Day Of School Quotes & Sayings

If I say I am not a politician, it is because I did not go to school to do political science. But at the end of the day, I think we are all born politicians. It's practical. All you gotta do is practice. — George Weah

Well, growing up in LA, things are kind of thrust in front of you. You're almost forced to grow up pretty fast, with experiences and stuff. Going to that school there were a lot of rich girls, a lot of partying, a lot of wild things. You're put in this environment where you're forced to wear a uniform. It was all girls, so you rebel naturally, I think. I don't know, I just kind of got inspiration from every day living and going to school. — Sarah Hudson

Shamefully, human beings are the only mammals to separate mothers from their infants. Dr. John Krystal,
Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobiology at the Yale School
of Medicine, described the impact of maternal separation on
the infant as 'profound', citing the recent discovery that the
autonomic activity (heart rate and other involuntary nervous
system activity) of two-day-old sleeping babies is 176 per
cent higher during maternal separation. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

The most important thing I would learn in school was that almost everything I would learn in school would be utterly useless. When I was fifteen I knew the principal industries of the Ruhr Valley, the underlying causes of World War One and what Peig Sayers had for her dinner every day ... What I wanted to know when I was fifteen was the best way to chat up girls. That is what I still want to know. — Joseph O'Connor

Soeur Marie Emelie"

Soeur Marie Emelie
is little and very old:
her eyes are onyx,
and her cheeks vermilion,
her apron wide and kind
and cobalt blue.

She comforts
generations and generations
of children,
who are
"new"
at the convent school.
When they are eight,
they are already up to her shoulder,
they grow up and go into the world,
she remains,
forever,
always incredibly old,
but incredibly never older...
She has an affinity with the hens,
When a hen dies,she sits down on a bench and cries,
she is the only grown-up, whose tears
are not frightening tears.
Children can weep without shame,
at her side...
Soeur Marie Emelie...
her apron as wide and kind
as skies on a summer day
and as clean and blue. — Caryll Houselander

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened - and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars? - Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants. — Junot Diaz

There's a joke about the balloon boy who has a balloon mum and a balloon dad and he goes to a balloon school with balloon friends ad a balloon principal. And one day, the balloon boy decides to take a pin to his balloon school, which is, of course, a disaster. And he's called into the balloon principal's office, and the balloon principal tells him, 'You've let me down, you've let your school down, you've let your parents down, you've let your friends down. But most importantly you've let yourself down'. — Gabrielle Williams

On the first day of school, you got to be real careful where you sit. You walk into the classroom and just plunk your stuff down on any old desk, and the next thing you know the teacher is saying, 'I hope you all like where you're sitting, because these are your permanent seats.' — Jeff Kinney

My son was diagnosed with autism. He's OK, he makes eye contact, but he doesn't talk. He needs eight hours a day of very intensive school, and you wouldn't even believe me if I told you how much it costs. — Steve Earle

They tried to teach you to make lists in grade school, remember? Back when your day planner was the back of your hand. And if your assignments came off in the shower, well, then they didn't get done. No direction, they said. No discipline. So they tried to get you to write it all down somewhere more permanent. — Jonathan Nolan

What are all those people doing under the trees?" I asked. "Those are students," Grandpa said. "They're probably studying their lessons. They have their classes inside those buildings." "That wouldn't be a bad place to go to school," I said. "Instead of having to stay in the schoolhouse to study, you could just go outside and sit under a tree. I think I'd like that." "I hope I live to see the day when you go to college here," Grandpa said. "Do you think you'd like it? — Wilson Rawls

Kaushik, what about a picture?" my father suggested. I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father's old Yashica, at school. "But you always have it with you." That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he'd married Chitra, passed briefly across my father's face. "I forgot it," I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything. "I don't understand," my father said. "Neither do I," I replied. "You haven't wanted a picture of anything in years." "That's not true." "It is." We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I, as school kid, was a member of the Civil Guard, something like today's NCC. We had to salute our officers who went round in jeeps. So I thought one day I will also ride in a jeep and somebody else will salute me. — Dhirubhai Ambani

Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup. — Sherry Turkle

I suppose this happens because we have cameras on our phones. Do we need that? It's not like ten years ago we were thinking, "I wish I could take a low-quality photo of my dessert and text it to someone who's not interested." Remember when photos were special? It was not that long ago. "It's school picture day! We better get Junior a haircut. We want him to look nice. Don't want to waste the time of that camera expert and that precious film. — Jim Gaffigan

One of my school friends' parents owned a minigolf course, and a bunch of us kids would play there all day in the summer. Two-under deuces was a good score. — Jack Nicholson

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up with people who were from other parts of the world ... I remember feeling that I would never have anything to contribute on St. Patrick's Day. I couldn't tell the stories that they might have been telling about their forebears and I felt left out. — Isabel Wilkerson

Each of our children during their high school years went to 'early morning seminary' - scripture study classes that met in the home of a church member every school day morning from 6:30 until 7:15. — Clayton Christensen

My parents and grandparents listened to bacheta heavy, the true bachata from back in the day - Juan Luis Guerra, Anthony Santos. I liked the genre, but I remember thinking, 'OK, enough of this.' I would sing Usher's 'U Remind Me' to the girls in school. — Prince Royce

A Mother's Advice

Manners matter, regardless of your position in society. There is no excuse in this world to practice bad manners, especially at the table. I found that out in high school. I was invited to my boyfriend's house for dinner. His parents were somewhat formal, and I knew the dinner would be "fancy," at least in my mind. My family wasn't upper class (or even middle class), and my mother never had what would be called "social graces."
Before I left, my mother gave me a piece of advice: hold your head high, be quiet, and take the lead from his mother. Even though I was scared to death, I did what my mother advised and got through the experience with flying colors.
To this day, my mother's advice has gotten me through many difficult situations, especially ones that are totally new to me! With my mother's simple advice, I know I could dine with the Queen of England, just by following her lead. Thanks, Mother!

-Deborah Ford — Deborah Ford

They were childless - Dan Needham suggested that their sexual roles might be so "reversed" as to make childbearing difficult - and their attendance at Little League games was marked by a constant disapproval of the sport: that little girls were not allowed to play in the Little League was an example of sexual stereotyping that exercised the Dowlings' humorlessness and fury. Should they have a daughter, they warned, she would play in the Little League. They were a couple with a theme - sadly, it was their only theme, and a small theme, and they overplayed it, but a young couple with such a burning mission was quite interesting to the generally slow, accepting types who were more typical in Gravesend. Mr. Chickering, our fat coach and manager, lived in dread of the day the Dowlings might produce a daughter. Mr. Chickering was of the old school - he believed that only boys should play baseball, and that girls should watch them play, or else play soft-ball. — John Irving

Today at school I will learn to read at once; then tomorrow I will begin to write, and the day after tomorrow to cipher. Then with my acquirements I will earn a great deal of money, and with the first money I have in my pocket I will immediately buy for my papa a beautiful new cloth coat. But what am I saying? Cloth, indeed! It shall be all made of gold and silver, and it shall have diamond buttons. That poor man really deserves it; for to buy me books and to have me taught he has remained in his shirt sleeves ... And in this cold! It is only fathers who are capable of such sacrifices! ... — Carlo Collodi

It's not an honest face. It's not a kind face. It's a face made of anger and secrets and lies. From the tight, guarded mouth to the clenched, square jaw to the glossy shimmer of I-dare-you that coats the surface of her eyes, Aimee's face is a scary place for Meghan's gaze to rest. But beneath the gloss, behind the sharpness and tension, deep at Aimee's core, Meghan can see something warm and real. It's the same unnameable thing she saw in the sickroom on the first day of school. It's the same thing she feels pulsing softly deep in her own chest. — Madeleine George

again. "When we were Sixes, we went and shared a whole school day with a group of Sixes in their community." "How did you feel when you were there?" Lily frowned. "I felt strange. Because their methods were different. They were learning usages that my group hadn't learned yet, so we felt stupid." Father was listening with interest. "I'm thinking, Lily," he said, "about the boy who didn't obey the rules today. Do you think it's possible that he felt strange and stupid, being in a new place with rules that he didn't know about?" Lily pondered that. "Yes," she said, finally. — Lois Lowry

Our car would've burned up too, but Michael, who is only twelve, got in it and backed it away. I climbed in with him and noticed some of my school books in the car, so I took them out and threw them in the fire. I figured it would save me from doing a lot of homework, but unfortunately under the headline in the paper the next day that said HARPER'S MALT SHOP BURNS TO THE GROUND IN TRAGIC FIRE it also said that seen throwing her school books into the fire was little Daisy Fay Harper. Rat's foot! No wonder Hollywood stars hate reporters, and after all that some busybody do-gooder has already bought me a new set of books. — Fannie Flagg

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its) - Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world - a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious - surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity. — Walt Whitman

When you are old, at evening candle-lit
beside the fire bending to your wool,
read out my verse and murmur, "Ronsard writ
this praise for me when I was beautiful."
And not a maid but, at the sound of it,
though nodding at the stitch on broidered stool,
will start awake, and bless love's benefit
whose long fidelities bring Time to school.
I shall be thin and ghost beneath the earth
by myrtle shade in quiet after pain,
but you, a crone, will crouch beside the hearth
mourning my love and all your proud disdain.
And since what comes to-morrow who can say?
Live, pluck the roses of the world to-day. — Pierre De Ronsard

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It's like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it's gorgeous. You feel very exposed. — Guillermo Del Toro

They spoke to each other in strange, strangulated voices, and lost the knack of making each other laugh, jeering at each other instead in a spiteful, mocking tone.
Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water.
Why not let it die instead?
It was unrealistic to expect a friendship to last forever, she had lots of other friends: the old college crowd, her friends from school, and Ian of course.
But whom to could she confide about Ian? Not Dexter, not anymore — David Nicholls

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn. — Delmore Schwartz

Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked. — George Carlin

It's obvious. Look - see? The black kids are over there hanging out with the black kids. The jocks have their territory. Mary Ida and those other sorry girls are standing over there at the water fountain where you know they'll always be. We're sitting here on the bleachers, where boys like us always sit. It's only the first day of school, but we're already stuck where we'll all be for the rest of the year. Who said you had to go there? Nobody. But you did. You went automatically. You had no choice. It's like, I don't know, in your blood cells or something. That's what I mean, a law of nature. The universal law governing the motion of bodies at school. — George Bishop

My first day of high school, I wore brown boys' corduroys that my mom had sewn Sesame Street elastic into - they were my coolest pants - and a lime green Patagonia fleece that my mom found at Goodwill. I loved fleece. — Cameron Russell

Definitely beats my first kiss. Seventh grade, Andrea Williams, behind the gym after school. She came over to my table at lunch, whispered the proposition in my ear, and I had a hard-on for the rest of the day. — Jay Asher

Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolate by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened. — Horace Mann

So how's Cupid Day treating you?" He pops a mint in his mouth and leans closer. It grosses me out, like he thinks he can seduce me with fresh breath. "Any big romantic plans tonight? Got someone special to cozy up next to?" He raises his eyebrows at me.
[ ... ]
"We'll see," I say, smiling. "What about you? Are you going to be all by your lonesome? Table for one?"
He leans forward even more, and I stay perfectly still, willing myself not to pull away.
"Now why would you assume that?" He winks at me, obviously thinking that this is my version of flirting
like I'm going to offer to keep this company or something.
I smile even wider. "Because if you had a real girlfriend," I say, quietly but clearly, so he can hear every word perfectly, "you wouldn't be hitting on high school girls. — Lauren Oliver

Citizenship means standing up for the lives that gun violence steals from us each day. I have seen the courage of parents, students, pastors, and police officers all over this country who say 'we are not afraid,' and I intend to keep trying, with or without Congress, to help stop more tragedies from visiting innocent Americans in our movie theaters, shopping malls, or schools like Sandy Hook. — Barack Obama

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in. — David Foster Wallace

When you start one of these programs, school lunch programs, in a country that heretofore had nothing of that kind, immediately school enrollment jumps dramatically. Girls and boys get to the classroom with the promise of a good meal once a day. — George McGovern

God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. I recall it quite vividly.I was at school in England by then. The moment of awakening happened, in fact, during a Latin lessson, and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. I remember feeling that my survival confirmed the correctness of new position. I did slightly regret the loss of Paradise, though. — Salman Rushdie

Our teachers need a snow day. They look unusually pale. The men aren't shaving carefully and the women never remove their boots. They suffer some sort of teacherflu. Their noses drip, their eyes are rimmed with red. They come to school long enough to infect the staff room then go home sick when the sub shows up. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Most of the homeschooled children I know have about the same amount of after-school peer time as the rest of the population but, obviously, without that school day together, they do spend less time with their peers. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is still open to debate. — Quinn Cummings

I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. I don't know, like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn't be able to help falling in love with them. — Tumblr

Most Americans think of Rosa Parks as a demur, pleasant-enough seamstress who backed into history by being too tired to get out of her seat on a bus one day, in reality she had been trained in nonviolence spirit and tactics at a famous institution, Highlander Folk School. It seems to be a difficult concept for most of us that peace is a skill that can be learned. We know war can be learned, but we seem to think that one becomes a peacemaker by a mere change of heart. (23) — Mahatma Gandhi

I decided to be an actress, and the day after, I was an actress. That was quick and very scary at the same time. When 'Obscure Object of Desire' came out in France, I felt guilty for my friends at the National School who weren't in the movies. The whole thing was turmoil. — Carole Bouquet

The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week , a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather ---all the things so unimportant that they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren't — Michael Zadoorian

The ultimate reason why the democratic impulse is so strong - why we resist such differences - is that the sinful heart resents the final discrimination made in the judgment of God when He separates the sheep from the goats. Spelling tests smack of the Last Day. The way we manage our schools shows how, deep down, we would really like to abolish the Great White Throne Judgment. This resistance extends from the democratic government school system down to the most trivial awards ceremony. And judging from our awards ceremonies, many modern educators do not want God to separate the sheep from the goats. They want Him to hand out participant ribbons to all. — Douglas Wilson

Is a BJ adultery? What? Did I miss a day of school? Of course it is! Oral sex is adultery like Curling is an Olympic sport. The only thing is, oral sex should be in the Olympics because it's much harder than Curling, and if you're good at it, you DESERVE a medal! — Lewis Black

A perfect example of the power of prayer is when a blizzard closes the schools on the day of a big exam. — Doug Larson

I worked in a paper factory the week after I left school. I had loads of paper cuts all over my hands and the pay was dreadful. On my third day I was like, 'Can I leave early? I've got an audition for Coronation Street.' They said yes and I never went back. — Suzanne Shaw

When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and he mentioned a song. We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don't know that one. And he mentioned another. I said I don't know that one either, Dad, and he became very alarmed that I didn't know what he considered my own musical genealogy. — Rosanne Cash

I work seven days a week and I work about 12 hours a day, from the beginning of September to about the end of May; the school year. I take two days off, Christmas and New Year's, Thanksgiving sometimes - two and a half. And the result is that I bonded myself to my desk. — James Lipton

When everything is added up, the frequent blows weighted against the sporadic triumphs, this is I have to say not just a vocation, it's a great gift. But you also know this, for your work, for your passion, every day is a rededication. Painters, dancers, actors, writers, filmmakers. It's the same for all of you, all of us. Every step is a first step. Every brush stroke is a test. Every scene is a lesson. Every shot is a school. So, let the learning continue. — Martin Scorsese

I remember one day during my freshman year of high school, when as usual I was obsessively listening to a cast recording: it may have been 'Jesus Christ Superstar.' And I remember sitting there, totally absorbed, saying to myself, 'I can do this.' — James Van Der Beek

My interest, perhaps, came out of the trauma of being a young immigrant in this country and constantly feeling my "resident alien" status. I remember trying to learn English on kindergarten playgrounds. I tried hard to be a convincing American but it was a losing battle. I was labeled weird and that tag never left me - all through high school, I was always the oddball. It was not always an easy path - I just had to tell myself that one day, being on the periphery would become an asset (and I think it finally has, as a creative adult). — Porochista Khakpour

Forbid the day when vivisection shall be practised in every college and school, and when the man of science, looking forth over a world which will then own no other sway than his, shall exult in the thought that he has made of this fair earth, if not a heaven, at least a hell for animals. — Lewis Carroll

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

In military school, on day one you must memorize the mission of the Merchant Marine Academy. — Robert Kiyosaki

The day someone quits school he is condemning himself to a future of poverty. — Jaime Escalante

I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest. — Jamie Zeppa

As a child, I was tortured because my mother was a brilliant seamstress who made most of my clothes. I was despised by the children at school because I looked like I was going to an opening every day. We weren't wealthy at all; we lived in a row house in Philadelphia. — Lynda Resnick

this is real, and it is happening now, just as it happened before: We are under the big tree in my backyard, on that patch of dirt where we used to build fairy houses from moss and sticks and scraps of birch. It is late afternoon. All around us is golden light. We have been together all day, in our cutoff shorts and bare feet. It is the start of fifth grade, the start of being the oldest in the school. Next year, we will be the youngest all over again. But not yet. We are playing that hand-slapping game, the one we like to play at recess. You hold your hands out, palms up, and I place mine lightly on top. You pull yours out and try to slap mine. You hit air three times. On the fourth try, your — Ali Benjamin

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there. — Alice Sebold

His fingers gouged into my leg harder. "My sister was in that cafeteria," he said. "She saw her friends die, thanks to you and that puke boyfriend of yours. She still has nightmares about it. He got what he deserved, but you got a free pass. That ain't right. You should've died that day, Sister Death. Everyone wishes you would have. Look around. Where is Jessica, if she wants you here so bad? Even the friends you came here with don't want to be with you."
"Let go of me," I said again, pulling on his fingers. But he only pinched tighter.
"Your boyfriend isn't the only one who can get his hands on a gun," he said. Slowly he eased himself up to standing again. He reached into the waistband of his jeans and pulled out something small and dark. He pointed it at me, and when the moonlight hit it, I gasped and pressed myself against the barn wall. — Jennifer Brown

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry. — Grace Paley

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut - this indescribably emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do.
Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner. — Hugh Howey

Today was the first day of summer, she realized, her spirits lifting like a kite. She loved milestones of any sort: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, checks on the calendar, notches on a growth chart. Today would be special, brand new. She felt it deep inside. Summer was here with sunny days and balmy nights, the informality of barbecues and dips in the swimming pool. She was so relieved to have the grind of the school year finished. She missed playing with her children. — Mary Alice Monroe

Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day - hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age. — Daniel Goleman

No one in my family had ever attended school [ ... ] On the first day of school my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why this particular name I have no idea. — Nelson Mandela

I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard.
I don't know where you are, but you're living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I'm touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we'll walk through and we'll be full of a future and of a past and we'll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can't meet now, I don't know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we'll be caught in something so bright ... and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet. — Richard Bach

I'm told I was acting in school plays when I was a tiny little boy at the age of three, so they must have seen something then. And even when I was practicing piano eight hours a day, I was still doing school plays. — Christian McKay

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While — Fred Waitzkin

Then, out of the blue, Aaron Winer saved the day. He took her to some movie and made out with her in the back row. The next day, at school, they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Bam! Problem solved. I pretended to be bitter about this, but in fact I was so relieved that I started laughing hysterically in history class and had to be excused to go the nurse. — Jesse Andrews

I was not a good scholar, and during my last year at school I made little effort. This was not due to laziness ... , but to a state of youthful day-dreaming and indifference ... that was only ... pierced when creative desire enveloped me like ether. — Hermann Hesse

If you're planning on dropping out of high school, prepare yourself for the future by repeating aloud each day: I'm looking forward to low-paying jobs for the rest of my life. — Sean Covey

Allie hated this. Why couldn't they have even a day to be normal kids in a normal school, with their A levels the biggest obstacle ahead of them? — C.J. Daugherty

The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. — Toni Morrison

So, I mean, there's still vast swaths of the city that are suffering from a lack of jobs and poor housing and poor public schools, but they are building momentum - you know, techies, foodies, artists, musicians, all coming to Detroit. So there is this vibrancy. You see it in the newspapers every day - some story about the new Detroit. — David Maraniss

You are supposed to know how to fly or you would not be here. You will now learn to fly all over again. Our way. I have examined your logbooks. They contain some interesting and clever lies. If you are lucky and work a good solid eighteen hours a day in this school, it is barely possible that a few of you may succeed in actually going out on the line-that is, if the company is still in such desperate need of pilots that it will hire anybody who wears his wings in his lapel and walks slowly past the front door. — Ernest K. Gann

One of the bonds between Lily and me is that we both suffer with our teeth. She is twenty years my junior but we wear bridges, each of us. Mine are at the sides, hers are in front. She has lost the four upper incisors. It happened while she was still in high school, out playing golf with her father, whom she adored. The poor old guy was a lush and far too drunk to be out on a golf course that day. Without looking or given warning, he drove from the first tee and on the backswing struck his daughter. It always kills me to think of that cursed hot July golf course, and this drunk from the plumbing supply business, and the girl of fifteen bleeding. Damn these weak drunks! Damn these unsteady men! I can't stand these clowns who go out in public as soon as they get swacked to show how broken-hearted they are. But Lily would never hear a single word against him and wept for him sooner than for herself. She carries his photo in her wallet. — Saul Bellow

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

You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life. — Emo Philips

What's the difference between this school and a happy retirement community?" The room was silent again. "The difference is 'rithmetic! A retired person living by the ocean, just doing a little reading and writing till the end of their days - that's the dream, right? 'What do you do all day?' 'Some reading, a little writing.' Sounds idyllic, right? And yet school sucks. Everybody hates it. What's the difference? 'Rithmetic! It's time somebody put their finger on this fucking obvious thing. — B.J. Novak

I used to cheerlead in high school, and I had the biggest crush on one of my teammates' brothers. I was a great tumbler, so when he showed up at practice one day, I tried to impress him, but I ended up landing on my face! When I got off the ground, I had rug burn on my nose. I was in tears because it hurt so bad! — Josie Loren

The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority ... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty. — Martin Amis

I can remember neing in high school, walking through Central Park on a chilly day, and the sound of stamping on the crispness of autumn leaves would make me think of the sensation of my head cracking open. And I would get really scared and run all the way home, running for cover. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Jamie Randall: [Last lines] I used to worry a lot about who I'd be when I grew up. You know, like how much money I'd make or, umm, like some day I'd become some big deal. Sometimes, the thing you want most doesn't happen. And sometimes, the thing you never expect does. Like giving up my job in Chicago and everything and deciding to stay and apply to med school. I don't know. You meet thousands of people and none of them really touch you. And then you meet one person and your life is changed... forever. — Margaret Watson

Trace was just one of those guys who caught your attention no matter if you had a ring on your finger. He would be hot 'til the day he died. Seriously. — Chelsea Lynn Charters The Gossip Web

I had forgotten how thrilling a snow day is until my son started school, and as much as he loves it, he swoons at the idea of a free day arriving unexpectedly, laid out like a gift. — Susan Orlean

When I was in school, one of my teachers was crazy about me. I once heard her tell another teacher, "I wish he was my kid for one day!" — Milton Berle

In my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister like my father, I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the Dirty War in Argentina. Bob used to print the names of those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold in his newspaper. It was a kind of an awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do. — Chris Hedges

Will non-English-speaking students start speaking English because their teachers were fired? Will children come to school ready to learn because their teachers were fired?
It would be good if our nation's education leaders recognized that teachers are not solely responsible for student test scores. Other influences matter, including the students' effort, the family's encouragement, the effects of popular culture, and the influence of poverty. A blogger called "Mrs. Mimi" wrote the other day that we fire teachers because "we can't fire poverty." Since we can't fire poverty, we can't fire students, and we can't fire families, all that is left is to fire teachers.
— Diane Ravitch

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools ... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. — H.L. Mencken

A couple months after school started that year, I just plain stopped going to see the Maje. I remember coming home one day and checking the answering machine in my bedroom. The first message was from the Maje. He was waiting for me to come over. He sounded feeble and desperate: "Steve, where are you? I need you? Are you coming? Please . . ." I deleted it. The next message was also from the Maje and said pretty much the same thing. Delete. There must have been a dozen messages on that machine from the Maje, all begging me, pleading with me, to come help him. I deleted every single one of them. To this day, I have no idea what happened to the Maje, no idea if he ever got that cataract surgery. That's how our relationship ended. It still makes me feel horrible to think about now: I just deleted the Maje. — Stephen "Steve-O" Glover

A family of four needs to transport around 200 pounds of water each and every day to meet its most minimal drinking, cooking, and cleaning needs. To manage such an impossible weight, two trips to the well each day by mother and children are not uncommon. Carrying water for basic subsistence devours school time for children and places a dispiriting burden on the enterprising will of parents to struggle out of their material privation. That the water carrying falls traditionally on women adds the insult of gender inequity to the tragedy. — Steven Solomon

I can bring Rain with me everywhere I go, but when she's in school, I don't know what I'll do. The longest I've been away from her is three days, and I cried my eyes out. The first day of school will be so hard. — Marisol Nichols

Even as a child Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best. "Any school assignment, be it playing a musical instrument or writing papers, whatever, he would do at any or all hours of the day". — James Wallace

There are all kinds of things that can scare you every day. What if someone you know gets cancer? What if something happens to you sister or your friends or your parents? And what if you get hit by a car crossing the street or the kids at school find out what an unnatural freak you are and what if you go too far out in the lake and the water is over your head and what if there's a fire or a war?
And you can lie awake at night and worry about these things because it's scary and unpredictable, but it's REAL. It's possible.
-Mackie Doyle, The Replacement — Brenna Yovanoff

My daughter finished high school the same month I got my master's degree. I'm glad I didn't know when I gave birth to her at 21 what it would cost in terms of time, money and sacrifice to bring her to that graduation day. — Regina Brett

I was actually pretty miserable in high school. I couldn't wait for it to be over. And when it finally was, I remember sitting at graduation with all these classmates getting nostalgic and emotional already and all I could think was, "Get me out of here. I never want to see you people again." So it's ironic that I spend half my day putting myself back there by choice [while writing]. — Sarah Dessen