English Teacher Quotes

#1. My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III

#2. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.

Stephen King

#3. If I said in one of my songs that my English teacher wanted to have sex with me in junior high, all I'm saying, is that I'm not gay, you know? People confuse the lyrics for me speaking my mind. I don't agree with that lifestyle, but if that lifestyle is for you, then it's your business.

Eminem

#4. In high school, I once sang 'Let's Get It On' and 'Brown Sugar' with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher.

Chris Pine

#5. My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

Libba Bray

#6. God gets it. When you reach out to him, he's not looking for fancy words that would impress your English teacher. He sees your heart. A groan, a look, a sigh - he speaks every language. He understands.

Max Lucado

#7. Where's our teacher?"
"Probably getting it on with the English teacher."
- Alex Gold and Mike Wilson

R.J. Morse, R.J. Brookes

#8. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

Pat Conroy

#9. I was an educated girl. I'd done very well in school. I had a good point average and graduated from USC as an English teacher. My dad didn't even finish high school.

Marlo Thomas

#10. The blonde checks out the legs of the car like Pigpen checks out the legs of my English teacher--like a dog in heat.

Katie McGarry

#11. I didn't understand how funny this play Much Ado About Nothing truly was until I became an English teacher and had to teach it. There is no wittier dialogue anywhere.

Dan Brown

#12. My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.

Kevin Gates

#13. I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.

Langston Hughes

#14. We have a host of English teachers in the family. My mum is an English teacher, and so are my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I have grown up with family writing competitions, and I can't remember a birthday or Christmas present that didn't include books.

Alexandra Adornetto

#15. I must have got my detailed, obsessive streak from my father, who was an English teacher, because my mother wasn't like me at all.

Barbra Streisand

#16. History shows that erections happen at the worst possible times, and they stick around until someone else notices them. Often, it is either a librarian or an English teacher, like Mrs. Edith Mitchell.

Andrew Smith

#17. I wouldn't be an actor if it weren't for the English teacher I had my junior year in high school. She's the one who told me I could be an actor. I had never met an actor, I had never seen a real play, only high school plays. I didn't know actors were real, that it was a real job.

Julianne Moore

#18. I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

Andrew Clements

#19. 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

#20. When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

Victor Salva

#21. Joe was so tired that he had slept through first hour Spanish, second hour history, and most of third hour English. The English teacher, Mrs. Lane, hadn't taken a liking to that. She decided to send Joe to the principal to discuss why he was so sleepy, which Joe hadn't taken a liking to.

Belart Wright

#22. My English teacher, he's like, he's like Mr. Bu-fu.

Frank Zappa

#23. I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.

Catherine Lowell

#24. I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side.

John Krasinski

#25. About GreenHollyWood who is this character?? My English teacher a fat guy about 30 or 35 years old with Glasses and short Hair.

Deyth Banger

#26. Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

David Guterson

#27. In about 9th grade, an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school, so I did on a whim. I got accepted. Then I got accepted at the Julliard School, and by then, I was serious about it.

Ving Rhames

#28. When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, 'I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.' I wouldn't have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn't a clever man.

David Suchet

#29. I still don't know what I'm going to be. I love acting. I would love to be an English teacher. I would love to be a housewife and have a chateau in the South of France, I would love to be a singer that travels to cafes around different towns.

Bethany Joy Lenz

#30. I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.

Samuel Alito

#31. The first article carrying Vonnegut's byline, 'This Business of Whistle Purchasing,' a lighthearted criticism of a school fund-raiser, was submitted at the urging of his sophomore English teacher.

Charles J. Shields

#32. Basically [I become a Republican], pretty early. I had an English teacher that got me to subscribe to the National Review.

Jeff Sessions

#33. I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.

Robert Barry

#34. Which is great, since my English teacher hates late students like I hate riding my motorcycle in forty-degree weather while it rains.

Katie McGarry

#35. I had my heart set on becoming an English teacher, but stumbled into acting after meeting a theatrical agent in my dad's restaurant in San Diego.

Charisma Carpenter

#36. I had a very good English teacher who said to me that she thought I ought to do it. She - I don't know, she saw something thank goodness because I think if it hadn't been encouraged by somebody that serious, I'm not sure what would've happened to me.

Maggie Smith

#37. In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martial artistry, culture, and love.

Taylor Mali

#38. Separately, they called our English teacher to register their horror at their offspring being taught about witches, which apparently was an insult to both Islam and Christianity. The English teacher instructed us to white-out the word witches and write in weird sisters.

Bill Campbell

#39. My English teacher wanted to have sex with me in Junior High ... the only problem was, my English teacher was a guy ... I smacked him in his face with an eraser, chased him with a stapler and stapled his nuts to a stack of papers.

Eminem

#40. If there was something that all the time had in common, what your English teacher would call a "theme," it would be this: Don't get caught.

Charles Benoit

#41. If I wouldn't of spent so much time shooting spit wads at my English teacher I'd know how to punctuate good thing I normally write poetry.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#42. Even English-teacher bookworms need friends and bars.

Jenny Hubbard

#43. My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can't decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into a monarch butterfly. I call her Hairwoman.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#44. My favorite English teacher in high school showed me 'Brazil' when I was 15, and it blew my mind. It's one of those movies that's revealed itself in different ways as I've gone back to it over the years.

Win Butler

#45. You have to be a whole, dignified, self-respecting person in order to be an English teacher or whatever kind of job your education would prepare you for, and I just knew that segregation was wrong, and I knew that I should not be going along with it. That I should resist it.

Diane Nash

#46. In short: Write the way people think. Nike knew what it was doing when it coined the slogan "Just do it." Grammatically, this phrase makes no sense. Your high-school English teacher would scold the copywriter for not being clear about the antecedent for "it.

Gary Dahl

#47. Maybe his shifting isn't just physical. Maybe it applies to his feelings too, because I don't see how he can walk around eating candy at Luna Park as we take my English teacher practically hostage.

Zoraida Cordova

#48. I never thought I'd be a person who would want to write books ... I promise you not a single English teacher I've ever had would have thought that this would be going on right now.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#49. Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

Melissa Bank

#50. My brother is a policeman; my sister's an English teacher. When I hear what they make versus what I make, it's ridiculous.

Robert Sean Leonard

#51. I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.

Tony Dungy

#52. I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.'

Craig Ferguson

#53. A friend of mine said, no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said, you still look like a Campbell's Soup kid.

Kate Clinton

#54. I read 'the Hobbit' at the age when you're supposed to read it. I didn't read 'The Lord Of The Rings.' My father, who was an English teacher, advised me that once I had read 'the Hobbit,' that would be enough. I could then move on to Dostoyevsky.

Ken Stott

#55. My mother was an English teacher before she became a full-time mom, and a huge proponent of reading, so she made sure I was an early and vigorous reader.

Matt Wagner

#56. Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print - writing in English, interviewing Americans - validated my presence here.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#57. Probably my English teacher because she got me into writing instead of just answering the question. I used to hand in homework with 20 pages of nonsense and she'd still mark it. She was a really amazing teacher.

Robert Pattinson

#58. My father is a retired army captain and banking software salesman, and my mother is an English teacher.

Jim Parrack

#59. What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.

Luanne Rice

#60. I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

Taron Egerton

#61. It's a bad dream: my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face, the one he gets when he's reading aloud in class and wants us to think he's moved by the passage.

Tom Perrotta

#62. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

Aaron Lazar

#63. I'm crazy about Shakespeare, who was a notorious word inventor. And my wife is an English teacher, and she's hilarious.

Rob Delaney

#64. Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.

Pat Boone

#65. joined one institute in Patel Nagar to accomplish this goal; my English Teacher was strict, but she did not have much knowledge.

Yogesh Saini

#66. My English teacher always gave me scripts for plays, but I was into sports. My friend said there were small parts I could go up for, but the director gave me the part of Mozart, which was kind of the lead role. From then on I just loved it.

Santiago Cabrera

#67. But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.

Richard Peck

#68. We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher
we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.

Phillip M. Hoose

#69. I planned on being an English teacher, but I don't know where that went.

John Krasinski

#70. English teacher: Sam, form a sentence using the word aftermath. Sam: 'I always feel sleepy after math class.' ***

Various

#71. My head whips towards the sound of Breanna's sweet voice. At the corner, she waves to our English teacher [Ms Whitlock] then starts to our classroom.

Katie McGarry

#72. Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.

Mickey Rourke

#73. My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.

Ilsa J. Bick

#74. Because this is Upper Canada, after all, and 'caning' sounds more English than 'having ass whipped to death with hickory stick.

Allan Dare Pearce

#75. None of my English teachers in college were praising me or telling me I was anything special. But then in creative writing classes they were. And I enjoyed those more anyway.

John Brandon

#76. My task as a language arts teacher is to provide texts that are not so difficult that my students shut down in frustration and not so easy that my students don't push their thinking.

Kimberly Hill Campbell

#77. The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.

E.L. Doctorow

#78. I did everything in my power not to be an actress. I went off and did a teacher-training course first, so I could teach English and Drama - because I'm not thick, surprisingly enough.

Sarah Douglas

#79. I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Karl Lagerfeld

#80. About Grade 9 and Grade 10, I had a fantastic drama teacher, and it was one of the first subjects I actually felt that I was good at. I wasn't a mathematician. Didn't like science, any of those subjects. English and Drama were the two subjects that I loved and felt that I was good at.

Deborah Mailman

#81. The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.

John Grisham

#82. In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

Trevor Nunn

#83. Of all the excellent teachers of college English whom I have known I have never discovered one who knew precisely what he was doing. Therein have lain their power and their charm.

Mary Ellen Chase

#84. I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

Anthony Bourdain

#85. It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

Thom Gunn

#86. He even let me smoke a cigarette in his office, but he urged me to quit smoking because of the health risks. He even had a pamphlet in his desk that he gave me. I now use it as a bookmark.

Stephen Chbosky

#87. The following is, regrettably, a true story. Some of the names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the innocent. Though few of the people involved were innocent by any definition whatsoever.

English Teacher X

#88. Let the teachers learn the kids English. Ol' Diz will learn the kids baseball.

Dizzy Dean

#89. Muriel, my mother, was my main confidant. She was a teacher of English at Watford grammar school but took a break while my sister Madeleine and I were children. She held court in the kitchen, and we talked about everything.

John Sulston

#90. In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.

Will Schwalbe

#91. According to the latest poll in the Washington Post, 63 percent of Americans said that so far they approve of President Bush. Not surprisingly, the other 37 percent are English teachers.

Conan O'Brien

#92. Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion.

Sharon Salzberg

#93. I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words, but it was hard to concentrate.

Mathias Rust

#94. They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures

Tawni O'Dell

#95. I was a chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

Kurt Vonnegut

#96. My seven a.m. teacher was from France. And he spoke Frenglish. Sometimes it was funny, but when he announced which chapters we should study and the names came out in English, but the chapter numbers came out in French, I wanted to strangle the sacre bleu out of him.

Lila Felix

#97. The President publicly apologized today to all those offended by his brother's remark, There's more Arabs in this country than there is Jews! Those offended include Arabs, Jews, and English teachers.

Jimmy Carter

#98. If I were a teacher, I would like to teach freshman English - so I could be the Robin Williams type in Dead Poets Society. I wanna be that guy. I couldn't teach seniors because they'd be smarter than me.

Jake M. Johnson

#99. My parents grew up in poor families where little English was spoken, they both went to college and became teachers. They believed that anything was possible with hard work, and they particularly stressed the importance of education. They instilled that same belief in my sister and me.

Samuel Alito

#100. On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

Nelson Mandela