Quotes about school and education
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“Listen, street punk. You're a guy, and you're a couple inches taller, and maybe forty pounds heavier, and ooh, you're in a gang. But I've survived ten years of Catholic school, and I will cut you off at your knees without a blink. Do you understand?”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Angel

Guy, Understanding

“He was the only boy I'd found worth dating in God knows how many schools. I mean, ever since he'd been bitten by a werwulf he'd been rock-steady. The best thing about this totally effed-up situation.”

Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer

Source: Jealousy

God, Boy

“Who cares if you have a girlfriend, anyway?"

"I care" Simon said gloomily. "Pretty soon the only people left without a girlfriend will be me and Wendell the school janitor. And he smells like windex.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Variant: Pretty soon the only people left without a girlfriend will be me and Wendell the school janitor, and he smells like windex."
"At least you know he's still available.
Source: City of Bones

People

“I never thought I'd have to give you-a former Sunday School teacher-a lecture on ethics."
"Former Sunday School teachers don't go around without their underwear."
"You show me where it says that in the Bible.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Heaven, Texas

Teachers

“Shigure Sohma: singing High school girls high school girls all for me High school girls”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Girl, Singing

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Love, Life, Wisdom

“I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.”

Frank McCourt book Angela's Ashes

Source: Angela's Ashes (1996)

Children, People, Boy, Question

“Can't you home school me?" Nate pleaded.
"You would never do any work." (Nate's mom)
"Sounds perfect!”

Brandon Mull The Candy Shop War

Source: The Candy Shop War

Home, Moms, Perfection

“There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“I make it through the first two weeks of school without a nuclear meltdown.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

“I came back, Uncle Eddie. Last year, after the Henley, I could have gone to any school in the world -- I could have done anything, but I came back."

"You ran away, Katarina."
"And now I'm back."

"You're still running.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

World

“At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

World, Motivation, Idea

“What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.”

George Bernard Shaw Misalliance

Source: Misalliance

Children, Education, Universe

“Sheep. I'm stuck in a boarding school filled with sheep.”

Libba Bray A Great and Terrible Beauty

Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty

“I just thought of a great theory that explains everything. When I went to that party, I was abducted by aliens. They have created a fake Earth and fake high school to study me and my reactions. This certainly explains cafeteria food.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Food, Study

“With schools turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual," of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Imagination

“it's back to school time. or as home-schoolers call it, stay-where-you-are time.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Home, Time

“All of a sudden I didn't fit in anywhere. Not at school, not at home… and every time I turned around, another person I'd known forever felt like a stranger to me. Even I felt like a stranger to me.”

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

Source: Flipped

Home, Time, Personality

“As far as I’m concerned, high school sucked when I went, and probably sucks now. I tend to regard people who remember it as the best four years of their lives with caution and a degree of pity.”

Stephen King book Guns

Source: Guns

People

“The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Home

“I suppose a lot of teenage girls feel invisible sometimes, like they just disappear. Well, that's me—Cammie the Chameleon. But I'm luckier than most because, at my school, that's considered cool.

I go to a school for spies.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Feeling, Girl

“How many times do we all have to do this? Get up, go to school, again? Before everyone admits it's a crap idea?”

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) British writer

Source: Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me?

Idea, Time

“You see something you like?" I asked, echoing something I'd said to him ling ago, when he'd caught me in a compromising position at school.
"Lots," he said.
-Rose (Roza) to Dimitri”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

“I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

“One day soon you'll be in the world, and you'll have so many options you won't know what to do with them. Everyone will fall in love with you, because you're so beautiful and so charming, and you'll look back on high school as such a tiny blip.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Love, World, Beauty

“How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.”

Kamila Shamsie book Burnt Shadows

Source: Burnt Shadows

Boy, Flowers

“There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school.”

Sharon Olds (1942) American poet

“What being home-schooled has taught me, more than anything, is what a waste of a life high school is.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Life, Home

“Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.”

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

Book 3, Chapter 16
Source: Scaramouche

Nature, Sincerity

“If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Way, Past

“You don't want to peak in high school. If you do, the rest of your life is a disaster.”

Candace Bushnell book The Carrie Diaries

Source: The Carrie Diaries

Life

“I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Birth

“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.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Essays Including Essays, First & Second Series, English Traits, Nature & Considerations by the Way

Memory

“A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling.”

Thomas Harris (1940) American author and screenwriter

“My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Books, World, Sadness, Parent

“Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.”

James Baldwin If Beale Street Could Talk

Source: If Beale Street Could Talk

People

“Zach, we have to stop her!"
But Zach just held me. He looked at me with shock and awe and just a little bit of wonder. In spite of everything, I thought that he might laugh.
"Gallagher Girl," he told me, "youthe school.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: United We Spy

Youth, Girl

“You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Source: A Confederacy of Dunces

Way, Time

“High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived. It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track.”

Scott Westerfeld (1963) American science fiction writer

Source: Midnighters Manga #1

“Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Women, Men, World, Education

“My school colors were clear. We used to say, 'I'm not naked, I'm in the band.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Color

“Sometimes I think high school is one long hazy activity: if you are tough enough to survive this, they'll let you become an adult. I hope it's worth it.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Hope, Thinking

“The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Education, Problem

“[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Source: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

People, Family, Learning

“Answers to Frequently Asked Questions:
Yes.
Yes.
No.
One time in high school.
Three times in my twenties.
Rocks no salt.
Yes.
Four.
Never. And how dare you!
I will take no further questions.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

Question, Time

“It's the Marilyn Monroe school of medicine where enough of any drug will cure any disease.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Disease

“I prefer the school of life.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Life

“I can pick a lock. How do you think I got into my parents' liquor cabinet in middle school?”

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

Thinking, Parent

“School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.”

Ambeth R. Ocampo (1961) Filipino historian

Pleasure, Reading

“You can tell by the way the girls whisper about him when he walks by in school that they want him. It makes me jealous but not for the reason people would think. Good hunting partners are hard to find.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

People, Way, Girl, Thinking

“You’re seventeen. You’re supposed to be dealing with school and hormones and dim-witted parents. You’re supposed to be finding out who you are as a person.”
“But I already know who I am,” Valkyrie said. “I’m a world-breaker.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Kingdom of the Wicked

World, Parent, Personality

“When I tell people I went to library school, the most common reaction is either “You’re joking, right?” or “They have schools for librarians? Do they teach you how to properly sssh people?”

Scott Douglas (1963) American wheelchair tennis player

People

“What are you? An after school special?”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

For Boyfriend

“The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Books, World, Music, Heart

“Hey… You.. What's life without eyebrows, freak? Got a new listing for your bingo book right here!! A guyis going to be the next lord hokage of Konohagakure village. Uzumaki Naruto! Konoha-school NINJA!”

Masashi Kishimoto book Naruto

Source: Naruto, Vol. 02: The Worst Client

Life, Books

“The same boys who got detention in elementary school for beating the crap out of people are now rewarded for it. They call it football.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

People, Boy, Football

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

“A guy who is crazily, madly in love with you. A guy who sees how incredible and amazing you are, even though you’re not the cheerleader or even close to the prettiest girl in the school. A guy who thinks you’re beautiful, just the way you are.”

Candace Bushnell book The Carrie Diaries

Source: The Carrie Diaries

Love, Beauty, Way, Guy

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Pleasure, Art, Parting

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Source: An Autobiography

Children, Idea

“The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Life

“NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Sloppy Firsts

“Throwing things horrified me. I suffered extreme, paralyzing anxiety when it came to anything remotely athletic. I wouldn't even run to catch the school bus because I knew I'd trip and then get teased for a year.”

Augusten Burroughs Possible Side Effects

Source: Possible Side Effects

Suffering

“My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Hope, Winter, Heart

“Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?”

Sarah Vowell book The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Source: The Partly Cloudy Patriot (2003)

Evil

“Lovely. Imprisoned in a nursery school dungeon.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Love

“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”

Ivan Illich book Deschooling Society

Source: Deschooling Society

Age, World, Religion

“They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

Hate, Star

“I liked, I admit, that we didn’t pretend there hadn’t been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack.”

Daniel Handler book Why We Broke Up

Source: Why We Broke Up

Girl

“I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Variant: My education was dismal. I went to a series of schools for mentally disturbed teachers.

Education, Teachers

“One school of thought says that the best way to handle an issue like this is exposure therapy," Mad Rogan said. "For example, if you're terrified of snakes, repeated handling of them will cure it."
Aha. "I'm not handling your snake.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Burn for Me

Way, Madness

“Somehow it always comes back to coal at school.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“Joel, lad, school is about learning to learn. If you don't practice studying things you don't like, then you'll have a very hard time in life.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Rithmatist

Life, Study, Learning, Time

“Life, I've learned, is never fair. If they teach anything in schools, that should be it.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Life, Learning

“Welcome to adulthood," she said. "It sucks as much as high school.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

Adulthood

“I wasn't aiming at the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Variant: I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway. - Percy Jackson (Lightning Thief)
Source: The Lightning Thief

“I didn’t know what was more disturbing—the fact that something was obviously wrong, or that three faculty members of the world’s premiere spy school had forgotten to lock the door.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

World

“adj.
It has always been my habit, ever since junior high school, to ask that question:
“What are you thinking?”
It is always an act of desperation, and I keep on asking, even though I know it will never work the way I want it to.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Way, Question, Thinking

“High school sucks. People who say those were the best years of your life—those people are liars… Who wants the best years of their life to be in high school? High school is something everybody should be ready to lose.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Forever Princess

Life, People

“The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Moms, Winter

“She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. "You're lost!" "You're angry!" "You're in the wrong school!" "You're in the wrong country!" "You're on the wrong planet!”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Country

“But then, he thought, most politicians are small and shabby, the sort of people who have been bullied at school.

That's why they become politicians.”

Anthony Horowitz book Skeleton Key

Source: Skeleton Key

People

“High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: Don't wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than ten feet away, I'll just deal with it when I get there.”

David Sedaris When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Source: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day" ( full text online http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/calmly-we-walk-through-this-april-s-day/); this poem has also been printed under the title "For Rhoda" Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959) Context: Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

Learning, Time

“By the way, my name's Rose Hathaway. I'm seventeen years old, training to protect and kill vampires, in love with a completely unsuitable guy, and have a best friend whose weird magic could drive her crazy.
Hey, no one said high school was easy.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

Love, Way, Guy, Training

“What is a Gallagher Girl?" Liz asked one final time. "She's a genius, a scientist, a heroine, a spy. And now we are at the end of our time at school, and the one thing I know for certain is this: a Gallagher Girl is”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: United We Spy

Girl, Time

“As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct.”

Ambeth R. Ocampo book Rizal Without the Overcoat

Source: Rizal Without the Overcoat