school Quotes

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”

The Herdmans moved from grade to grade through the Woodrow Wilson School like those South American fish that strip your bones clean in three minutes flat . . . which was just about what they did to one teacher after another.

“My folks never knew how to read or write. I only got to the sixth grade myself -- had to leave school when the old man dies. You kids are lucky. I’m going to see to it that you get through school.”

“The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood, being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson.”

“The revenue arising from his school was small, and would have been scarcely sufficient to furnish him with daily bread, for he was a huge feeder, and, though lank, had the dilating powers of an anaconda; but to help out his maintenance, he was, according to country custom in those parts, boarded and lodged at the houses of the farmers whose children he instructed.”

“The world is made wrong; kings should go to school to their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.”

College will probably destroy your love for poetry. Hours of boring analysis, dissection, and criticism will see to that. College will also expose you to all manner of literature—much of it transcendent works of magic that you must devour; some of it utter dreck that you must avoid like the plague.

″‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Kevin said as we joined the mob in the hallways, ‘she better be fake.’ I asked him what he meant. ‘I mean if she’s real, she’s in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who’s really like that is going to last around here?‘”

“It was school that kept me going in those dark days. When I was in the street it felt as though every man I passed might be a Talib. We hid our school bags in our shawls. My father always said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform, but now we were afraid to wear them.”

“Studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.”

“All I Really Need to Know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.”

“Can’t you home school me?” Nate pleaded. “You would never do any work.” [Nate’s mom] “Sounds perfect!”

“Better luck than all this could hardly have been hoped for; there was only one of them left to seek a place. Jurgis was determined that Teta Elzbieta should stay at home to keep house, and that Ona should help her. He would not have Ona working – he was not that sort of a man, he said, and she was not that sort of a woman. It would be a strange thing if a man like him could not support the family, with the help of the board of Jonas and Marija. He would not even hear of letting the children go to work – there were schools here in America for children, Jurgis had heard, to which they could go for nothing. […] Jurgis would have it that Stanislovas should learn to speak English, and grow up to be a skilled man.”

“It wouldn’t do any good to tell him that she hadn’t been that girl at her old school. Yeah, she’d been made fun of before. There were always mean boys—and there were always, always mean girls—but she’d had friends at her old school.”

“This hotel – the Amazon – was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents [...] and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.”

“I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish.”

“I knew for certain something would have to change if I were going to stay in that school. Either the students would have to change the way they behaved, or I would have to devise a better plan to protect myself. My body was wearing out real fast.”

“I wondered if she would teach able-bodied third graders the same way. Probably not. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.”

“‘I know what it’s like to be distracted. To seek out distractions. To exhaust yourself doing every other little thing rather than face a blank page.’”

“The best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.”

“For the first time, instead of ‘pretend’ grades that teachers would give me because they weren’t quite sure if I knew the answer or not, I get real grades recorded in the teachers’ grade book that are based on actual answers I’ve given. Printed out and everything!”

“I still couldn’t get over the fact that I was part of the team. Okay. Truth. There was the team, and there was me, and we were in the same room. But we weren’t quite a team. They appreciated the fact that I usually got the answers right but . . . lots of the preparation involved fast-and-furious, back-and-forth discussions, and I had trouble adding anything to what was being said—most of the time.”

“My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think.”

“To everyone else, school was prison. To Lena, it was freedom.”

“Books! What have such as I, who am a warrior of the wilderness, though a man without a cross, to do with books? I never read but in one, and the words that are written there are too simple and too plain to need much schooling...”

“Forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students’ progress.”

“First, we parents have to back up school authority and quit making excuses for our kids when they misbehave.”

“The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think”.

“There are days when the close attention I must give to details chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but soon I recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart.”

“You make it sound as if Bert is a hero. I’d like to think that, but I can’t. A schoolteacher is a public servant: I think he should do what the law and the school-board want him to. If the superintendent says, ‘Miss Brown, you’re to teach from Whitley’s Second Reader,’ I don’t feel I have to give him an argument.”

“In school, we learned about the world before ours, about the angels and gods that lived in the sky, ruling the earth with kind and loving hands. Some say those are just stories, but I don’t believe that. The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.”

“So the rich kids aren’t the alpha group of the school. The next most likely demographic would be the church kids: They’re plentiful, and they are definitely interested in school domination.”

″And she was new to the school, so the rumors overshadowed everything else I knew about her.”

“Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floors, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.”

“Dream big, they say. Shoot for the stars. Then they lock us away for 12 years and tell us where to sit, when to pee, and what to think. […] Then we turn 18 and even though we’ve never had an original thought, we have to make the most important decision of our lives. […] And if you don’t have the money and don’t really have the grades, a lot of the decision gets made for you.”

“So the rich kids aren’t the alpha group of the school. The next most likely demographic would be the church kids: They’re plentiful, and they are definitely interested in school domination.”

“We’re more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school.”

“Well, you really are your own worst critic. I’m sure it’s amazing. I remember that paper that you wrote in school about synaptic behavioral routines. It made me cry.”

“I went to school, feeling that my life depended not so much upon learning as upon getting into another world of people.”

“You’re like a little wild thing that was never sent to school. Sit, I say, and you jump up. Come, I say, and you go galloping down the sand to the nearest dead fish with which you perfume your sweet neck.”

“Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

“In the pearl he saw Coyotito sitting at a little desk in a school, just as Kino had once seen it through an open door. And Coyotito was dressed in a jacket, and he had on a white collar and a broad silken tie

“About six years ago, Lake Wobegon High decided to cut out commencement speeches by the valedictorian, salutatorian, and class orator because they all sounded the same. That was the year that Charlene Holm made valedictorian. Her family marched to school, and the manure hit the ventilator.”

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

“The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.”

“She didn’t want to miss the first day of school, but she was afraid of what the other kids would say. And she had no idea what to wear with those crazy stripes.”

“The book takes a surprising turn after the teens escape the school and go on a journey to look for freedom. The hardships that they face is unbelievable since the “Phalange” who is a fascist organization in power seeks to kill them.”

“Lilly loved school. She loved the pointy pencils. She loved the squeaky chalk. And she loved the way her boots went clickety-clickety-clack down the long, shiny hallways. Lilly loved the privacy of her very own desk. She loved the fish sticks and chocolate milk every Friday in the lunchroom. And, most of all, she loved her teacher, Mr. Slinger.”

″ ‘I do not want to be a teacher when I grow up,’ Lilly said as she marched out of the classroom.”

“Maniac felt why more than he knew why. It had to do with homes and families and schools, and how a school seems sort of like a big home, but only a day home, because then it empties out; and you can’t stay there at night because it’s not really a home and you could never use it as your address, because an address is where you stay at night, where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other and uses the same toaster. So all the other kids would be heading for their homes, their night homes, each of them, hundreds, flocking from school like birds form a tree, scattering across town, each breaking off to his or her own place, each knowing exactly where to land. School. Home. No, he was not going to have one without the other. ”

“And to be quite honest, Mrs. Dando, the last thing Michael needs is to be troubled by petty things like football and school.”

“Whenever the students had free time, they were permitted to go to the Lightlbulb Lab in the back of the classroom. They expressed their ideas creatively through drawing and writing. Lilly went often. She had a lot of ideas. ”

“Trixie and her daddy went down the block, through the park, past the school, and into the Laundromat.”

“My mother educates me. We believe that schools inhibit the natural curiosity, creativity, and intelligence of children. The mind needs to be opened out into the world, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom.”

With barely enough hours in the day for school and his music, J.J. has no time left over to contemplate the shocking revelation that his grandfather may have been a murderer. To make matters worse, this time problem seems to affect everyone in Kinvara.

“Nobody but a genuine grown-up was going to take her to school. If she had to, she would make a great big noisy fuss, and when Ramona made a great big noisy fuss, she usually got her own way. Great big noisy fusses were often necessary when a girl was the youngest member of her family and the youngest person on her block.”

“In regular school you have to concentrate- and sometimes when you concentrate, you form nervous little habits. ”

A girl walks to school each day and sees a cat. The cat talks to her. The cat is quite the philosopher. She tells the girl what she knows about the world. The cat makes the girl late for school and that causes the girl problems.

It’s just a run of the mill mid-grade fantasy quest Arthurian/Christian symbolism story. And to make matters worse, for me anyway, is that it is just so whimsical and overly descriptive.

″‘Why should I make you new feet? To enable you to escape again from home?’ ‘I promise you,’ said the puppet, sobbing, ‘that for the future I will be good.’ ‘All boys,’ replied Geppetto, ‘when they are bent upon obtaining something, say the same thing.’ ‘I promise you that I will go to school, and that I will study and earn a good character.‘”

This is a touching narrative about a family whose surname is “Silk”. In that family, the little boy in the family, Griffin Silk, has troubles at school with bullies until a girl named Layla comes along. Then, he finds out his baby sister being born, and he is named “Tishkin Silk”, hence the name of this story.

A neat little book with poetry in it reminding us how much kids can hate school, somedays I can relate. The fun part is the rhyming and showing kids no matter what you are talking about, we can put in into a poem.

“From that day on, Angelina came downstairs when her mother called her, she tidied her room, and she went to school on time.”

″...Angelina never wanted to go to school. She never wanted to do anything but dance.”

“The very next day Angelina took her pink slippers and ballet dress and went to her first lesson at Miss Lilly’s Ballet School.”

“No sooner had the puppet discovered that he had feet than he jumped down from the table on which he was lying, and began to spring and to cut a thousand capers about the room, as if he had gone mad with delight. ‘To reward you for what you have done for me,’ said Pinocchio to his father, ‘I will go to school at once.‘”

“That night I showed my mother and father our new poster. They thought it was great. Especially our silver-sparkle airplane. My mother put the poster on top of the refrigerator so it would be safe until the next day, when I would take it to school.”

After meeting Suzy Blue and the first part of “the Will” (a frog-looking entity that knows everything about the House), Arthur learns that he’s been selected as Rightful Heir to the House and must get the other part of the clock hand in order to defeat Monday.

“Angelina was so busy dancing at Miss Lilly’s that she didn’t need to dance at suppertime or bedtime or on the way to school anymore.”

“Maisy paints some pictures.”

“Maisy dances like a ballerina.”

“Maisy plays in the Wendy house”

“Maisy does some sums.”

“Maisy writes a story.”

“Maisy dresses up.”

“Maisy feeds the fish.”

“Maisy puts on her hat and coat It’s time to go home.”

“Corrie and I were probably the most energetic. We took a few walks, back to the bridge, or to different cliffs, so we could have long private conversations. We talked about boys and friends and school and parents, all the usual stuff.”

“By the time he went to school, Max was not a flying superhero, but just an ordinary boy with a cape and a mask...which were no help to him at all in the school yard.”

“At lunchtime in the school yard, to his friends he was still plain and ordinary, ‘Max’... Well, not quite ordinary. But then as Aaron said, ‘Everyone’s different in some way, aren’t they?’ ”

“In the weeks that followed, Max could be seen hovering like a summer dragonfly above the school gates. ”

“With that, Miyax became Julie. She was given a cot near the door in Martha’s little house and was soon walking to school in the darkness. She liked to learn the printed English words in books, and so a month passed rather happily.”

“That’s what it was, because after school my mom took us all to the dentist and Dr. Fields found a cavity just in me. Come back next week and I’ll fix it, said Dr. Fields. Next week, I said, I’m going to Australia.”

“At singing time she said I sang too loud. At counting time she said I left out sixteen. Who needs sixteen? I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.”

“At school Mrs. Dickens liked Paul’s picture of the sailboat better than my picture of the invisible castle.”

“ ‘Well, I want you to know I’m right here when you need me, Treehorn,’ said the Principal, ‘and I’m glad I was here to help you. A team is only as good as its coach, eh?’ The Principal stood up, ‘Goodbye, Treehorn. If you have any more problems, come straight to me, and I’ll help you again. A problem isn’t a problem once it’s solved, right?’ “

“ ‘I can’t read this,’ said the Principal. ‘It looks like SHIRKING. You’re not SHIRKING, are you, Treehorn? We can’t have any shirkers here, you know. We’re a team, and we all have to do our very best.’ “

“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”

“Inside he could see a classroom. There were children sitting at their desks, and a teacher writing on the blackboard. Mr Tickle waited a minute and then reached in through the window. Mr Tickles extraordinary long arm went right up to the teacher, paused, and then – tickled! The teacher jumped in the air and turned round very quickly to see who was there.”

“The kids in Room 207 were misbehaving again. Spitballs stuck to the ceiling. Paper planes whizzed through the air. They were the worst-behaved class in the whole school.”

“Days went by and there was no sign of Miss Nelson. The kids missed Miss Nelson!”

“Her father didn’t have time to take her to see one at the zoo. He didn’t have time for anything. He went to work every day before Hannah went to school, and in the evening he worked at home. When Hannah asked him a question, he would say, ‘Not now, I’m busy, maybe tomorrow.’ “

“Aw, come on, Doodle. You can do it. Do you want to be different from everybody else when you start school?”

“You are a West Indian girl going to school in New York and you are proud.”

“She wanted to tell people about him. That he was a teacher, that he had lost his leg when his school was bombed. That he had loved her and told her stories, and now she was all alone in this big, sad land.”

“It’s still hard to fit into things. In the school play, I am Tree Number Two. And when we go camping, I get a LOT of fresh air.”

“The noise was glorious. Ramona yelled and screamed and shrieked and chased anyone who would run. She chased tramps and ghosts and ballerinas. Sometimes other witches in masks exactly like hers chased her, and then she would turn around and chase the witches right back.”

“There were two kinds of children who went to kindergarten - those who lined up beside the door before school, as they were supposed to, and those who ran around the playground and scrambled to get in line when they saw Miss Brinney approaching. Ramona ran around the playground.”

“Ramona thought of kindergarten as being divided into two parts. The first was the running part, which included games, dancing, finger painting, and playing. The second part was called seat work. Seat work was serious. Everyone was expected to work quietly in his own seat without disturbing anyone else.”

“Ramona considered. Kindergarten had not turned out as she had expected. Still, even though she had not been given a present and Miss Binney did not love her, she had liked being with other boys and girls her own age. She liked singing the song about the dawnzer and having her own little cupboard. ”

“If there is anyone here this afternoon whom I have convinced that books are meant to be enjoyed, that English is nothing to do with duty, that it has nothing to do with school- with exercises and homework and ticks and crosses- then I am a happy man.”

“I learn two things before school even starts: One, I am definitely the only giraffe in this school. And two, flags make very good handkerchiefs.”

″ ‘So do I’, said Frances, and she made the lobster-salad sandwich, the celery, the carrot sticks, and the olives come out even.”

“They did run as fast as they could, but time ran faster, and before they were half-way to school the town clock struck nine, and all hope was over. This vexed Katy very much; for, though often late, she was always eager to be early.”

“With these three little girls and two little boys There is sure to be plenty of laughter and noise; But nobody minds it, because don’t you see, At school they are quiet with lessons they say - But when holidays come they can play the whole day.”

“Mildred Hubble was in her first year at the school. She was one of those people who always seem to be in trouble. She didn’t exactly mean to break rules and annoy teachers, but things just seemed to happen whenever she was around.”

“Everything about the school was dark and shadowy. There were long, narrow corridors and winding staircases- and of course there were the girls themselves, dressed in black gymslips, black stockings, black hob-nailed boots, grey shirts and black-and-grey ties. Even their summer dresses were black-and-grey checked.”

Solomon is full of anger: with his teachers, with his parents, with himself. He cannot bear to be at school or at home, so he hides in a corner of the kirkyard.

It is about a boy with dyslexia. His teacher bully’s him and he often skives off school and hides in a graveyard. He sits under a rowan tree. But he didn’t know that rowan trees were planted to ward off evil.

“There were so many rules that you couldn’t do anything without being told off, and there seemed to be tests and exams every week.”

“I’m the tallest girt in our school. I’m not the oldest or the cleverest or the prettiest or the funniest but I sure am the tallest which nobody can deny.”

“Australian girls nearly always begin to think of ‘lovers and nonsense’, as middlefolks call it, long before their English aged sisters do. While still in the short-frocked period of existence, and while their hair is still free-flowing, they take the keenest interest in boys- boy of neighboring schools, other girls’ brothers, young bank clerks and the like.”

“Having both school and Sounder would be mighty good, but if he couldn’t have school, he could always have Sounder.”

“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.”

At school that day, he faces the reality that girls are treated very differently from boys while he struggles in vain to stop his dress getting dirty.

″‘You and my father,’ -she glowered at poor Mr. Herbert- ‘did it ever occur to you that you couldn’t always get rid of me simply by shoving me into some school?‘”

“Captain Tinker wanted me to go to school. He’ll be very disappointed in me if I run away. I ought to go back. I will go back...”

“Lightning and thunder crashed and flashed together in a perfect fury! Stunned by the force of it, the children ran for shelter under the great oak tree that marked the halfway point between home and school. Its branches lashed and creaked, but it was something sturdy to cling to.”

“Sometimes they went because their masters were obliged to go away from home on trips or business. Sometimes a cat was sent to School to learn good manners.”

“The only thing that Annie didn’t like were the steely winter days when it began to grow dark before she came home from school. The marsh didn’t seem such a friendly place then. The wind whined, seabirds screamed.”

“On the whole he is not a bad pupil. I wouldn’t want to make him miserable because of a single prank. I know what it means to be a young Roman to be a pupil in the Xanthos School. And I hope you know it too.”

“A warm glow filled her heart because she realized that the friendships she had made at School would last forever.”

“Everything was home in a way except school. The United States of America was home and he could feel it when they sang The Star Spangled Banner. And the ranch was home. The house was home. But most particularly the bed was home.”

“All his classmates envied him his ink because it was so bright and pretty, with sepia tone none of them had ever seen before. However, the boy learned a strange alphabet that no one else understood and he had to leave the school because the teacher said he was setting a bad example.”

“That’s another tiresome thing about having rich parents- you have what grown-ups call ‘advantages’. They think that you are very lucky and ought to be grateful, but I have tried both and I can tell you that it is much more fun to go to an ordinary school and have a bad French accent like other children.”

″‘Emil, Emil! You know perfectly well I can’t afford to get you another suit.’ And once again he remembers- too late- how she works all day to put food on the table and so he can go to school.”

″ ‘And now, Tom, my boy,’ said the Squire, ‘remember you are going, at your own earnest request, to be chucked into this great school, like a young bear, with all your troubles before you -earlier than we should have sent you perhaps. If schools are what they were in my time, you’ll see a great many cruel blackguard things done, and hear a deal of foul, bad talk. But never fear. You tell the truth, keep a brave and kind heart, and never listen to or say anything you wouldn’t have your mother and sister hear, and you’ll never feel ashamed to come home, or we to see you.’ ”

“There is none of the colour and tastiness of get-up, you will perceive, which lends such a life to the present game at Rugby, making the dullest and worst-fought match a pretty sight. Now each house has its own uniform of cap and jersey, of some lively colour; but at the time we are speaking of plush caps have not yet come in, or uniforms of any sort, except the School-house white trousers, which are abominably cold to-day. Let us get to work, bare-headed, and girded with our plain leather straps. But we mean business, gentlemen.”

“At School Five little Girls, sitting on a form, Five little Girls, with lessons to learn, Five little Girls, who, I’m afraid, Won’t know them a bit when they have to be said. For little eyes are given to look Anywhere else than on their book; And little thoughts are given to stray Anywhere-ever so far away.”

“The object of all schools is not to ram Latin and Greek into boys, but to make them good English boys, good future citizens; and by far the most important part of that work must be done, or not done, out of school hours. To leave it, therefore, in the hands of inferior men, is just giving up the highest and hardest part of the work of education. Were I a private school-master, I should say, Let who will hear the boys their lessons, but let me live with them when they are at play and rest.”

″ ‘What is he sent to school for? Well, partly because he wanted so to go. If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.’ ”

“To be late for school and with a balloon- that was unheard of! Pascal was very worried.”

″ An only child, Nicholas, appears older at school than he does as home, and his touchingly naive reactions to situations cut through the preconceptions of adults and result in a formidable sequence of escapades. ”

The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of the weariness of school-life for one day at least.

She won’t miss much by not going to school, as far as that goes. Mr. Phillips isn’t any good at all as a teacher.

I’ve been expecting trouble ever since she started to school. I knew things were going too smooth to last. She’s so high strung.

“Matthew, did you ever study geometry when you went to school?” “Well now, no, I didn’t,” said Matthew, coming out of his doze with a start. “I wish you had,” sighed Anne, “because then you’d be able to sympathize with me. You can’t sympathize properly if you’ve never studied it. It is casting a cloud over my whole life. I’m such a dunce at it, Matthew.”

It’s nothing but limes now, for everyone is sucking them in their desks in schooltime, and trading them off for pencils, bead rings, paper dolls, or something else, at recess. If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime. If she’s mad with her, she eats one before her face, and doesn’t offer even a suck. They treat by turns, and I’ve had ever so many but haven’t returned them, and I ought for they are debts of honor, you know.

“I wish all the girls would leave, and spoil his old school. It’s perfectly maddening to think of those lovely limes,” sighed Amy, with the air of a martyr.