Sylvia Constance Ashton-Warner MBE (17 December 1908 – 28 April 1984) was a New Zealand writer, poet and educator.
I am inclined to think that eating is a private thing and should be done alone, like other bodily functions.
When I teach people, I marry them.
Off fall the wife, the mother, the lover, the teacher, and the violent artist takes over. I am I alone. I belong to no one but myself. I mate with no one but the spirit. I own no land, have no kin, no friend or enemy. I have no road but this one.
I never forgive attacks on my work.
We already have so much pressure towards sameness through radio, film and comic outside the school, that we can't afford to do a thing inside that is not toward individual development.
I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.
It's just as possible to live to the full in a narrow corner as it is in bigness.
What can be heavier than wealth than freedom?
No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide.
How much of my true self I camouflage and choke in order to commend myself to him, denying the fullness of me. How often have I paraded sweetness and interest when I felt otherwise; pretended to take careful leave of him on many an occasion when I would rather have walked right out. How I've toned myself down, diluted myself to maintain his approval.
A comforting acquaintance, hope, a contagious thing like spring, inebriating like lager.
Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. Sexual energy Freud calls it; the capital of desire I call it; it pays for both mental and physical expenditure.
I've got to relearn what I was supposed to have learned.
Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.
Being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply.
I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.
What a desire!. . . to live in peace with that word: Myself.
There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.
When love turns away, now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step.
Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money.