The English Teacher Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

R.J. Morse, R.J. Brookes

#5. I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.

Vinny Guadagnino

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Ilsa J. Bick

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Death and its associates, after the initial shock, produce callousness.

R.K. Narayan

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Pat Boone

#27. Because of the way our society is structures, using sentences such as "I don't it" can put people at a disadvantage. And this is, of course, why teachers have to give students access to Standard English, in order to protect them against this sort of prejudice.

Kate Burridge

#28. The first Western teacher of English in Japan was a Native American.

Gerald Vizenor

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Various

#32. 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

#33. 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

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

John Krasinski

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

Jeff Sessions

#58. 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

#59. 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

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

Dizzy Dean

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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