Class All Day Quotes & Sayings

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return. — Douglas Coupland

You're crazy," said her best friend, Angela, as the bell rang to signal five minutes before the first class on the first day back at school.
"They said that about all the great visionaries."
"You know who else they said it about?" Angela demanded. "All the actual crazy people. — Sarah Rees Brennan

To every class we have a school assign'd,
Rules for all ranks, and food for every mind:
Yet one there is, that small regard to rule
Or study pays, and still is deem'd a school;
That, where a deaf, poor, patient widow sits,
And awes some thirty infants as she knits;
Infants of humble, busy wives, who pay
Some trifling price for freedom through the day.
At this good matron's hut the children meet,
Who thus becomes the mother of the street. — George Crabbe

I had one of those defining moments in the fourth grade when my teacher said the story I wrote was the best in the class, and therefore I would be going Young Authors Conference where I'd get to hang out with authors all day. — Lisa McMann

So as I'm walking up and down the grocery aisles, I notice this distinct, mildewy, putrid odor following me. And I keep looking around for the responsible party, until I discover that she is me. I stink. When I get home, Craig rolls out of bed to help me with the groceries and I say "Honey, smell me. I stink." And he sniffs my shirt and says without surprise, "Yes, you do." And I say "Well, what IS that? It's disgusting." And he says the following:
"It's mildew. All our clothes smell like that. We always stink." I'll just give you a few seconds to digest that information. I know I needed a little time. "WHAT? WELL WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME, HUSBAND?" "I was scared to tell you. You get sensitive about ... . housekeeping stuff." "Oh. So let me clarify here. You'd rather reek all day at work and allow Chase to be THE STINKY KID IN CLASS than risk me getting mad?
"Yes. Yes, I would. Definitely. — Glennon Doyle Melton

They teach us that in school, matters of principle. I swear it's a plot to get us all slaughtered the day they graduate us out the door. It's their revenge, see? Here we are reading books in literature class about some banana who's only got one oar in the water to start with, and then he pops it out worrying about principles. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

I think diamonds represent luxury, indulgence, and class. So any time you can incorporate a gift that is synonymous with all those attributes, you know the other person will love it. I would challenge someone to find something that better represents Valentine's Day more than diamonds! — Chris Evans

Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew
and I knew it was important to know
that Papa worked hard all day long. — Vivian Gornick

How do you do it?"
"Do what?"
"All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like ... like none if it mattered."
Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn't been aware she was crying. "Trix," he sighed, "it mattered. — Jodi Picoult

I'd like all of you to ask yourselves what you would have done, were you a student here in Valentine Morgenstern's day. Would you have joined the Circle? Would you have stood by Valentine's side at the Uprising? Raise your hand, if you think it's possible. Simon was unsurprised to see not a single hand in the air. He'd played this game back in mundane school, every time his history class covered World War II. Simon knew no one ever thought they would be a Nazi. Simon — Cassandra Clare

There are times I think of us all and I wish we were back in second grade. Not really that young. But I wish it felt like second grade. I'm not saying everyone was friends back then. But we all got along. There were groups, but they didn't really divide. At the end of the day, your class was your class, and you felt like you were a part of it. You had your friends and you had the other kids, but you didn't really hate anyone longer than a couple of hours. Everybody got a birthday card. In second grade, we were all in it together. Now we're all apart. — David Levithan

There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is no room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw to-day, so come the Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. — Richard Llewellyn

Okay heres the deal a whole day of NO TALKING IN SCJHOOL.Not in class,not in the halls, not on the plaground nowhere.No talking at all. And its a contest- BOYS AGAINST GIRLS. Whichever side talks less, wins. — Andrew Clements

The day it happened, the week after it happened-those were not times I wanted to go back to. How I felt like I was trapped in a chamber of my own noise. Sitting in class and not being there at all. Sitting in a chair and fragmenting at the same time. Clutching to the random facts. Thinking the concept of a fact was itself a fiction. Because we live in a blur. All of us live in a blur. — David Levithan

In today's world of fear and uncertainty, every child should have one class period a day to dive within himself and experience the field of silence-bliss-t he enormous reservoir of energy and intelligence that is deep within all of us. This is the way to save the coming generation. — David Lynch

The coach passed by many buildings of this sort, which would no doubt be little palaces to the occupants, who had escaped from Cockbill Street and Pigsty Hill and all the other neighbourhoods where people still dreamed that they could 'better themselves', an achievement that might be attained, oh happy day, when they had 'a little place of their own'. It was an inspiring dream, if you didn't look too deeply into words like mortgage and repayments and repossession and bankruptcy, and the lower middle classes of Ankh-Morpork, who saw themselves as being trodden on by the class above and illegally robbed by the one below, lined up with borrowed money to purchase, by instalments, their own little Oi Dong — Terry Pratchett

Just look what happens to poets," I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. "Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I'm not faulting them for that. — Steve Yarbrough

... in Altruria every one works with his hands, so that the hard work shall not all fall to any one class; and this manual labor of each is sufficient to keep the body in health, as well as to earn a living. After the three, hours' work, which constitutes a day's work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands. — William Dean Howells

On the first day of the arts and crafts class i had nothing really prepared, so i asked everyone to draw themselves. When i looked at the drawings i felt faint. All of the students were Black, yet the drawings depicted a lot of blond-haired, blue-eyed little white children. I was horrified. — Assata Shakur

Spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins. What else are they? One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators. And don't forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy. But — Jack London

When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class. Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognises the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle. — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years ... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. — Daniel Levitin

On the days that feel dark and endless, I make myself a simple promise: I'll get out of bed in the morning. Then I'll head up the hill to class. If I put one foot in front of the other, day by day, I'll move closer to the light at the end of all this struggle. — Regina Calcaterra

I think I'm going to skip all of my classes today because I need a "me" day. The problem with "me" days is that I need them four times a week. The problem with me is that I'm very smart and very capable (or so I've been told) but my laziness hinders me. Laziness. They forgot to add procrastination, self-destruction, and the inability to leave my bed to the list. The problem with me is that I've dealt with this before but have no idea what to do next. I should email my past teachers and ask them what I did after I sent them messages excusing my week-long absences from class due to "personal reasons." I should stop scratching my hand in case my mom asks me if I'm okay again. I am okay. I am doing fine. But I have an itch that I cannot place, an itch that changes locations when my fingers find it. The problem with me is that I will focus on it completely until it goes away. The problem with this feeling is that it never goes away. It has always been one large itch that I cannot place. — Lora Mathis

Wherever the deaf have received an education the method by which it is imparted is the burning question of the day with them, for the deaf are what their schooling make them more than any other class of humans. They are facing not a theory but a condition, for they are first, last, and all the time the people of the eye. — George Veditz

Tendulkar is a world class player and a great ambassador for the game. As a youngster I watched the games and that's where all my dreams started. You watch Tendulkar on TV and you think that I want to be like that one day — Graeme Smith

We can talk about corporations all day long but my goal is to help the middle class, somebody who makes too much to be on government assistance but still lives paycheck to paycheck. — Lindsey Graham

During our World History lesson that morning, Mr. Avenovich loaded up a stand-alone simulation so that our class could witness the discovery of King Tut's tomb by archaeologists in Egypt in AD 1922. (The day before, we'd visited the same spot in 1334 BC and had seen Tutankhamen's empire in all its glory.) — Ernest Cline

I was a good student but I was also one of those people that could not got to class and then the day before the exam stay up all night (studying), which I do not recommend doing. But that's more the kind of thing you do when you're younger and you're in college in a band and wanted to party, too. — Jeff Kendrick

While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table [the Constitution] gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor ... — George Mason

I used to love history class. I can still quote whole passages by heart: "When the emperor entered the Hall of Balming Virtue, a violent wind came from a dark corner, and out of it slithered a giant serpent that coiled around the throne. The emperor fainted, and that night earthquakes struck Loyang, and waves swept the shores, and cranes shrieked in the marshes. On the fifth day of the sixth moon a long trail of black mist floated into the Hall of Concubines, and hot and cold became confused, and a hen turned into a rooster, and a woman turned into a man, and flesh fell from the skies." Now, that is grand stuff, just the thing to give to growing boys, and then we were old enough to read the greatest of all historians. This is what Ssu-ma Ch'ien had to say about the exact same subject: "The Chou Dynasty was nearing collapse." Bah. — Barry Hughart

The pirogues came with live turtles, and with fish, with cloudy beer and wine made from bananas, palm nuts, or sorghum, and with the smoked meat of hippopotamus and crocodile. The vendors did a good trade with our crew and the passengers down at the third-class boat; the laughter, the exclamations, and the argument of bargaining were with us all day, heard but not understood, like voices in the next room. At stopping places, the people who were nourished on these ingredients of a witches' brew poured ashore across the single plank flung down for them, very human in contour, the flesh of the children sweet, the men and women strong and sometimes handsome. We, thank God, were fed on veal and ham and Brussels sprouts, brought frozen from Europe. — Nadine Gordimer

We had to go to stew school for five weeks. We'd go through a whole week of make-up and poise. I didn't like this. They make you feel like you've never been out in public. They showed you how to smoke a cigarette, when to smoke a cigarette, how to look at a man's eyes. Our teacher, she had this idea we had to be sexy. One day in class she was showing us how to accept a light for a cigarette from a man and never blow it out. When he lights it, just look in his eyes. It was really funny, all the girls laughed. — Studs Terkel

Okay, so on anniversaries, I need to give her something. An incentive."
Simon almost walked into a tree. "What?"
"An incentive. Like in third grade, when Mrs. Nestor gave me a cookie every day that I didn't read during class and promised me a candy bar if I didn't read all week."
"You never got that candy bar."
"Because it wasn't worth listening to her yammer about stuff I already knew. But this anniversary gift thing, is like that, right? An incentive for Chloe to keep going out with me."
He sighed. "No ... It's just a gift."
"To thank her for going out with me? — Kelley Armstrong

I grew up in dance class, so I was looking in mirrors all day. — Katharine McPhee

It was such a thrill. I found the roughest, toughest girls who love to party. They study and work all day in the Agricultural world and college and then they party. I met one girl at 3 am and she was so drunk and said 'l have to get up and cut a sheep's throat at 9 am.' I met another who was a wool classer. She said 'I can drink to 4 in the morning and class wool from 6 am. So I wrote Girls Out There about them. — Beccy Cole

First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That's your territory and when you're out there you'll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That's what a class is, a swarm. And you're a warrior teacher. It's something people don't think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom. — Frank McCourt

The government's drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true. — Piper Kerman

Do you have any idea how much it turns me on, knowing something of mine has been cradling your sweet pussy all day long?" Without warning, he thrust two thick fingers inside her with just enough force to make her cry out, bring her up on her toes. He didn't move them, only held them there, high and tight inside her. Ruby's head fell forward on a moan that was equal parts frustrated and relieved. He'd finally filled her. But she needed so much more from him, and he seemed determined to take his time. "You walked around with your naughty secret all day, didn't you? Did you think of me while you sat in class wearing my underwear? Did the thought of me get you all wet, baby?" His thrust his fingers deeper. "Answer me or you'll get no more. — Tessa Bailey

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure. — Bell Hooks

And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it. — Frederic Bastiat

Though it was long thought that woman's brain was minor in comparison with man's, woman, as a class, now-a-day shows an all-round activity; and has brought staid control to official actions which had had a long run through domination by man; - that proud, cocky, strutting animal who thinks that this gigantic world should hop, skip and jump at his commands. — Ernest Vincent Wright

PERFECTION The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. — David Bayles

My favorite book is The Mysterious Island. I order my books from a flimsy catalog the teacher hands out to every student in the class. Emil and the Detectives. White Fang. Like that. Money is tight for us, but when it comes to books my mother is a spendthrift; I can order as many as I like. I sit here day after day, waiting for my books to arrive. My books. It takes a month or more, but when they finally do, when the teacher opens the big box and passes out the orders to the kids, checking the books against a form taken from her desk, I glow with happiness. I've never had the newest dress, or the prettiest, but I always have the tallest stack of books. Little paperbacks that smell of wet ink. I lay my cheek against their cool covers, anticipating the stories inside, knowing all the other girls wonder what I could possibly want with those books. — Greg Iles

Look back over the last hundred years and you'll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income - as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 - the nation as a whole grew faster, and median wages surged. The basic bargain ensured that the pay of American workers coincided with their output. In effect, the vast middle class received an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth. We created that virtuous cycle in which an ever-growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats. On the other hand, during periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion - as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day - growth slowed, median wages stagnated, and we suffered giant downturns. — Robert B. Reich

The Bible looks the way it does because "God lets his children tell the story," so to speak. Children see the world from their limited gaze. A second grader might give a class presentation on what mom does all day. She will talk about her mom from her point of view, rooted in love and devotion. She'll filter - unconsciously and in an age-appropriate manner - her mother's day through how she perceives her family and her role in the family. She'll get some things more or less correct, but she will also misunderstand other things, and get still other things plain wrong. — Peter Enns

But why? Why do you care about our class's history?"
"I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides 'Locks self in room and draws all day.' Even art schools won't take a psychopath. — Natalie Standiford

People don't work in factories, [they aren't] big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted. — Eric Drooker

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.)
Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners - who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying - look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. "The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find," one miner told me wryly. — Amy Chua

The idea that modern labour has an ascetic character is of course not new. Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world; hence deeds and renunciation inevitably condition each other to-day. This fundamentally ascetic trait of middle-class life, if it attempts to be a way of life at all, and not simply the absence of any, was what Goethe wanted to teach, at the height of his wisdom, in the Wanderjahren, and in the end which he gave to the life of his Faust. For him the realization meant a renunciation, a departure from an age of full and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in the course of our cultural development than can the flower of the Athenian culture of antiquity. — Max Weber

Oh, sorry," he said, bringing his mind back to their conversation. "This time we have to maintain a bluff to win. Not easy. Complicated. I'll explain it all to you one day." She pretended exasperation. "Not fair, Andrew. Don't treat me like a second-class citizen. You've always confided in me. I've confided in you. You're interested in what I do every day. Well, I'm just as interested in what you do. We're a team, Andrew. We share. So don't suddenly go chauvinist and relegate me to the kitchen. Tell me the problems you're dealing with. I want to share them with you." "I don't mean to withhold anything from — Crossroad Press

My husband and I own a CrossFit Gym. Crossfit is perfect for me because it's always competitive, all the workouts are in a class environment, and it's different every day. It's a constantly varied functional fitness workout done with intensity. — Chelan Simmons

It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century. Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite. Yes, the same rags, the same thunder of great sabots, the same terrible troop, with dirty skins and tainted breath, sweeping away the old world beneath an overflowing flood of barbarians. — Emile Zola

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown. — Peter Kropotkin

Weapons weren't in the class description. It's about basic self-defense and hand-to-hand."
"Why bother then?" Adrian strolled over to a glass case displaying several types of brass knuckles. "That's the kind of stuff Castile does all day. He could have showed us."
"I wanted someone a little more approachable," I explained.
"What, like Captain McTropicalShorts back there? Where on earth did you find him anyway?"
"Just did an Internet search." Feeling a need to defend my research, I added, "He comes highly recommended."
"By who? Long John Silver? — Richelle Mead

You know, when I first met Gansey, I couldn't figure out why he was friends with someone like Ronan. Gansey was always in class, always getting stuff done, always a teacher's pet. And here was Ronan, like a heart attack that never stopped. I knew I couldn't complain, 'cause I hadn't come first. Ronan had. But one day, he'd done some stupid shit I don't even remember, and I just couldn't take it. And I asked why Gansey was even friends with him if he was such an asshole all the time. And I remember Gansey told me that Ronan always told the truth, and the truth was the most important thing. — Maggie Stiefvater

People who come first in class never get good marks in the report card of Life. After all who asks you your CGPA on your last day? — Laksh Kishore

I like wearing fitted jackets mixed with jeans, a button-down shirt and a tie. I like to keep the rock and roll feel but class it up a bit. As far as stage clothes, I prefer John Varvatos and All Saints. They have clothing that is really accessible for wearing every day as well as for wearing on stage. I also love J. Lindeberg's suits. — Scott Weiland

When I first started [taking acting classes] I sort of stuck my toes in but I was so nervous I didn't know if I could go all the way. I was so scared about it for some reason. The more confident I got with it, the more I just fell in love with it. I love going to work every day and trying to make the most of the stuff I've been given. — Josh Duhamel

Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began. — Larry McMurtry

The day must come when the nation's whole scale of living must be reduced. If that day comes,Parliament must lay the burden equally on all classes. — Lord Randolph Churchill

Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War — Stephen Leacock

Have a care, Sir Tucker, lest you find yourself in the stockades."
He scoffs and looks at Mr. Erikson. "She can't do that, can she? She's not the ruler of this class. Brady is."
...
"You could strip him of his title," suggests Brady, apparently not minding at all that I have usurped his throne. "Make him a serf."
"Yeah," says Christian. "Make him a serf. Being a serf blows."
As a serf, poor Christian has already been killed several times in our class. Aside from dying of the Black Plague on the first day, he's starved to death, had his hands cut off for stealing a loaf of bread, and been run down by his master's horse just for kicks. He's like Christian the fifth now. — Cynthia Hand

It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is "we the people" who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us - rich and poor and middle class - have a common interest. — Howard Zinn

Testimony in new age writing affirms the way in which embracing a love ethic transforms life for the good. Yet a lot of this information only reaches those of us who have class privilege. And often, individuals whose lives are rich in spiritual and material well-being, who have diverse friends from all walks of life who nurture their personal integrity, tell the rest of the world these things are impossible to come by. I am talking here about the many prophets of doom who tell us that racism will never end, sexism is here to stay the rich will never share their resources. We would all be surprised if we could enter their lives for a day. Much of what they are telling us cannot be had, they have. But in keeping with a capitalist-based notion of well-being, they really believe there is not enough to go around, that the good life can only be had by a few. — Bell Hooks

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

I was always writing. I was writing in high school because it was a really competitive school for class clowns; I used to have to write all of my snaps and my disses the night before and then act like I was making it up the next day. — John Leguizamo

Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears. — Jacques Roux

The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic. — A.S. Byatt

Greta Wickham. He used to say if only Nora and Greta were here now, we wouldn't be in this mess, even when there was no mess at all." "Oh, he talked very warmly about you," Peggy interjected, "and William Junior and Thomas had nothing but good words to say about Maurice Webster when he was teaching them. I remember one day Thomas had a temperature and we all wanted him to stay in bed and he wouldn't, oh no he wouldn't, because he had a double commerce class with Mr. Webster that he could not miss. You know they wanted Thomas to stay in Dublin when he qualified. Oh, he got offers with very good prospects! We told him he should consider — Colm Toibin

To this, Mrs. Nickleby only replied that she durst say she was very stupid, indeed she had no doubt she was, for her own children almost as much as told her so, every day of her life; to be sure she was a little older than they, and perhaps some foolish people might think she ought reasonably to know best. However, no doubt she was wrong; of course she was; she always was, she couldn't be right, she couldn't be expected to be; so she had better not expose herself any more; and to all Kate's conciliations and concessions for an hour ensuing, the good lady gave no other replies than Oh, certainly, why did they ask her?, her opinion was of no consequence, it didn't matter what she said, with many other rejoinders of the same class. — Charles Dickens

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

I've never liked the idea of just having an office in a college somewhere and teaching classes and going to the library and doing research all day. I've never wanted that. The glamorous life is the life that appeals to me. — Ben Stein

The world didn't have words to measure hate. There were tons, yards, years. Volts, knots, watts. Ronan could explain how fast his car was going. He could describe exactly how warm the day was. He could specifically convey his heart rate. But there was no way for him to tell anyone else exactly how much he hated Aglionby Academy.
Any unit of measurement would have to include both the volume and the weight of the hate. And it would also have to include a component of time. The days logged in class, wasted, useless, learning skills for a life he didn't want. No single word existed, probably, to contain the concept. All, perhaps. He had all the hate for Aglionby Academy.
Thief? Aglionby was the thief. Ronan's life was the dream, pillaged. — Maggie Stiefvater

The only french sentence he could call to mind was a passage which had caused him some trouble in class the previous day. So far as he had been able to judge the translation was: 'the gentleman who wears one green hat approaches himself all of a sudden. — Anthony Buckeridge

I know very well you can't help me," he said. "But I tell you, because unsuccessful and superfluous people like me find their salvation in talking. I have to generalise about everything I do. I'm bound to look for an explanation and justification of my absurd existence in somebody else's theories, in literary types - in the idea that we, upper-class Russians, are degenerating, for instance, and so on. Last night, for example, I comforted myself by thinking all the time: 'Ah, how true Tolstoy is, how mercilessly true!' And that did me good. Yes, really, brother, he is a great writer, say what you like!" Samoylenko, who had never read Tolstoy and was intending to do so every day of his life, was a little embarrassed, and said: "Yes, all other authors write from imagination, but he writes straight from nature. — Anton Chekhov

The managers and superintendents and clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never from the workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of them. A poor devil of a bookkeeper who had been working in Durham's for twenty years at a salary of six dollars a week, and might work there for twenty more and do no better, would yet consider himself a gentleman, as far removed as the poles from the most skilled worker on the killing beds; he would dress differently, and live in another part of the town, and come to work at a different hour of the day, and in every way make sure that he never rubbed elbows with a laboring man. Perhaps this was due to the repulsiveness of the work; at any rate, the people who worked with their hands were a class apart, and were made to feel it. — Upton Sinclair

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo. — Elif Batuman

Well, here's all you need to know. Classes, nothing before 11. Beer, its your best friend, you drink a lot of it. Women, you're a freshman, so its pretty much out of the question. Will you have a car? ... Someone on your hall will, find them and make friends with them on the first day. — Jeremy Piven

Nothing Twice Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, if you're the planet's biggest dunce, you can't repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with exactly the same kisses. One day, perhaps, some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a rose were flung into the room, all hue and scent. The next day, though you're here with me, I can't help looking at the clock: A rose? A rose? What could that be? Is it a flower or a rock? Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It's in its nature not to stay: today is always gone tomorrow. With smiles and kisses, we prefer to seek accord beneath our star, although we're different (we concur) just as two drops of water are. — Wislawa Szymborska

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job
meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher? — Charles Bukowski

But I have to tell you, I get it all day, every day, I'm not sexy enough, or I'm not cool enough, or if I did this I would be accepted. Let me tell you one thing: the sexiest thing is class. I promise you that each and every one of you is made to be who you are. That is what's so attractive and beautiful. Please don't forget that, even when it gets hard. — Selena Gomez

Rats! There goes the bell ... oh, how I hate lunch hours! I always have to eat alone because nobody likes me ... Peanut butter again ... I wish that little red haired girl would come over, and sit with me. Wouldn't it be great if she'd walk over here, and say, "May I eat lunch with you, Charlie Brown?" I'd give anything to talk with her ... she'd never like me, though ... I'm so blah and so stupid ... she'd never like me ... I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to talk to her! Everyone would probably laugh ... she'd probably be insulted someone as blah as I am tried to talk to her. I hate lunch hour ... all it does is make me lonely ... during class it doesn't matter ... I can't even eat ... Nothing tastes good ... Rats! Nobody is ever going to like me ... Lunch hour is the loneliest hour of the day! — Charles M. Schulz

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied. — Douglas Coupland

I had a momentary vision of Brooklands' entire middle class, its prosperous lawyers, doctors and senior managers, being confined to their own ghetto, with nothing to do all day except groom their ponies and swing their croquet mallets. — J.G. Ballard

Perhaps some day men will raise a tablet reading in letters of gold: 'All honor to women, the first disenfranchised class in history who, unaided by any political party, won enfranchisement by its own effort ... and achieved the victory without the shedding of a drop of human blood. All honor to women of the world! — Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch

Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. — John Stuart Mill

Because you smiled at me." "What?" "You asked why I wanted to do this with you. It's not because you were up on the ledge too, even though, okay, that's part of it. It's not because I feel this weird responsibility to keep an eye on you, which is also part of it. It's because you smiled at me that day in class. A real smile, not the bullshit one I see you give everyone all the time where your eyes are doing one thing and your mouth is doing another." "It was just a smile." "Maybe to you. — Jennifer Niven

If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it's hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the "Obama economy" and how it had affected his life. I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. — J.D. Vance

One would think that potential motherhood should make women as a class as sacred as the priesthood. In common parlance we have much fine-spun theorizing on the exalted office of the mother, her immense influence in moulding the character of her sons; "the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world," etc., but in creeds and codes, in constitutions and Scriptures, in prose and verse, we do not see these lofty paeans recorded or verified in living facts. As a class, women were treated among the Jews as an inferior order of beings, just as they are to-day in all civilized nations. And now, as then, men claim to be guided by the will of God. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Because I was crazy and because my parents wanted me out of their hair, they put me in an all-day acting class ... so they wouldn't have to deal with me, probably. And it just so happened there agents auditing the class, and I ended up getting signed. — Liana Liberato

Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas... — E. M. Forster

With the threat of failure looming, students with the growth mindset set instead mobilized their resources for learning. They told us that they, too, sometimes felt overwhelmed, but their response was to dig in and do what it takes. They were like George Danzig. Who? George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homework problems at all. They were two famous math problems that had never been solved. — Carol S. Dweck

The strategy worked like a charm, and in 1980 Jimmy Carter was swept away like offal by the "Reagan Revolution," which ushered in eight years of berserk looting of the federal treasury and the economic crippling of the middle class. That was the eighties, folks. That was the feeding frenzy of the New Rich, who found themselves wallowing in excess profits as their maximum income tax rate got chopped down to 31 percent and who were welcomed like brothers in the White House at all hours of the day or night. — Hunter S. Thompson

I remember in second grade, everybody in the class had to come up with adjectives for each other, and I got shy. In a way, I force myself to perform, because if I didn't, I'd stay home rolled up in a ball watching 'The Real Housewives of Orange County' all day. — June Diane Raphael

The following day I decided to take the boat to Corfu where my friend Durrell was waiting for me. We pulled out of Piraeus about five in the afternoon, the sun still burning like a furnace. I had made the mistake of buying a second class ticket. When I saw the animals coming aboard, the bedding, all the crazy paraphernalia which the Greeks drag with them on their voyages, I promptly changed to first class, which was only a trifle more expensive than second. I had never traveled first class before on anything, — Henry Miller

I've been acting since I was a little kid. It was my escape from my day which had to do with a father leaving, and a mother not being home, and her struggling and doing her best and all that. But it wasn't fun. I would go into theater class. If she were a stay-at-home mom, I wouldn't have that discomfort inside that kept me pushing. — Daphne Zuniga

In Poetry class, Professor Sappho teaches us how to compose love ballads. She's a swell teacher and all but I'm not sure I understand her. She's always going on and on about her weekend trips with the other goddesses to the island of Lesbos. — Tai