School Yard Quotes & Sayings

The Maycomb school grounds adjoined the back of the Radley lot; from the Radley chickenyard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked. The — Harper Lee

If I want to put a Christmas tree in my yard, or three crosses for the crucifixion story, that's fine. But if I try to use public property or a public school as a way to impress my religion on other people, I think that violates the constitution. — John Shelby Spong

What did it sound like ... having someone call your name across a crowded school yard? How did it feel to turn to the sound of your name, to see some smiling face or waving hand and know it was for you and you alone?
- Staggerlee — Jacqueline Woodson

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
... The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. — Henry David Thoreau

Well I'm on my way
I don't know where I'm going
I'm on my way I'm taking my time
But I don't know where — Paul Simon

Nobody is in the school yard when I get there, except for a few guys hanging near the fence. I recognize a couple of them from the forbidden Latin lunch table. I walk fast, trying not to be noticed, but, of course, they have to go out of their way to call me out. "Move that junk, mami!" one of them calls, making squeezing motions with his hands. I don't turn around to give him the finger, though I probably should. Instead, I hurry up the steps two at a time. — Meg Medina

I was the kid who always liked to take the ball down to the school even in my free time, kick it against the wall, juggle it in the front yard and so it was kind of a perpetual state of playing soccer for me. — Brandi Chastain

Wearing a bath towel around the school yard and pretending it's a cape doesn't mean you have magical powers. — Lincoln Peirce

There have been times during my life when I have wish to be a boy again, not to have the energy and perfect health of youth, but know once more the innocence and the delight in even the smallest of things that we often fail to feel full strength as the years drift by. What is easy to forget, however, until you apply yourself to the task of memory, is that childhood is a time of fear, as well; some of those fears are reasonable, others irrational and inspired by a sense of powerlessness in a world where often power over others seems to be what drives so many of our fellow human beings. In the swoon of childhood, the possibility of werewolves is as real as the school yard shooter, the idea of vampires as credible as the idea of a terrorist attack, the neighbor possessing paranormal talents as believable as a psychopath. — Dean Koontz

Sometimes he wished he didn't have a sister, though he loved Deenie and still remembered the feeling he had when he caught that kid Ethan pushing her off the swing set in the school yard in fifth grade. And how time seemed to speed up until he was shoving the kid into the fence and tearing his jacket. The admiring look his sister gave him after, the way his parents pretended to be mad at him but he could tell they weren't.
These days, it was pretty different. There'd be those moments he was forced to think about her not just as Deenie but as the girl whose slender tank tops hung over the shower curtain. Like bright streamers, like the flair the cheerleaders threw at games.
Sometimes he wished he didn't have a sister. — Megan Abbott

Sleep, honey. We can play later." And if she hadn't seen it with her own tired eyes, she never would've believed it. Like the snuffing of a candle, he was asleep in seconds. Burning red hot one moment, a ghost of dissipating smoke the next.

Hope inventoried his unguarded face, softer and so much younger in sleep, his enviably long lashes hiding the ever present jadedness. Fatigue pulled at her and she fought it, forcing her eyes open when they drifted shut.

"I'm not gonna fall in love with you, Beck. I'm gonna leave you in August."

She whispered the vow to a man in deep sleep. To a room cast in shadow. To a house steeped in tradition. To a woman mired in denial.

Sleep took her quickly, quicker than she wanted, and with it came the mocking sound of her surely spoken promise, echoing in her dreams like a school yard taunt. — Jodi Watters

Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That's the kind of people we would be if our situation were different. — Heather O'Neill

When I was still at school, I'd help Dad at the concrete yard he had prior to the garden centre. I was doing things there, like driving the tractors and forklifts, that most kids my age couldn't. — Rick Astley

I'd won our school science fair in the fourth grade, my "Phases of an Egg" presentation eclipsing the dozen or so baking-soda-and-vinegar volcanoes presented by the rest of our class. I'd taken gold in our town's Junior Olympics when I was ten, and got to stand up on the top of a three-tiered pedestal after placing first in the Fifty Yard Dash. One time when I was fourteen, I'd received a Presidential Physical Fitness certificate from Ronald Reagan, when I logged a record-breaking eighty-two situps in the span of a minute. But nothing compared to the sense of accomplishment I felt - no award, no ribbon, no trophy - no achievement lived up to the unfathomable triumph of having won the heart of Terrence C. Wilmington III. — T. Torrest

Mother seemed happy because the school yard where Rafik would spend his recesses was surrounded by a high stone wall. She'd recently started talking about 'safety' in a way that made Liyana jumpy. Liyana never thought about safety unless someone else brought it up. She didn't WANT to think about it either. SHE WANTED TO LIVE IN AN UNLOCKED WORLD — Naomi Shibab Nye

Growing up knowing that I wanted to be a sportscaster and knowing that the best school in the country was right in my back yard, I certainly knew all there was to know about Marty Glickman and about people like Bob Costas and Marv Albert and all of the other greats that have passed through there. — Beth Mowins

The punches came fast and hard, lying on my back in the school yard. — Neil Young

I am able to say that I was very much liked at the school. I even had quite some ascendancy over my comrades, and as soon as I appeared in the school yard, I was surrounded by young friends, most of them bigger than I, but who were quite willing to give the appearance of disciples; they would have defended me furiously if necessary. — Marquis De Lafayette

Of course, in our grade school, in those days, there were no organized sports at all. We just went out and ran around the school yard for recess. — Alan Shepard

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything. — Valerie June

the yard. When Ben knocked on Griffin's door the next morning on his way to school, he was surprised when the door was answered by Mrs. — Gordon Korman

I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target. — Sherman Alexie

I never really take shortcuts. I was always one of those people who, instead of cutting across someone's yard on the way home from school, I would go to the end of the block and turn. — Amy Sedaris

It is not easy to hurl snowballs while holding on to a plastic bag of groceries, so my first few efforts were subpar, missing their mark. The nine maybe ten nine-maybe-ten-year-olds ridiculed me - if I turned to aim at one, four others outflanked me and shot from the sides and the back. I was, in the parlance of an ancient day, cruising for a bruising, and while a more disdainful teenager would have walked away, and a more aggressive teenager wouls have dropped the bag and kicked some major preteen ass, I kept fighting snowball with snowball, laughing as if Boomer and I were playing a school yard game, flinging my orbs with abandon. — Rachel Cohn

I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey. — Steven Chu

I didn't tell her about the free-for-alls on the school yard, muggings on the bus. A girl burned a cigarette hole in the back of another girl's shirt at nutrition right in front of me looking at me as if daring me to stop her. I saw a boy being threatened with a knife on the hallway outside my spanish class. Girls talked about their abortions in gym class. Claire didn't need to know about that. I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day no matter what. — Janet Fitch

You guys like to tell jokes and giggle and kid around, huh? Giggling like a bunch of young broads in a school yard. Well, let me tell you a joke: Five guys sitting in a bull pen, San Quentin. Wondering how the fuck they got there. What'd we do wrong? What should we've done? What didn't we do? It's your fault, my fault, his fault. All that bullshit. Finally, someone comes up with the idea, wait a minute, while we were planning this caper, all we did was sit around and tell fucking jokes. Got the message? — Quentin Tarantino

When you've come face-to-face with the dark side of the school yard, life doesn't hold many surprises. — Eoin Colfer

I always had two or three jobs at the same time. I started doing yard work when I was 7 or 8. When I was 13, I got my first state job doing road construction. Between working, sports and school, I hardly ever had free time. — Breaux Greer

My dad taught me to switch-hit. He and my grandfather, who was left-handed, pitched to me every day after school in the back yard. I batted lefty against my dad and righty against my granddad. — Mickey Mantle

She says to me, but were we ever intimate? How intimate were we really? Sure, there were the ordinary familiarity-type things - our bodies, our bodily discharges and stains and seepages, an encyclopedic knowledge of each other's family grudges, knowledge of each other's early school yard slights, our dietary peccadilloes, our tv remote control channel-changing styles. And yet ...
And yet?
And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know. — Douglas Coupland

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

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