Quotes & Sayings About Boarding School

Dr. DeMarco nodded, motioning toward Carmine. "I'm thankful for the Mazda - damn thankful you didn't return it scratched," he said, glaring at his father. "I'm thankful to be out of that ridiculous boarding school. Thankful for music and my gun ... I fucking love my gun." Haven looked at him with surprise as Dr. DeMarco laughed. "It's a nice gun. I checked it out. A 1911 .45 ACP. Where'd you get it?"
Carmine shrugged. "Maybe I don't recall." "Fair enough," Dr. DeMarco said. "Are you done?" "Uh, I'm thankful for you all, even if you get on my nerves sometimes," Carmine said. "Oh, and orgasms ... definitely thankful for those." "That's enough," Dr. DeMarco said, shaking his head as he turned to her. "What are you thankful for, child?" She hesitated, her nerves running amuck. "Having food to eat. A bed to sleep in, too. — J.M. Darhower

Rich women are not too put upon by their children. You don't have to do all the things for a child that those women who had to stay at home did. My Ann had a French governess who took care of her until she was twelve years old and went off to boarding school. — Clare Boothe Luce

To all parties present and participating in the life of the country, Aunt Alexandra was one of the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding-school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was born in the objective case; she was an incurable gossip. When Aunt Alexandra went to school, self-doubt could not be found in any textbook, so she knew not its meaning. She was never bored, and given the slightest chance she would exercise her royal prerogative: she would arrange, advise, caution, and warn. She never let a chance escape her to point out the shortcomings of other tribal groups to the greater glory of our own, a habit that amused Jem rather than annoyed him: Aunty better watch how she talks - scratch most folks in Maycomb and they're kin to us. — Harper Lee

Her voice was polished with a hint of a New England-boarding-school accent that shouted refinement over geographic locale. I was trying not to stare. She saw that and smiled a little. I don't want to sound like some kind of pervert because it wasn't like that. Femal beauty gets to me. I don't think I'm alone in that. It gets to me like a work of art gets to me. It gets to me like a Rembrandt or Michelangelo. It gets to me like night views of Paris or when the sun rises on the Grand Canyon or sets in the turquoise Arizona sky. My thoughts were not illicit. Ther were, I self-rationalized, rather artistic. — Harlan Coben

It wasn't all that different from any particularly demanding boarding school, except that of course nobody ever went home for the holidays and we had a lot of brain surgery. — Kage Baker

My parents divorced when I was seven. Because divorce is messy, for good or ill, they sent me to boarding school. — Jack Davenport

I went through a period at boarding school when my coaches wanted me to switch to snowboarding because they thought I was no good at skiing. I was too skinny. I had terrible technique. They were saying I should be a snowboarder, and luckily, I resisted. — Bode Miller

He's in that larva stage, the damp, pained shedding of the child's body. This is what boarding school is for. To store them away during years like this, so they can suffer without the embarrassment of their parents watching. — Adam Haslett

Well, Luce, my dear, you may have gone to boarding school parties, but you've never seen a throw-down like reform school kids do it. — Lauren Kate

It's an ironic thing about being an immigrant kid, growing up - 'cause I grew up in the UK and went to a British boarding school and we would go to chapel every Sunday morning. And we'd actually have religious studies and religious studies means Christian studies where you study the Bible. — Aasif Mandvi

I love 'Call the Midwife'; it's an absolute gem of a programme. Filming the Christmas special and then the second series felt like going back to a boarding school that you really love and is full of friends. — Helen George

His daughter returned from her boarding school, improved in fashionable airs and expert in manufacturing fashionable toys; but, in her conversation, he sought in vain for that refined and fertile mind which he had fondly expected. — Emma Willard

When I was 13, I won a scholarship to boarding school. My parents let me choose whether to go, and I decided I wanted to. Afterwards, I went to Cambridge to study law - in a way, I was carrying the academic hopes of my family, as Mum and Dad left school at 14. — Stephen Mangan

Boarding school in Tring was a bit of a bubble that burst when I went to Hackney to go to drama school. — Lily James

At the senior prom for my Catholic boarding school, I was feeling manly, so I shaved, even though I didn't need to. Being inexperienced, I managed to slice a quarter-inch gash into my lower chin a half hour before I picked up my date. — Christopher Buckley

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. — Edmund White

Not interested. I didn't try very hard. I went to boarding school on a sports' scholarship after I bowled a cricket ball into my old headmaster's leg. He said, 'Christ, that was accurate,' and got it for me. But I walked out at 16. — Tony Blackburn

At boarding school there wasn't much time for much of anything except education. — Henry Cavill

I grew up in the South Wales valleys, but I think my parents realised from quite an early age that if they hadn't sent me to boarding school I would have probably gone to prison. And it cost them absolutely everything. — Thighpaulsandra

How could it be winter without snow?I appreciated every season, but winter was my favorite.I loved when it was time to pull out my thick sweaters.I loved the smell of a wood fire.I loved skiing and snow boarding and sledding, when i could find the time-although time was in a short supply when school was in session.I even enjoyed the cold, wintry weather, it was great for snuggling. — Rachel Hawthorne

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life. — Mark Haddon

Homosexuality is like a boarding school in which there are no vacations. — Andrew Holleran

The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to. — Joe Strummer

I loved my boarding school, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't have a career. — Lilly Pulitzer

I wasn't a jock in school, and by the 10th grade, when I was in boarding school I was carrying water buckets for the girls' hockey team. I was the kid with long hair and glasses and acne trying to learn how to play guitar and piano in the music center. I was not an athlete past the age of 13 or 14 when they start throwing the ball really fast. — Michael Weatherly

I was born in Dallas; then I moved to Allen, Texas. But then I got sent to boarding school, where I started to get fascinated with actors like Al Pacino. — Scott Haze

If we do not let people do things the way they do, we will never know what they are really capable of and they will just follow our boarding school rules. — Ricardo Semler

Harry's status as orphan gives him a freedom other children can only dream about (guiltily, of course). No child wants to lose their parents, yet the idea of being removed from the expectations of parents is alluring. The orphan in literature is freed from the obligation to satisfy his/her parents, and from the inevitable realization that his/her parents are flawed human beings. There is something liberating, too, about being transported into the kind of surrogate family which boarding school represents, where the relationships are less intense and the boundaries perhaps more clearly defined. — J.K. Rowling

My father, who was a sergeant in the RAF during the Second World War, was killed in a hitchhiking accident while returning home on compassionate leave. As a result, my mother had to get work, as a nurse, and at seven the RAF put me into a boarding school and ex-orphanage called the Royal Wolverhampton School. — Eric Idle

I don't know if kids still read it, I just know that for me - as a boarding school kid - the book had a lot of resonance. It was a well written book. I was honored to play a part in that movie version. — Parker Stevenson

I went to a lot of different high schools. I had quite a sporadic schooling experience. I went to school in England briefly, to boarding school, and I went to a few different ones in Australia as well. I'm really lucky! I have friends in most countries. — Alice Englert

The petty worries of the
school room must not be carried to your home or boarding place. — Thomas E. Sanders

God. How would I cope if I went to jail? I'd never even been to boarding school. — J.L. Merrow

My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I didn't do plays at school, because I didn't have the confidence. At 14, I was at boarding school in Devon and I suffered from dyslexia quite badly, but they had a very good department there which specialised in it. — Joseph Mawle

Is that why you came?'
'No, I came because I simply can't get enough of people looking down their noses at me. The girls at school are getting frightfully lax about it.'
'Are they? How remiss of them. We're taught from the cradle how to look down our noses, you know, we rich sons of bitches. Perhaps Westcliffe's curriculum is a tad too liberal these days. — Shana Abe

Some friendships in life sustain themselves only at a particular life stage, products of some mutual developmental problem to be resolved together, or of some external circumstance, like being housed in the same dormitory in boarding school. Others grow out of a deeper spiritual and philosophical affinity, which continues throughout life. — Jill Ker Conway

Trouble in our family is spelled with a capital C and has been as long as I can remember. The C stands for Charles. He's my older brother, two years and four months older to be exact. Ever since the phone call about him last night, I've felt incredibly tense. And now, at this very minute, my parents are driving up to Vermont, to Charles's boarding school, to find out if he's actually been kicked out or if he's just been suspended again. I — Judy Blume

I didn't play a great deal of sport in primary school. It was not until I went away to boarding school in Sussex that I really got into sport. — Frank Bruno

I never have issues in handling the fame. I was in a boarding school, as I am from a middle-class family. We didn't have a lot of money, so we all learned to respect money and understood its real value. — Suresh Raina

It was a clear autumn day Sunday in 1876; Vincent van Gogh, twenty-three years old, left the English boarding school where he was teaching to give a sermon at a small Methodist church in Richmond, a humble London suburb. Standing in front of the lectern, he felt like a lost soul emerging from the dark cave in which he had been buried.

The sermon, which survives among Vincent's collected letters, reiterates universal ideas and is not an outstanding example of the art of homiletics. Nevertheless, his words grew out of his tormented life and had an intense emotional charge. Preaching to the congregation, he was also preaching to himself -- and of himself. The images he used were the same as those that were to be given powerful expression in his pictures.

The text chosen for the sermon was Psalm 119:19, 'I am a stranger on the earth, hide not Thy commandments from me.' — Albert J. Lubin

My parents sent me from Venezuela to the Convent of Our Lady, a boarding school in Hastings, which was horrible - like Harry Potter without the magic. Sometimes we went into town, and if we were caught chewing gum in our uniform, members of the public would take down our names and report us to the school. — Carmen Busquets

I was sent to boarding school at the age of ten. I think Mummy was trying to protect me in her own way, trying to spare me living through the day-to-day reality of her illness. — Lysette Anthony

Growing up, I was your classic Catholic Irish kid. I went to mass every Sunday. Then in secondary school I went to boarding school, and there was mass seven days a week before breakfast - it may have put me off! — Deirdre O'Kane

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

The instinctive attraction of the daughters of high society to noble ideals was probably reinforced by an idea that, in dedicating themselves to the Church, they could escape the sometimes grim realities of marriage. It was not only the problem of volatile husbands raised in a society that prized aggressive masculinity and constant pregnancy; there was also the painful fact that only a few of the numerous babies would survive to adulthood. Against these harsh realities, the new monastic communities offered an appealing alternative, a rigid but somehow delicious atmosphere similar to that of a girls' boarding school. To a virgin, this must have seemed attractive, and to a teenage Roman widow weighing the dangers of a second marriage, it must have seemed positively utopian. And, of course, there was the chance to do good work. We should not underestimate the delight that these women found in being able to pool their resources in trying to better the lot of the city's poor. — Kate Cooper

... one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there ... . So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many ... . — Alexander McCall Smith

My love life couldn't be more nonexistent if Julius was all all-girls' boarding school with a moat full of alligators around it. — Flynn Meaney

Inside, a mother superior, ethereal, delicate, who took me under her wing. She caressed me with her slender, soft hands, she sat next to me as if I were a friend. One day she disappeared. In her place arrived a buxom Swiss from Canton Uri. It's common knowledge that a new leader will hate the predecessors' favourites. A boarding school is like a harem. — Fleur Jaeggy

Edward was always a good listener, since his own form of self-expression then consisted in making uneartly and to me quite meaningless sounds on his small violin. I remember him, at the age of seven, as a rather solemn, brown-eyed little boy, with beautiful arched eyebrows which lately, to my infinite satisfaction, have begun to reproduce themselves, a pair of delicate question-marks, above the dark eyes of my five-year-old son. Even in childhood we seldom quarrelled, and by the time that we both went away to boarding-school he had already become the dearest companion of thos brief years of unshadowed adolescence permitted to our condemned generation. — Vera Brittain

I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an 'unaccompanied minor' made me blase about the rigors of air travel. — Shashi Tharoor

I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life. — Simon Mawer

My father went to boarding school in Sydney when he was 14. — Kevin Kwan

The first 'Polly and the Pirates' is about a prim and proper girl who gets kidnapped out of her comfy boarding school by a bunch of pirates that think she's the daughter of their long lost queen. In the course of the adventure, she discovers she has a natural penchant for swashbuckling, despite her sheltered childhood. — Ted Naifeh

Darling, I'm so unutterably bored as to be a hazard — Tyne O'Connell

I moved to Seattle when I was two or three years old. Had my early education there, and would spend summers on the farm in Maryland. Then I went to boarding school in New Hampshire, to St. Paul's School. From there, I moved to London. — Alexis Denisof

At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn't Brown or Smith or Hughes. — Diane Cilento

If my dad was alive, I wouldn't have gone to boarding school, and I wouldn't have had the success I've had. — Jason Day

I was sent to boarding school - a grim place. The only good thing the headmaster did for us was every Sunday evening in the winter he would show us films in the chapel. He couldn't afford a sound projector, so we saw silent films, which you could then still rent from photographic shops. — Kevin Brownlow

My fingers clutch the wooden edges of the podium. "My sister, Isabelle, was a woman of great passions," I say quietly at first. "Everything she did, she did full speed ahead, no brakes. When she was little, we worried about her constantly. She was always running away from boarding schools and convents and finishing school, sneaking out of windows and onto trains. I thought she was reckless and irresponsible and almost too beautiful to look at. And during the war, she used that against me. She told me that she was running off to Paris to have an affair, and I believed her. — Kristin Hannah

I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can't buy love. — Raquel Welch

I was born and grew up in Phoenix, and I left there when I was 17 to go to Interlochen Arts Academy - a boarding school in Michigan - for a year, and then I went to college for a year at The Boston Conservatory and landed the 'Spring Awakening' tour midway through my freshman year, which was pretty cool. — Kimiko Glenn

I'm a war baby: I was brought up with rationing, and my parents always had to struggle. I remember when I was sent to boarding school - Prior Park College in Bath - my father was asked how he was going to pay the fees, and he replied: 'In arrears.' — Cameron Mackintosh

Sheep. I'm stuck in a boarding school filled with sheep. — Libba Bray

The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about. — Tucker Carlson

At boarding schools of every description, the relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice. — Mary Wollstonecraft

At age 10 or 12 he's going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton. — Jeremy Irons

I think boarding school does give you an independence. — Deirdre O'Kane

Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people. — Alice Hoffman

I had a very happy childhood. But I was sent off to boarding school at quite a young age, this massive Victorian house that was suffocated in ivy. I think there is a part of that school in 'Heap House.' — Edward Carey

I went to a boarding school when I was 13, and it was a very arty school, so there was an opportunity for a lot more. I joined a band and so on. We would do concerts at school, and I would play cover tunes and thought, 'This is really great.' — Teddy Thompson

By the sound of things, you know nothing about mathematics.'
'You can put it like that. I'm utterly useless.'
'Useless is such a harsh word, you are merely ... inexperienced. So I thought we could start at the beginning.'
'I'm not that stupid. I know how to add, subtract and multiply-'
'I don't mean that kind of beginning ... — Charlotte Munro

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach. — Harry Mathews

Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. — Arthur Conan Doyle

When we are fully mindful of the transience of things - an impending return home from an overseas adventure, a graduation, our child boarding the school bus for the first day of kindergarten, a close colleague changing jobs, a move to a new city - we are more likely to appreciate [be grateful for] and savor the remaining time that we do have. Although bittersweet experiences also make us sad, it is this sadness that prompts us, instead of taking it for granted, to come to appreciate the positive aspects of our vacation, colleague, or hometown; it's 'now or never.' — Sonja Lyubomirsky

When I was in eighth grade, I used a self-timing camera to take nude pictures of myself in various stages of erection. I then exchanged my biology teacher's slides with the images. The teacher, in a state of panic, kept rapidly pressing the 'next' button. It was like a pornographic flip-book. That was the last straw in a very heavy pile of straws. I was expelled, and I ended up transferring mid-year from boarding school to a public school near home. — Dani Alexander

I went to boarding school in Somerset and loved it so much that my teachers had to make me phone home when I first got there. Whenever I spoke to my mum, at the end of the call I would say, 'Love you, Mum', and she would say, 'Love you the most.' — Ella Eyre

I never went to school for that. In high school we had photography, which was great. That was another moment of discovery. I had a great teacher - I can't even remember her name now. I ended up going to boarding school for my last high school years and they had a dark room there. Of course there was curfew; you were supposed to be in bed at a certain time. But I would sneak out and sneak into the dark room and work all night. — Jeff Vespa

I have an addictive personality. Boarding school merely sent me more quickly on the downward spiral that dominated my childhood. — Marcus Brigstocke

Life at a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope. — C.S. Lewis

It was tough going to boarding school. It was very hard work. — Jasmine Guinness

Mayo College, where I got my grounding, is a private boarding school. It is a traditional school with brilliant teachers including some from overseas. — Ajay Mehta

I used to put on sketch shows at boarding school when I was eight. I'm not sure about the material, but it did used to get a laugh. — Belinda Stewart-Wilson

I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire. — Denise Mina

I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books. — Wilbur Smith

Writer Somerset Maugham, after his parents deaths, spent a few stultifying years in his uncle's vicarage. Later, in his teens at a boarding-school, having lost his belief in the existence of God said: "The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God, but on the fear of hell, tumbled down like a house of cards." — Selina Hastings, Countess Of Huntingdon

I have a theory that if you've got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you're probably better off at boarding school. — Wendy Cope

Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home. — Roald Dahl

You want to know what's on the other side?'
Walsh eyed the detective carefully, as if gauging the seriousness of the question.
'Is it seventy-two virgins, like the Muslims believe?'
'That's the good news. The bad news is that they're all guys. It's like being at a boarding school.'
'I knew there had to be a catch. — John Connolly

Apollo has peeped through the shutter,
And awaken'd the witty and fair;
The boarding-school belle's in a flutter,
The twopenny post's in despair;
The breath of the morning is flinging
A magic on blossom and spray,
And cockneys and sparrows are singing
In chorus on Valentine's day. — Winthrop Mackworth Praed

...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest. As to going a visiting, where can we not go, if we will; where have we not been, when we would; starting our fancy away from our Christmas Tree! — Charles Dickens

As their eyes became accustomed to the light, the girls were startled to see the figure in front of them. Hunched over, wearing a dark cloak, was an old man. His long, white hair straggled over his shoulders, his skin was covered with grey whiskers and one of his eyes, hooded, drooped below the other bulging one. His mouth hung open and his yellowed teeth did nothing to stop his rank breath pervading the air. — Helen Laycock

I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one. — Vincent Cassel

I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare. — Elizabeth Neel

For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

At this point I was strongly advised that I was too young socially to go to college so I took a second senior year at Andover, another boarding school. — William Standish Knowles

Boarding school is a wicked thing. — Kristin Scott Thomas

Geoff Muldaur was and is one of my musical heroes. When I listen to him sing and play, I can hear the coal mine, the cotton field, and last, but certainly foremost, the boy's boarding school. — Loudon Wainwright III

Our midnight feasts aren't so much 'lashings of ginger beer' as 'whatever booze we can smuggle in'. — Cat Clarke

What got me excited to do Grima Wormtongue is when I was young I went through a period in boarding school were I was picked on alot. And there is something about Grima, he has been picked on when he was a kid, he (Grima) is so distrustful, he is so easily corrupted, He is so ugly, and he wants somebody, he wants to love somebody, and he can't, because nobody will have him. — Brad Dourif