Top 100 School English Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I'm old-school English, so I suppose I'm quite protective - especially of time. Now that I'm a father, every moment is precious.
Orlando Bloom
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class
Francine Prose
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.
Eric Allin Cornell
#13. Because this is Upper Canada, after all, and 'caning' sounds more English than 'having ass whipped to death with hickory stick.
Allan Dare Pearce
#14. You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?
Theresa May
#15. 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
#16. You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.
Emily Rios
#17. 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
#18. At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.
Clive Sinclair
#19. At school, myself and some pals, all football-daft, divided up the old English First Division and wrote off to half a dozen clubs each asking for a trial.
Drew Busby
#20. 'Othello' was my first Shakespearean discovery. I was obsessed with drama at school, and I studied the play for my English GCSE. Desdemona is the part that everyone wants, but Iago's wife Emilia is the one I've always been drawn to.
Michelle Dockery
#21. 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
#23. I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the Wren with a dash of Martini-Drink deep.
Aporva Kala
#24. 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
#25. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#26. Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.
Yael Grobglas
#27. I left school at 16 but I wish I'd gone to university - I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don't think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.
Brendan Coyle
#28. I came to New York when I was 21, 22. I couldn't speak English. I knew I wanted to go to fashion school.
Francisco Costa
#29. I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.
Carrie Coon
#30. I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.
Elizabeth George
#31. I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language really helped.
Michiel Huisman
#32. 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
#33. I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
Joan Collins
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. My favorite subject was either English or History. I had a really awesome high school education.
Ian Harding
#37. In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#38. I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.
Anthony Horowitz
#39. I wasn't that bothered with school; I was too mad into horses. But I liked reading and was good enough at English and always liked music.
Kate Thompson
#40. In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public.
Tom Wolfe
#41. I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'
Susan Minot
#42. I excelled in English while I was at school.
Jamie Bell
#43. 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
#44. Music was my life ... It was everything to me, even though I was in school majoring in English. I was still very focused on music and always finding ways to perform, so that was what set me up to want to become a recording artist.
John Legend
#45. 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
#46. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#47. I am an English major in school with an emphasis in creative writing. I think hearing Maya Angelou speak at school last year was one of the best moments Stanford, at least, intellectually, had to offer.
Fred Savage
#48. I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
Pat Conroy
#49. When I was six or seven, we went to the nearest English primary school, St Weonards, about seven miles away. The teaching was good, and this was the start of my beginning to shine as a student.
Saul David
#50. I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.
Ruby Bentall
#51. In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.
Rabih Alameddine
#52. I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.
Joshua Foer
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. When I first met him (Michael) at the beginning of the year and found out that I would have to be his lab partner in bio and the year-long series of projects in AP English, I seriously considered taking night school classes and getting a GED just to avoid him.
Stephanie Wardrop
#56. 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
#57. My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.
Tatiana Maslany
#58. It hapens very often that parents think they are worred about the progress a boy is making. they do not realise that all boys are numskulls with o branes which is not surprising when you look at the parents really the whole thing goes on and on and there is no stoping it it is a vicious circle.
Geoffrey Willans
#59. My father is Cuban. Spanish was my first language, but I don't speak it that much anymore because I had dyslexia, and in school they work with you only in English. But I'm proud to be Latina, and most people don't know I am.
Bella Thorne
#60. I went by myself to Hollywood, I spoke no English, every day I had to go to school.
Jackie Chan
#61. So I went to English school, secondary English school, so forget going to Mecca for my religious education.
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
#62. Peter is ... adjusting. He's back in school, and he's doing quite well. I wish you could find it in your heart to forgive him."
"I've got this funny resentful streak about people who try to kill me.
Josh Lanyon
#63. I found that I was just hopeless at school. It was just a total bore. First, I passed in art and English, and then just art. Then I passed out.
Joe Strummer
#64. I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.
Edgar Ramirez
#65. 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
#66. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#67. I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Amy Tan
#68. Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Rideout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize 'I Must Go Down to the Seas Again' by Jason Masefield. We don't have to actually think about stuff.
David Mitchell
#69. Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
Pico Iyer
#70. I had a very tough childhood. I came here from Italy in the '70s and didn't speak a word of English, so the kids at school tormented me. Truly, it was horrifying the names they called me, and the teachers never really did a thing to stop it.
Giada De Laurentiis
#71. I spent many years in grad school in English, so I've read a lot in a variety of genres. But adventure fantasy is my bread and butter as a reader, and probably always will be. So it's only natural that I came to that genre as a writer.
Saladin Ahmed
#72. Throughout most of my life, I've tried to downplay my Chinese heritage because I wanted so much to be an American. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and I longed to be like everyone else. I insisted on American food; I was embarrassed by my mother's poor English.
Tess Gerritsen
#73. I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.
Bernadette Devlin
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.
M T Anderson
#77. I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.
Elizabeth Edwards
#78. I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#79. I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.
Rabih Alameddine
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn't merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit.
George Woodcock
#84. My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic carpets and wondrous lands. My mother is not religious - she's just English.
Bat For Lashes
#85. When I decided I wanted to go to drama school, I realized that a lot of the actors whose careers I really admire and whose work I really admire were English and English trained. I felt there was a real vocational feel to work in the U.K.
Ben Schnetzer
#86. 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
#87. Knowing English is important, but for us Venezuelans I think it would also be important to know Portuguese . For that reason, we should evaluate the possibility of it being taught in our schools.
Hugo Chavez
#88. 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
#89. I came from a Hindi medium school ... the principal felt that I would not fit into an English medium college. Though I was top in my class in school, and I got admission in other colleges, but I really wanted to study in St. Xavier's.
Lakshmi Mittal
#90. A lot happened in Vancouver. It was my first Western experience. I learned English, which is my second language. I became very acquainted with Western culture. I had my first sewing machine when I was 9. I trained in fashion illustration when I was in school.
Jason Wu
#91. I came to the U.S. in 1994 to learn English and go to business school, but I took only a few business courses at the State University of New York at Albany and didn't finish.
Hamdi Ulukaya
#92. I'm completely English, but I grew up in Paris and went to school here. My parents moved when I was five.
Jemima West
#93. I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event in which races were run, and I won these by a considerable margin.
Roger Bannister
#94. I always have tendency to form very strong local attachments, so I was very keen to find out about the school I was going to, its history, and the countryside. I was acquiring a kind of English character if you like, Englishness about things and my attitudes.
Ibn Warraq
#95. I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.
Ashwin Sanghi
#96. Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It's because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.
Caroline Winberg
#97. Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.
Evelyn Waugh
#98. I wanted to act when I was young. When I was 12, I asked the head of English at my school, 'Can I audition?' and he said, 'What would we want you for?' And I remember going, 'Oh yeah. Why would they want me?'
Alison Moyet
#99. Romantic novels, the kissing scenes, the ditching scenes have taught the youth of India more English than all the English classes in school combined.
Sneha Mehta
#100. The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it's largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.
Mark Forsyth
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