Quotes About School Life

“Fortunately for me, I ran across some girls I could get along with so I could enjoy high school life okay, but it must be awful for kids who don't get along with anybody. We're different from our parents, a completely different species from our teachers. And kids who are one grade apart you are in a different world altogether. In other words, we're basically surrounded by enemies and have to make it on our own.”

— Natsuo Kirino

“No, I have never had a problem finding books to read. But I have had a problem finding people who understand what it's like to really LOVE reading. Maybe even need it. People who associate periods of their life with the kinds of things they were reading then, whether in school or in dusty old rooms of a house in Holland. The kind of people who take personal journeys into books and write responses that are part review, part stories in themselves. This is what Goodreads has always given me.”

— G.R. Reader

“What does it mean a 'greener life'? Well, let's be brutal. It doesn't meaning meditating in a centrally heated room on a macrame mat in front of an Amerindian dreamcatcher and a homemade candle surrounded by ugly spider plants, then rushing off in a gas-guzzling 4-wheel drive to collect the children from school and feeding them on pre-prepared supermarket meals heated in the microwave. If you have a faith, living a greener life demands a certain amount of self-sacrifice. You don't save the planet with notions and lip service. Like every adventure it requires a degree of suffering and getting your hands dirty.”

— Clarissa Dickson Wright

“Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.”

— David Mamet

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

— Doris Lessing

“The priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference.”

— Upton Sinclair

“School life is like being on a monkey mountain ... monkeys in the same gang constantly fight and get back together again ... and a hierarchy gets established.”

— Shouko Akira

“I was just thinking about how high school gossip travels fast. I guess my life has been reduced to either a text or a tweet.”

— Thomas Amo

“As I held onto Rosemary Telesco for dear life, we both knew the truth. She was going off to camp and eventually, private school. We were on different roads, she and me. Two ships that passed in Sheep Meadow.”

— Jennifer Flackett

“Passing Time was a show that captured all the angst of high school life-all the highs and lows, all the absurdities-and then made them higher and lower and more absurd.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and
coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.”

— Sylvia Plath

“Angry at his parents and all grown-ups who thought that school life was a lark, a good time, the best years of your life with a few test and quizzes thrown in to keep you on your toes. Bullshit. There was nothing good about it. Tests were daily battles in the larger war of school. School meant rules and orders and commands. To say nothing of homework.”

— Robert Cormier

“I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.”

— Anthony Hopkins

“All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.”

— Roald Dahl

“I really don't like to do back-to-back movies. I concentrate on things at home. My family and school life are important to me. I try to do one movie a year.”

— Anna Chlumsky

“My family and school life are important to me.”

— Anna Chlumsky

“When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills.”

— Albert Claude

“I just absolutely, totally hated school. It was like a prison to me. I just could not stand that structured, absolute disciplined way of having to deal with life.”

— Kim Basinger

“A big part of my life is music education because it changed my life - but arts, academics and athletics should all be equally treated in the school.”

— Flea

“I know I'm old school, but I believe that pain can be the most important tool in a person's life. It forces a person to pay attention to something that needs to be changed. I worry that drugs like sleeping pills mask pain just enough that the real root of the problem gets buried, deeper and deeper. A problem-even something like grief-just doesn't go away until it's dealt with.”

— Suzanne Woods Fisher

“Sport was an integral part of school life. The most influential teachers were not necessarily the PE teachers, but the teachers who helped me in sport because they had an understanding of what you were going through.”

— Sebastian Coe

“I went to an all-girls school, and I always felt like I missed out on a traditional high-school life.”

— Halston Sage

“His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.”

— James Joyce

“I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.”

— Tyne Daly

“You're taught from the day you start medical school that you're a god, that you can have power over life and death. So when your life starts to crumble, and the highest power you see is looking back in the mirror - and you know that power is flawed - it is very hard to get past that.”

— Michael Palmer

“I think there should be a good balance between being a good student and being able to enjoy your high school life.”

— Vanessa Minnillo

“Extroverts never understand introverts, and it was like that in school days. I read recently that all of us can be defined in adult life by the way others perceived us in high school.”

— Neil Peart

“When I look back, it was a strange period in my life, looking at my childhood and then my teenage years and forming Slayer when I was still 17, not out of high school.”

— Dave Lombardo

“Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple.”

— George Carlin

“Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.”

— Jane Smiley

“Why don't you wear those tiny shorts when you run, like they do in the movies?" His voice was low and sexy, and he knew it.
"Because I'm not in a movie. I know it's confusing, since you obviously live 'The Saxon Show' day and night, but some of us want to live a boring, old, normal high school life, you know?”

— Liz Reinhardt

“Bud, this is it," Mr. McCarthy said. "This is the last year, and then you're gone. Let me tell you this: After high school, life only gets better. You're in a tunnel right now. There's a light glimmering there at the end of it. You gotta make it to that light. High school is a nightmare, bud. It might be the worst years of your life.”

— Jesse Andrews

“I don't think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn't be the person I am today if it wasn't for the opportunities the library gave me.”

— Alan Moore

“Mean girls go far in high school. Kind women go far in LIFE.”

— Mandy Hale

“I'm a professional singer. I have a theory that all actors want to be rock stars, and all rock stars want to be actors. I spent my whole school life forming boy bands.”

— James Corden

“I went to art school and never thought I'd be a musician, but then punk rock came along in the late 70s and kind of ruined my life. So I quit art school to get involved in music and I've been doing it ever since.”

— Michael Gira

“Lesson #456 of high school life: Never, EVER trust an alarm clock.”

— Heather Brewer

“Of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.”

— Charlotte Mason

“Boredom!!! Shooting!!! Shelling!!! People being killed!!! Despair!!! Hunger!!! Misery!!! Fear!!! That's my life! The life of an innocent eleven-year-old schoolgirl!! A schoolgirl without a school, without the fun and excitement of school. A child without games, without friends, without the sun, without birds, without nature, without fruit, without chocolate or sweets, with just a little powdered milk. In short, a child without a childhood.”

— Zlata Filipović

“My school life was very much a wandering experience. I was having trouble in school and I was not making a lot of friends. So coming home and actually improvising on the piano and just coming up with melodies was an escape for me.”

— Josh Groban

“We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.”

— Dolly Parton

“School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.”

— E. M. Forster

“Not having to travel and being able to settle in has helped me in training life and school life. I've learned to get a grip and take care of myself.”

— Michael Phelps

“Sometimes I'd knock on the door of somebody I was going to school with, so it was like living a double life.”

— Michelle Rodriguez

“I enjoyed the discipline and solitariness of long-distance running, which allowed me to escape from the hurly-burly of school life.”

— Nelson Mandela

“The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.”

— John Dewey

“In a world often marked by selfishness, a large family is a school of solidarity and sharing; and this attitude is to the benefit of society as a whole ... I always thank the Lord in seeing mothers and fathers of large families, together with their children, committed to the life of the Church and of society.”

— Pope Francis

“If there is a central theme to what I called "a peaceful warrior's approach to living," and to The Four Purposes of Life, it is that there may be innumerable techniques or methods one can learn (from the Eastern spiritual cultures and from the Western psychological tradition), but that above and beyond all these technologies waits the school of everyday life.”

— Dan Millman

“How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: "your will must disappear and mine prevail!"-how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?”

— Maria Montessori

“I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.”

— Dave Barry