School Quotes

Can we please drop the whole ‘school starts tomorrow’ talk? I’d like to live in denial for a little while longer.

~ Aileen Erin

You can't have a goal without determination, because without the determination the goal will die.

~ Patrick L. Turner

Some kids look at me strange in the hallways because I don't decorate my locker,...

~ Stephen Chbosky

A good roommate may be the single most important thing to have when one is away at school.

~ Barbara Dana

School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite—all the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It's funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it's normal to be happy there when it isn't.

~ Dara Horn

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.

~ Junot Díaz

... I succeeded at math, at least by the usual evaluation criteria: grades. Yet while I might have earned top marks in geometry and algebra, I was merely following memorized rules, plugging in numbers and dutifully crunching out answers by rote, with no real grasp of the significance of what I was doing or its usefulness in solving real-world problems. Worse, I knew the depth of my own ignorance, and I lived in fear that my lack of comprehension would be discovered and I would be exposed as an academic fraud -- psychologists call this imposter syndrome.

~ Jennifer Ouellette

Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night. The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge.

~ Daniel Amory

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.Your school wasn't on fire, you were.

~ Jonathan Lethem

...your zeal to face life's rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students...' He shook his head of disagreeable hair. 'I need not tell you,' he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, 'that there resides in almost every one of 'em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible.

~ Millard Kaufman

The inaugural morning at Merston High was officially over. It was no longer a mysterious place in Melody's imagination, filled with endless possibilities and hooks on which to hang hopes for a better tomorrow. It was completely - boringly - normal. Like meeting an online crush after months of e-flirting, the reality didn't live up to the fantasy. It was dull, predictable, and way more attractive in the photos.

~ Lisi Harrison

Registration Day' by Gavin Gunhold (1899— ) Toronto Review of Poetry, 1947On registration day at taxidermy schoolI distinctly saw the eyes of the stuffed mooseMove.

~ Gordon Korman

Interestingly enough, whenever I cite examples from superhero comic books in a lecture, my students never wonder when they will use this information in their real life. Apparently they all have plans, post-graduation, that involve protecting the City from all threat while wearing spandex. As a law-abiding citizen, this notion fills me with a great sense of security, knowing as I do how many of my scientist colleagues could charitably be termed mad.

~ James Kakalios

As a kid I was deeply curious as to what college life would be like. Now that I am a university professor, I realize that this was a premonition that once I entered college I would never get out, and that my matriculation would turn into some sort of life sentence.

~ James Kakalios

You know what would be fun,” our school’s administration likely thought, huffing glue out of an old sock. “What if we make our cruellest eleven-year-olds assess each other in wet spandex for an hour every day for a week in the dead of winter?

~ Scaachi Koul

If you are at school you must be royalty because you have lots of subjects.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

Tha know where thy are we' ferrets. Ya never know where ya are we' lasses

~ Gervase Phinn

Gina Rodgers raised her hand, triggering a class-wide bristle. Everyone wanted to impress Mr. Tipton, but it was Gina who always raised her hand first, like he was going to fall in love with her for her 4.3 GPA or something.

~ Mira Jacob

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

~ David Almond

teacher:I'm teacher, not because i want to teach children something. I am teacher just because I like to correct the tests.

~ My Teacher

You don't go to school to learn about others.You go to school to learn about yourself.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

It was examinations (in school) that drove my wits away, as all emergencies do. Being expected to measure up was paralysing. It was never that Mother wanted me to beat my classmates in grades, what she wanted was for me to have my answers right. It was unclouded perfection I was up against.

~ Eudora Welty

Life is a school, be opened to learn from it, but sometimes it might teach you through the hard way

~ Topsy Gift

This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed with excitement and the headmistress's aspect softened with anticipation, for she was about to let the dangerous genie of adolescent sex out of its bottle and tame it. She spoke in veiled, suggestive terms in assembly of freedom and responsibility, and we giggled uneasily - it was all vaguely shocking, like being tickled by a policeman.

~ Lorna Sage

No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.

~ Saul Bellow

Schoolgirls are not distractions. They are students. Teach them something other than misogyny.

~ Merlyn Gabriel Miller

Why to be in this room?If I was smart... I won't stay in this room and I will move in a room where people are more clever than me... but If it's easy as possibility... I want without a trouble to finish school.

~ Deyth Banger

School...school... is just nothing... if you think that you are going to learn something. You are here wrong, you wanna see the system?It's in about23 Channels as a start then increases... decreases... even with different topics in the end... they want you to recall the whole data from the 23 Channels as for Perfect, as For under Perfect Okay..okay... but still not perfect, as for Good... Just an Okay... and as for Middle... Little from there and little from there as for the last... Nothing at all.

~ Deyth Banger

Every class has pupils who mimic the teachers particularly well and perform for their classmates, a class without such teacher-mimics would have something lifeless about it.

~ Elias Canetti

Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn't realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.

~ Melissa Bank

The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it.

~ Rick Bragg

All grown-ups appear as giants to small children. But Headmasters (and policemen) are the biggest giants of all and acquire a marvellously exaggerated stature.

~ Roald Dahl

Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie, Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be part of. A misfit,like us.

~ James Howe

Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be part of. A misfit,like us.

~ James Howe

Anyway, I do not want you thinking that I or Addie or Joe or Skeezie feel sorry for ourselves. We do not. Other people may call us names or think we're weird or whatever, but that does not mean we believe them. We may be misfits, but we're okay. Leastwise, in our own eyes we are, and that's all that matters.

~ James Howe

No,” moaned Tom in despair. “School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!

~ Ray Bradbury

Seventh grade had a full complement of creeps, weirdos, future criminals, and nerds.

~ Caroline B. Cooney

Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn't report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.

~ Alice Sebold

What is generally known as discipline in traditional schools is not activity, but immobility and silence. It is not discipline, but something that festers inside a child, arousing his rebellious feelings.

~ Maria Montessori