After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the challenges of the public-school system, emphasizing that while students may face setbacks, the system itself remains steadfast.
Evelyn Waugh's quote reflects the paradox of the public-school system, where students may be expelled or face harsh treatment but are still supported by the overarching structure that aims to educate. It suggests that despite potential failures at the individual level, the system continues to function and provide opportunities for learning and growth, embodying a resilience that can be both frustrating and reassuring.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a speech at a school board meeting to discuss educational reform.
More from Evelyn Waugh
All quotes βIt is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
Similar quotes
Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.
It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.
Observation, very general and wide-spread, has shown that small children are endowed with a special psychic nature. This shows us a new way of imparting education!
A mother is a school. Empower her; and you empower a great nation.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.