Grade Quotes & Sayings

I have a completely worthless degree: a BS in Photojournalism from Boston University (BU). With this degree, I suppose I could have gotten a job teaching grade school kids how to photograph their relatives, but knowing about B&W photo processing and developing and how to shoot a picture story is good basic info that every photographer should have. — Peter Menzel

There is a mathematical underpinning that you must first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics, matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school - roughly 15 years. Such a course of study does not actually involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply. — Carl Sagan

My brother was a year younger than I am and he was never in the home with me hardly at all, ... My mom had to take him to every school there possibly was to get him some education. He ended up first in Columbus, Ohio, for grade school, then went to a high school for the deaf and Galludet in Washington. — Les Miles

I was a class clown since second grade. — Eric Andre

My eighth-grade year, I was home-schooled. I'd basically wake up, go to the gym in the morning, do a little bit of school, go to practice, do a little more school, then go back to practice. My mom had a crockpot and a mini traveling oven, so we'd be cooking and eating dinners at the gym. — Jacob Dalton

If you always try to measure yourself with
money ... well, it's like counting backwards, the more you
keep on, the less you'll have to show for it. — Steven J. Carroll

I have a secret. A big, fat, hairy secret. And I'm not talking minor-league stuff, like I once let Joseph Applebaum feel me up behind the seventh-grade stairwell or I got a Brazilian wax after work last Friday or I'm hiding a neon blue vibrator called the Electric Slide in my night table. Which I'm not, by the way. In case you were wondering. — Karen MacInerney

Here's what I've learned about the people in this city," Darcy was saying. "They grade their women on a curve. If someone is described as sophisticated, it means once during college she visited Paris, and if someone is described as beautiful, it means she's fifteen pounds overweight instead of forty. And — Curtis Sittenfeld

My reading is dead!' Pilar gasped. The little girl held the fourth grade reading book, rigid as a stillborn, across her open palms as if pleading with the pretty gringa teacher to take the burden away. — Janiece Hopper

Some students look at the problems that they're facing and they draw global conclusions from them. They say this is not just a professor giving me a bad grade or someone not sitting next to me in the cafeteria. This reflects that fact that I am not ready for college, or I shouldn't be in this college at all. — Shankar Vedantam

The most unsuccessful three years in the education of cost estimators appears to be fifth-grade arithmetic. — Norman Ralph Augustine

Fogged, bogged gates of Brume, barrier to my home; Timeless, faceless watchers loom, but I am allowed to roam. — Christina Mercer

I'm a pretty forgetful guy, but everything she says, I remember. I remember what colour her hair ribbon was when we met on the first day of fifth grade. I remember that she loves orchids because they look delicate but aren't, really. From a single postcard she sent me when traveling with her family two summers ago. I remember what my name looks like in her handwriting. — Adi Alsaid

When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment. — Jane Smiley

Winston and his sister walked for a time in silence, each in an invisible, vibrating pocket of excitement. — Eric Berlin

I taught sixth grade for three and a half years. — Ed Bradley

Is it ... can we ... is it safe?"
Tub checked the lot but he seemed unconcerned.
"Coach Lawrence nabbed him for practice. We live to fight another day, soldier."
"No ... I mean, the thing ... is it ... ?"
Tub frowned.
"The thing. Hmmm. Can you be more specific?
I clutched at the bumper and raised myself to unsteady feet. I patted the truck bed, taking solace in the cake of dust. It was real; I was not caught in a nightmare. I smeared the dust with my fingers and smelled it.
"If you lick that, we're no longer friends," Tub said. — Guillermo Del Toro

II know very, very little about the ukulele, but I actually grew up playing the viola from 4th grade through high school. — Kris Allen

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

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need. — Andrew Young

By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory. — Clyde Tombaugh

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock. — Beverly Cleary

She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn't begun to sour. — Ross Macdonald

I grew up on the back of a motorcycle - my dad didn't have a car until I was a teenager. And then my closest friend from grade school was a guy. — Aisha Tyler

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

In third grade, I was taking tap-dance lessons, and about six weeks before the recital I wanted to quit. My mom said, 'No, you're going to stay with it.' Well, I did it, and I was bad, too! But my parents never let their kids walk away from something because it was too hard. — Rebecca Lobo

Really, he called me that? Ellen DeGenerate? I've been getting that since fourth grade. I guess I'm happy I could give him work. — Ellen DeGeneres

It was an intensely lonely moment, like all of eighth grade condensed into one claustrophobic second. — Lisa Rowe Fraustino

What I have against religion is that they start you when you are so defenseless. I mean, I was three when they started pumping this bullshit into my head. I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade! — Bill Maher

In terms of age, I think I've covered about as wide a range as is possible, having written everything from picture books to early chapter books to middle grade novels to YA to one adult novel - and having been editor and lead writer for a magazine for retired people! — Bruce Coville

When you say fair, Samantha," said Mr Green through a peculiar smile, "do you mean one of those travelling fleets of vehicles that arrive and set up things like spinning Waltzers and Big Wheels and all manner of machines that whizz people around in circles and up and down and from side to side? Machines that could..." Mr Green turned away and his unnatural smile became even more unsettling... "easily go wrong! — Mark Gorton

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the storm tracks
of the milky way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow. — Stanley Kunitz

I loved school. But when I started 'Party of Five' in the fifth grade, I was taken out of school and tutored on the set. — Lacey Chabert

The constant desire to win is a very American kind of trouble. Less glamorous gains made along the way--learning, wisdom, growth, and confidence, dealing with failure--aren't given the same respect because they can't be given a grade. — William Zinsser

I'm stuck in 7th grade & I just keep getting let back — Mariah Carey

Jeremy said you've been friends since third grade. I wouldn't know. We didn't have a class together until eighth, when you did have a crush on me."

"No, I didn't!" she lied.

"Yeah, you did. Your face turned bright red every time I looked at you--kind of like it is right now. — Elle Todd

Your mother would have more luck winning her election than teaching you how to be charming. Izzy Malone, going to charm school! Are you going to walk across the room with a book stuck on your head?"

"No, it's not like that at all," I said as he doubled over with laughter. "And I really don't see what's so funny."

"It's just that"--he gasped--"it would be like teaching a hippo to wear high heels! — Jenny Lundquist

All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book. — Rick Riordan

When I first saw Destiny's Child, I was in the fifth grade, and it made me want to sing and make music, and there would be these freestyles on the radio for what seemed like hours; it was just so cool to me. — Lizzo

I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey. — Fran Lebowitz

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet. — J. Courtney Sullivan

I never read in school. I got really bad grades-D's and F's and C's in some classes, and A's and B's in other classes. In the second week of the 11th grade, I just quit. When I was in school, it was really difficult. Almost everything I learned, I had to learn by listening. My report cards always said that I was not living up to my potential. — Cher

When I was in grade school I was into chess club, Latin club, D&D, computer camp - everything that made vaginas go away. — Chris Hardwick

Most of the things that I remember from childhood wouldn't make a particularly good story: rescuing worms during rainstorms, our schnauzer attacking a wheel of cheese when someone dropped it during dinner, my parents tricking us into riding Space Mountain at Disney World (we thought it was an educational people-mover kind of ride), playing Star Wars (I got to marry Harrison Ford and my sister married Luke Skywalker) in first and second grade. On the other hand, we always had lots of interesting babysitters
seminary students and friends of my parents
who told really good ghost stories. — Kelly Link

Too often we act - ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we're giving them children who have, you know, they're not ready to learn. And if they're not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they're behind. — Colin Powell

Recreation in the open is of the finest grade. The moral benefits are all positive. The individual with any soul cannot live long in the presence of towering mountains or sweeping plains without getting a little of the high moral standard of Nature infused into his being ... with eyes opened, the great story of the Earth's forming, the history of a tree, the life of a flower or the activities of some small animal will all unfold themselves to the recreationist ... — Arthur Carhart

Just like every other kid in my grade school, I was listening to my little radio plug in my ear when Mickey Mantle hit 18 post-season homers and won series after series for the Yankees. I listened and I learned from that. I think he was the original 'Mr. October,' but thank god it didn't stick. — Reggie Jackson

I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known. — Lewis Thomas

My name's Todd but I changed it in the first grade because there was another kid named Todd and I didn't understand that that was possible. — T. J. Miller

And I was the only black kid in my school for almost all of my childhood, until I was a teenager. So imagine, if you will, being 6 feet tall by third grade, so essentially being a living maypole. — Aisha Tyler

There were other stories and other names. Second Base Stace, who had breasts in fourth grade and let some of the boys feel them. Vincent, who took acid and tried to flush a sofa down the toilet. Sheila, who allegedly masturbated with a hot dog and had to go to the emergency room. The list went on and on. — Stephen Chbosky

When I was in school, in eighth grade, someone recognized something in me. She was an English teacher, and we read a play out loud in class, and she asked me to read one of the roles. I'd never done anything like that before, but something just lit up. — David Morse

Heart hurting, I stand rigid in his embrace and stare down Whitney. "Considering you've called me Anna Banana-pants since the third grade," I add coolly, "you're either extremely dense or a liar. — Kristen Callihan

One of the biggest challenges of writing for middle-grade or even young-adult readers is that I don't want to have too much violence in it - which really limits what you can do. It's important that they're not just bloodbaths or glorifying violence. I always try to show that a person who dies leaves a hole. There's grief in my books. — Alane Ferguson

When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today. — Joe Dante

Unlike an envied and admirable few, I separate my friends and almost never dare mingle one group with another. When I do, it is usually a social disaster, like mixing drinks. I love good beer and I love good wine, but you cannot drink both on the same evening without suffering. I love the friends with whom I play or once daily played snooker and tooted quantities of high-grade pulverized Andean flake; I love the friends with whom I dine at preposterously expensive restaurants; I love the friends with whom I'm film-making or mincing on the stage. I love and value them all equally and don't think of them as stratified or in tiers, one group in some way higher or more important than the rest, but the thought of introducing them to each other makes me shiver and shudder with cringing embarrassment. — Stephen Fry

How do you ensure someone feels the same way about you without telling them how you feel? This isn't grade school. I can't pass on — Karina Halle

What has prepared Heather for her life in the Burrow?
Sleep, being hit over the head once in sixth grade and losing consciousness for a minute, waking up to find out someone had pushed her off the swings.
A life made of air — Jim Krusoe

You know in sixth grade, when they made all of us girls go into this other room and watch a video about getting our periods and stuff? I bet while we were gone, the boys were watching a video about how to look at each other in that infuriating way. — Meg Cabot

I have been an Avengers fan since the middle 1960s. I grew up with them, and I've imagined a hundred different versions of an Avengers movie. I think I even have a script I wrote back in eighth grade, 'Avengers vs. the Mole Man.' Truly dreadful, but a work of love. — Jonathan Maberry

We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything - cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level. — Richard Carmona

Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum. — Aaron Swartz

Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises. — Beverly Cleary

I took a Logo programming class in fifth grade. Logo is a language specifically designed for the classroom environment. It was basically doodling through words. — Gene Luen Yang

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back. — Jacqueline Woodson

I got kicked out in grade school because I staged a riot because I wanted more library time. — Bitsie Tulloch

I walked to Seward School first through fourth grade. It's just amazing to me now that we'd walk down 10th Avenue on Capitol Hill. — Stone Gossard

It's just that it's a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine." "What? Why's that?" "Well, he's one of those people who can only think when he's talking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder. — Douglas Adams

There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed. — Marilynne Robinson

Experience, they say, is the best teacher, but we get the grade first and the lesson later. — Ann Landers

Because my parents were American missionaries who sent me to public schools in rural Japan, I had to confront Hiroshima as a child. I was in the fourth grade - the only American in my class - when our teacher wrote the words "America" and "Atomic Bomb" in white chalk on the blackboard. All forty Japanese children turned around to stare at me. My country had done something unforgivable and I had to take responsibility for it, all by myself. I desperately wanted to dig a hole under my desk, to escape my classmates' mute disbelief and never have to face them again. — Linda Hoaglund

The thing she loved most about being Jewish was that you could step into a synagogue anywhere on earth and feel like you'd come home. India, Brazil, New Zealand, even Mars - if you could rely on Shalom, Spacemen!, the homemade comic book that had been the highlight of Simon's third-grade Hebrew school experience. — Cassandra Clare

In first grade, I told my friends I had a third story in my house filled with jewels and lions. — Kendall Jenner

In sixth and seventh grade, my two best friends and I pretended to be horses. Every day after school, we would gallop around, whinnying and stamping our hooves and tossing our manes - for hours. — Tyne Daly

My parents moved back to New York from Florida when I was in the ninth grade. — Sanford I. Weill

Dad has shamelessly played the Mom card. Against which there is no defense. — Denis Markell

examination is over," Harry corked his sample flask feeling that he might not have achieved a good grade but that he had, with luck, avoided a fail. "Only four exams left," said Parvati Patil wearily as they headed back to Gryffindor common room. "Only!" said Hermione snappishly. "I've got Arithmancy and — J.K. Rowling

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, — Ted Chiang

One day, Buckley came home from the second grade with a story he'd written: Once upon a time there was a kid named Billy. He liked to explore. He saw a hole and went inside but he never came out. The End. — Alice Sebold

One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong. — Mindy Kaling

showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upward: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on. — Thomas Piketty

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

Why does it scare me to think I might be ordinary? I remember when I started first grade and I could hardly pay attention for fear I wouldn't learn to read and write. I didn't want to be like everyone else. I didn't want to have to learn. I wanted to know everything already — Margaret Sartor

At some point you cannot be the kid in the glass bubble in this world. You might've heard throughout your grade school and high school years that it was a safe, nice, warm, fair, feeling place ... but it can get brutal when it gets competitive. Especially when you succeed. Watch the detractors come out of the walls at that point. — Dennis Miller

It is nearly two o'clock in the morning, and Tom Bolan is ass-over-head, military-grade, wearing-more-booze-than-he's-ingesting drunk. — Robert Jackson Bennett

I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York. — Johnny Depp

In third grade I thought I loved her - by sixth grade, I was sure of it — Emma Chase

There you go. Perfect. And can you still throw up at will like you could in sixth grade? That would be good. — Adam Rex

Two hundred dollars! OMG! Shopping spree! — Angela Cervantes

The class stared at the new girl with admiration. They had never met anyone like Gooney Bird Greene. She was a good student. She sat down at the desk Mrs. Pidgeon provided, right smack in the middle of everything, and began doing second grade spelling. — Lois Lowry

I remember the day when my seventh-grade teacher called my parents to tell them I'd been crying in the bathrooms at lunchtime after Sukey died - how disappointed Dad was that I was using Sukey's death as an excuse to get attention from my teachers; how delicately Mom suggested that Sukey would have wanted me to be happy; my humiliation at letting them down. — Hilary T. Smith

I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks. — Alan Alda

I wrote my first play as extra credit for my fourth grade English class. 'Can Helen Stop Smoking' was a satire on the ill effects of cigarette smoking. My friend Vicki Haugabrook played as Helen and I directed the show. At the time, my brother Vince was leading the campaign to get our grandmother to quit. — T'Keyah Crystal Keymah

I have this firm belief that I am who I am for a reason. If I change something, I'm cheating myself of whatever it is I'm supposed to learn from my body. You know, I'm legally blind. I'm 20/750, since I was in fifth grade. I wear glasses and contacts. But I won't even get LASIK. — Carrie Ann Inaba

Alice wondered if her mother was aware that she wasn't the only one in town who'd come down with a bad case of Blueberry Fever. — Sarah Weeks

We tend to manage our lives intellectually - in other words, we get stuck in our heads, keeping ourselves preoccupied with juggling an assortment of activities and responsibilities in order to manage the surface of life. Meanwhile, underneath we feel empty, hungry for meaning, restless, somewhat lost, and frequently ungrounded - as if we aren't really inhabiting our own bodies. This is why we keep ourselves so busy. It's one way to distract ourselves, at least temporarily, from experiencing the low-grade inner anxiety that haunts us. Change — Sonia Choquette

What's cool about the beatboxing is I was so afraid to sing in front of my peers, my parents, anybody. I just wouldn't do it. So in sixth grade, I would turn to beatboxing because it made me feel better. Like, I can beatbox 'Drop It Like It's Hot.' Doing that a bunch of times eventually gave me the confidence to sing in front of people. — Charlie Puth

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence. — F Scott Fitzgerald

wouldn't have agreed if we'd known your mom was there." "Pain in the ass, let me tell ya." "You don't need to tell me," I say. "I know all about what a pain she can be." Dee laughs. "She's like a weapons-grade pain in the ass. We figured out to sic her on the bad guys, and she became a huge asset. — Susan Ee