School Heads Quotes & Sayings

Kid's heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The U.S. school system as a whole qualifies. — Frank Zappa

Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins. — Camille Paglia

In high school Peggy Paula worked as a waiteress at the Perkins. Night shifts were her favorite, kids from her school would come in after games or dances with bleary eyes and messy hair and Peggy Paula knew they'd been drinking and smoking those flimsy joints she'd see them passing, the girls with smudged makeup and rat's nests in the back of their heads, proud unblinking eyes, scanning the dining room like I dare you, I dare you to guess what I just let Jared or Steve or Casey do to me, I let him and I liked it and I don't care. — Lindsay Hunter

If it was scandalous for girls in the 1960s to wear pants to school, what else will we look back on & shake our heads at? What else can't we see in the future? And at that, what else can we dream up? — Lisa Factora-Borchers

The thing Tedros liked about girls is that they always started the conversation. Most of the time, his job was just to listen, ask questions, and try to understand what in God's name was going on in their complicated little heads. He rarely had any idea what girls were talking about or why they made everything so torturous in their logic, so playing the role of the strong, silent type usually gave him time to catch up. — Soman Chainani

Lissa lowered her voice and added, "I might not even go to school anyway. I might defer and join the Peace Corps and go to Africa and shave my head and dig latrines."
"Shave your head?" I said, because, really, this was the most ludicrous part of the whole thing. "You? Do you have any idea how ugly most people's bare heads are? They've got all kinds of bumps, Lissa. And you won't know until it's too late and you're flat-out bald. — Sarah Dessen

I've been recognized a couple times. I get people staring at me, and I think in their heads they're thinking, 'How do I know her? Did I go to high school with her?' I think it's not registering yet. — Eliza Coupe

Instead of school busing and prayer in schools, which are both controversial, why not a joint solution? Prayer in buses. Just drive these kids around all day and let them pray their fuckn' empty little heads off. — George Carlin

When Lillian left work in the early evening the streets were slick and shiny with rain and the lamps flared yellow giving her the melancholy feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She'd just struggled to push up her umbrella when the farmer from Saskatchewan came out of the shadows and tipped his hat again, very politely, and said could he escort her home? She put her small hand on his broad arm and held the umbrella over both their heads (he was very tall) and he walked her all the way back to her lodging-house where the landlady, Mrs Raicevic, looked after Edmund after school. By then, Lillian had learned the farmer's name and she said, 'Edmund, this is Mr Donner,' and Pete Donner squatted right down and said, 'Hello there, Edmund, you can call me Pete.' Although he never did, preferring to call him 'Pop' almost from the day his mother married him. — Kate Atkinson

The whole military structure in Haiti that existed until the early 1990s was put in place by the American occupation. At the top there were Southern white officers, who led an army that crushed the indigenous resistance - the cacos. A high-ranking U.S. officer said when he arrived, "To think these niggers speak French!" Later, Haitian officers attended the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. The threat from the U.S. is something that is always hanging over people's heads: If we don't behave, we'll have occupation again. — Edwidge Danticat

I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh. — Charles M. Schulz

I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I've ever seen in the history of literature. I have gotten people into tongue-tied snits unable to name for me one scene in which Yoda is ever helpful to anybody, or says anything that's genuinely wise. 'Do or do not, there is no try.' Up yours, you horrible little oven mitt! 'Try' is how human beings get better. That's how people learn, they try some of their muscles, or their Force mechanism heads in the right direction, that part gets reinforced and rewarded with positive feedback, which you never give. And parts of it get repressed by saying, 'No, that you will not do!' It is abhorrent, junior high school Zen. It's cartoon crap. — David Brin

The races are like America's children. White people are the firstborn, so they were Dad's favorite. Black people are the second kids, the abused ones, so they still hate Dad. Latinos are the third, caught in the middle and always trying to make peace between the other siblings. Asians are the youngest, and get good marks in school, but basically are just trying to keep their heads down and not get involved. And Native Americans are the old uncle who owns a house and everyone else in the family was like, "He's not using that! Let's move in! — Colin Quinn

I was sick of immigrants not getting the credit they deserved. I was sick of the Jean-Georges of the world making a killing on our ingredients and flavors because we were too stupid to package it the right way. I was sick of seeing other Asian kids like myself walking to school with their heads down. I was sick of seeing them picking snow peas in the dining room after school and I was sick of not having a voice in America...My main objective with Baohus was to become a voice for Asian Americans. (264) — Eddie Huang

Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible. — Thomas Pynchon

Life is the most effective school ever created. Once upon a time they made children bow their heads and read books. It would take ages to get anything across." He taps his head. "But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Colors to do our research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science - how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things fall apart and why. You could learn this nowhere else but here. — Pierce Brown

The drone in my ear, it's like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever — Megan Abbott

To those who lived on the other side of the railroad and never realized the utter stupidity of the word "sin," the Bottoms was vile and wicked. But to the girls who lived there, and the boys who pimped and fought and sold licker there, "sin" was a silly word that did not enter their heads. They had never looked at life through the spectacles of the Sunday-School. The glasses good people wore wouldn't have fitted their eyes, for they hung no curtain of words between themselves and reality. To them, things were - what they were. — Langston Hughes

The questions they ask usually in the polls is: do you support the President's attempt to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein? ... If you ask a question like: do you support the dropping of powerful explosives upon the heads of totally innocent men, women and children, demolishing their homes and their schools and their hospitals, are you in favour of that? That would change the answers, I think, quite a bit. — William Blum

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions. — Jacques Barzun

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb. — Marge Piercy

I talk different, I walk different, everything. I don't have one single bad memory [there]. Not one. It was my sanctuary. I hated school, wasn't good in school, and me and my dad butted heads about that. But nothing mattered when I went home to Alabama. — Channing Tatum

All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North, except for its NKVD informers, was arrested. They even went after schoolteachers. In Sverdlovsk one case involved thirty secondary schoolteachers and the head of the Provincial Education Department, Perel. 37 One of the terrible accusations against them was that they had made arrangements to have a New Year's tree in order to burn down the school. And the club fell with the regularity of a pendulum on the heads of the engineers - who by this time were no longer "bourgeois" but a whole Soviet generation of engineers. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths. — George Bernard Shaw

All the librarians turned their heads to me in a collective shush. "I'm afraid you have to survive library school, put up with the general public on a daily basis, and endure several years of budget cuts in order to deserve these drinks," Chris told me kindly. "But someday, Dash, all this will be yours! We know how to spot 'em, and you're a young, temporarily one-eyed librarian in the rough! — Rachel Cohn

Lexie was the leader of the bobble heads. They were a group of girls best described as perfect, plastic, fake and hollow headed, hence the name bobble heads. — Ashley Jeffery

Yet that is considered an excellent school, and I dare say it would be if the benighted lady did not think it necessary to cram her pupils like Thanksgiving turkeys, instead of feeding them in a natural and wholesome way. It is the fault with most American schools, and the poor little heads will go on aching till we learn better. — Louisa May Alcott

In elementary and middle school, I threw kids against the wall. I rubbed their heads in the dirt at recess. I bit them. I even knocked teeth out. — Russell Wilson

Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, last but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one's feet. — Paul Russell

This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I'd be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can't wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return. — James Rebanks

ached, until his head throbbed, all of that preparation comes down to today. It's finally here! He quickly brushes his teeth and puts on his Halloween costume. He picks up the trombone case and his school backpack and heads downstairs quietly, not wanting to wake his mother. He rips open the cellophane and drops two Pop-Tarts into the toaster and pours himself a glass of milk. He drinks the milk but doesn't touch the pastries. — James Patterson

It is s shame that more people do not appreciate the value of "a good read". I was fortunate enough to have had elementary school teachers who would read to us while we were to put our heads down on the desk and visualize the story and characters. It set me up for a lifetime of enjoying reading.... — Linda Roberts

In the forest of primeval
A school for Good and Evil
Twin towers like two heads
One for the pure
And one for the wicked
Try to escape you'll always fail,
The only way out is
Through a fairytale. — Soman Chainani

What parents said they valued most were discussions with teachers and heads, and what they wanted was more descriptive information in their children's school reports. This is particularly true for primary schools. Parents wanted to know much more than just how their children were doing academically. — Carol J. Adams

In schools the main problem is not the absence of innovations but the presence of too many disconnected ... piecemeal, superficially adorned projects ... We are over our heads. — Michael Fullan

Almost everyone who's been to primary school in Britain has had towels put on their heads to play the shepherds in the nativity play. — Jim Crace

I had learned that some people feel that books are "intrusive," in the sense that books put things in their heads that they don't want there. Some people call these things "ideas." Maybe they're right. Sometimes these ideas sprout into what are known as "thoughts," and you know my feelings about school, government, and big businesses
thoughts are the last things they want rattling around inside people's heads because thoughts inevitably lead to consumer protection, free speech and hippies. — Gary Reilly

Then, as we ascend into the fifth and final act of the show, we can choose what we want to take back with us: a piece of our underworld self that, frankly, the cheating boyfriend may need to meet, or the boss that doesn't appreciate you, or the terrorizing Bitch at school - or maybe you're the terrorizing Bitch, maybe I am. Some fragments that took their masks off while we were on this underworld journey sometimes walk quietly with me. Only I know that after the show they will be staying with me as my figurative New Renter in my seafront condo, down the street from Pituitary Lane, behind Heart Terrace. Then again, some unmasked Beings that I see during a performance find me once I'm back in my dressing room and receive from me the Okay you, thank you for the perspective and the vision, but in this century you can't just chop people's heads off and feed them to your cats, and I know these guys are bad guys, and thank you for the vision. So you can haunt me during the show again in Indy — Tori Amos

Dear Blubbo, How is it going? It is fine here. My sisters are fine. Mom is usual. Everything is regular in life except I am still seeing the burning skull heads. Yesterday Mom took me to Sears for school clothes. I told my sisters I could see the people's head bones. They said DO NOT tell Mom. A guy moved a trailer onto the empty lot by our house. His skull is spectacular, many colors glowing. — Lynda Barry

It is so irresponsible for people in the 'I want to change the course of my society' community to not do the damn research into figuring out the latest science of how people change their minds, and under what conditions people change their minds, and what exactly in their minds is being changed.

The belief systems people hold are absolutely, in no way, shape, or form the result of any objective evaluation of information. The prejudices are inherited, they're socially inflicted, they're propagandized in school, in church, in communities, in families. They are reinforced by endless bouts of patriotic media and all of this nonsense. People are an emotional Gordian knot kaleidoscopic clusterfrack of prior prejudices stuffed into their heads and held aloft by the spears of social approval and ostracism. — Stefan Molyneux

Listen, I traipse no I run no I sprint--a fat, impotent ghoul sprung straight from the cellar of my childhood home--past the pregnant girl with five skeletal children and the nun and the synagogue with its windows stoned through and I'm headed directly for my daughter, Sylvia, at her school where she's stationed with classmates of wannabe punks and black boys with their heads shaved and every one of them, apes, gushing out their hormones as I sprint to the edge of the Earth where Sylvia studies the canon of our national literature that I'm desperately trying to forget. — Leland Pitts-Gonzalez

I never understood why the metal heads in my school hated the punks. — Trevor Dunn

That file full of letters meant I met with a Special Needs teacher in the hallway to get something called Individualized Attention, and let me tell you, working in the hallway with a teacher is like being the street person of a school. People pass you by, and they act like they don't see you, but three steps away they've got a whole story in their heads about why you're out there instead of in the nice cozy classroom where you belong, Stupid? Unlucky? Unloved? — Esme Raji Codell

Any school would gain, if the students began the day with meditation, cleared their heads and got themselves centered. — Pico Iyer

When I was in high school, I would drive into Seattle to see bands and sip coffee late into the night, and I always ended up taking the long way home. I'd be a little anxious about stalling my Datsun on one of the hills around the city, so when I saw Denny Way, I always turned onto it, even though it led away from my home to Seattle's Capitol Hill district. From there I navigated winding hills and eventually ended up at home. A quick look at a map would have revealed the freeway that heads straight to my house, but since my circuitous route was familiar, I stuck to it. I should have known better, but I was just a kid. What excuse does the richest nation on earth have for driving around in the dark like an adolescent? Just because our familiar arguments over how best to help families and the economy lead us along well-trod paths doesn't make them the best ones we could be taking. — Heather Boushey

We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.
Then it melts.
The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don't know what just happened. They can't remember. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The soul is a mystery. Scientists and Theologians constantly butt heads on the soul's definitive and can't come to grips with its purpose and actual existence. Yet, the basic framework taught in a High School physics class helps with an explanation of the latter - the existence of the soul. — H.D. Rennerfeldt

How many men had made her? Her brothers, by dying? Yah Tayyib, by rebuilding her? All those dead boys whose heads she brought back to the clerks? Raine, by teaching her how to drive and how to die? Tej and Rhys and Khos and all Raine's half-breed muscle? They were just men. They were just people. They had made her as surely as Queen Ayyad and Queen Zaynab, Bashir, Jaks, Radeyah, and her sisters had. Her hoards of sistesr, Kine and the bel dames and the women who kicked her out of school for getting her letters fucked. No, she could have gone either way; followed all or none of them. It wasn't what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you.
"You didn't make me," Nyx gasped. "I made myself. — Kameron Hurley

As a consequence while we had a roof over our heads, food on the table, and clothes to wear to school we were constantly conscious of being of modest means. — Robert B. Laughlin

No, I had no problem communicating with Latin American heads of state - though now I do wish I had paid more attention to Latin when I was in high school. — Dan Quayle

The classic scenario unfolds like this. An ambitious and successful woman heads down a challenging career path with the thought of having children in the back of her mind. At some point, this thought moves to the front of her mind, typically once she finds a partner. The woman considers how hard she is working and reasons that to make room for a child she will have to scale back. A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she hopes to have a family. A teacher might pass on leading curriculum development for her school. A sales representative might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role. — Sheryl Sandberg

I was telling somebody about in grammar school we used to have the duck-and-cover drills where we'd have to go down to a fallout shelter in the basement. We'd sit on our butts on the ground next to the wall with a textbook over our heads and our knees sort of drawn up to our chest. I don't think they still do that. They're sort of sobering. You leave recess and come in for the apocalypse drill. — Adam Reed

When every high school graduate can spell the word, 'inauguration,' let's put lampshades on our heads and listen to his speeches until Obama's voice gives out. — Paula Poundstone

I grew up a Baptist and went to seminary at Methodist school, Duke University, but I also don't worry too much about denominations. I love what John Wesley said - "If our hearts are together, let's not worry about whether our heads are together. If our hearts are together, then let's joins hands." So, I try to do that regardless of denominations. — Randall Wallace

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

The next sentence was about true insight coming from within. But didn't all knowledge come into people's heads from the outside? On the other hand, Sophie could remember situations when her mother or the teachers at school had tried to teach her something that she hadn't been receptive to. And whenever she had really learned something, it was when she had somehow contributed to it herself. Now and then, even, she would suddenly a thing she'd drawn a total blank on before. That was probably what people meant by 'insight'. — Jostein Gaarder

A mind virus is different in that there is no form to it; these are ideas placed in our heads when we are little. We get programmed by well-meaning people like our parents and their parents, our culture, religions and schools. We get conditioned to believe in our limitations and what's not possible. — Wayne Dyer