High School English Quotes

#1. I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

Mark Takano

#2. When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.

Daniel Alarcon

#3. My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

Eric Allin Cornell

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class

Francine Prose

#7. Comparing and contrasting is a valuable human skill - and not just during high school English exams. Our ability to rank-order things is invaluable in making choices and setting priorities.

Martha Beck

#8. So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.

Libba Bray

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. I haven't taught since 2004, but I taught high school English for seven years, primarily at a place called Haddonfield Memorial, which is in a very well-to-do-community in Southern New Jersey.

Matthew Quick

#12. After high school, I went to Stanford University and majored in English. Of course, that gave me a chance to do lots more reading and writing. I also received degrees in London and Dublin - where I moved to be near a charming Irishman who became my husband!

Linda Sue Park

#13. 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

#14. I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.

Ellen Ochoa

#15. The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

Gore Vidal

#16. 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

#17. My favorite subject in high school was English. I love reading and writing, and I felt really supported in this subject, and my least favorite was math, since I felt completely lost.

Christie Laing

#18. When I graduated high school, I was one of many English-majors-to-be traveling through Europe with a copy of 'Let's Go Europe' in one hand, 'Anna Karenina' in the other, a Eurail pass for a bookmark.

Maria Semple

#19. In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.

Joseph Sobran

#20. It's just snow," Lesa said, rolling her eyes. "It's not going to hurt you."
Kimmy smoothed her hands over her blond hair. "Sugar melts."
"Yeah, and shit floats." Lesa took her seat, yanking out last night's English homework.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#21. 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

#22. I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.

Carol Berg

#23. I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

Roy Blount Jr.

#24. I studied Shakespeare all through high school. Both of my parents teach English and history, so it has always been around my experience as a young man.

Xavier Samuel

#25. My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

Samantha Shannon

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.

Lawrence R. Klein

#29. The people who run the major banks have MBAs and wear suits. And when those people in suits come to the homes of people who don't have a high school diploma, don't even speak English, and offer them a home at zero percent down, that doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Ramin Bahrani

#30. 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

#31. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.

Julia Glass

#32. 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

#33. I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.

John Hurt

#34. I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.

Elizabeth George

#35. I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.

Amanda Hocking

#36. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.

India De Beaufort

#37. My favorite subject was either English or History. I had a really awesome high school education.

Ian Harding

#38. I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life.

Joss Whedon

#39. 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

#40. I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.

Ian Doescher

#41. I was a terrible reader as a kid. I mean terrible. Super slow and very unfocused. It took me forever to read a book, and I remember being well into high school and still needing my mom to sit down and read aloud to me so I could pass my English tests and such.

John Corey Whaley

#42. 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

#43. Nothing could convince Aunt Nelly to let Vlad stay home for the duration of the school year, which just goes to prove that parents and guardians don't care if they're sending you to face bloodthirsty monsters, so long as you get a B in English.

Heather Brewer

#44. I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones.

Spencer Boldman

#45. English and Gym. That's it. Look, do you know how difficult it is to write about being at school convincingly? It's been years since Stephfordy graduated, so it'll save us all a lot of time and effort if we just stick to two real subjects...

Stephfordy Mayo