English Class Quotes

• I translated Beatles songs for my English class.

  Christian Lacroix

  Song, Class

  52 Copy quote

• Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

  Barack Obama

  Book, Writing, Class

  Barack Obama's remarks in a National Address to America's Schoolchildren at the Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. September 8, 2009.

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• We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.

  David McCullough

  Writing, School, Expression

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?

  Ken Robinson

  Children, Motivation, Inspiration

  8 Copy quote

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

  Francine Prose

  Reading, School, Class

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• A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Book, Reading, Long Ago

  6 Copy quote

• I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Believe, Teaching, School

  "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

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• Those of us who write spend our entire lives in an endless English class.

  Joss Whedon

  Writing, Class, Endless

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• If you ask most high schoolers who Bruce Lee is, they will say that it someone they sit next to in English class.

  Seth Rogen

  Class, Next, Asks

  "Seth Rogen, Director Michel Gondry, Evan Goldberg and Producer Neal Moritz Interview GREEN HORNET". Interview with Steve Weintraub, collider.com. June 21, 2010.

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• I tried to go to community college for a while, and it's a funny story. I walked into the English class on the first day, and they told us to write about what we did over the summer. I can't remember exactly, but I think I walked out exactly at that point and went to the office to ask for my money back.

  Zach Condon

  Summer, Writing, College

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

  Megan McArdle

  Crazy, Years, Class

  Megan McArdle (2014). “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success”, p.11, Penguin

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• What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up—Ho-HO! Now you’ve got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You’re not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I’m talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it.

  Libba Bray

  Talking, Class, Humanity

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• I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by - that one guy. David Frost. 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood-' You know this poem, right? 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-" "I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can't travel both? That seemed really unfair to me.

  Dan Chaon

  Sorry, Thinking, Two

  Dan Chaon (2009). “Await Your Reply: A Novel”, p.100, Ballantine Books

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• I played a little basketball, but basketball interfered with theater season. That's when we did our term plays and did nutshell versions of Shakespeare for English classes. And, believe me, I got a fair amount of looks from the guys on the team. 'You're in theater but you can play football?'

  Dennis Haysbert

  Basketball, Football, Team

  FaceBook post by Dennis Haysbert from Dec 28, 2013

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• I go through the text making sure I haven't used any big words. If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in, I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big'. I've liked these words ever since I was told not to use them in English class at school. After that, I check that the sentences are short so as people won't get confused and I shorten all the chapters so they won't get bored. I can't read anything complicated these days, my attention span is too short. Everyone else probably feels the same.

  Martin Millar

  Confused, Nice, School

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• 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

  Pregnancy, School, Class

  4 Copy quote

• I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college.

  Scott Westerfeld

  College, Class, Training

  4 Copy quote

• It started when she passed me a note in English class. The note said you don't seem as awful as I hear you are. I passed one back that read: beware I am as awful as people say and worse. She laughed and I had a friend. She didn't become my Ally and I didn't ask her to or want her to but she became my friend and that was more than anyone else was willing to do.

  James Frey

  Class, People, Awful

  James Frey (2004). “A Million Little Pieces”, p.119, Anchor

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• We're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

  Libba Bray

  School, Exercise, Class

  "Going Bovine". Book by Libba Bray, September 22, 2009.

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• At some point my friends and I began to ask, how can a country that produced hippies and such cool people also fight a war and kill people and act cruelly? You would see American GMC trucks go by and soldiers reaching down to whack a girl riding a bicycle. They would yank at her hat and she would get thrown and she would die. You would see Americans do this and feel like they can do anything in our country. But then you'd take an English class with an American soldier from Ohio who seemed just as nice as anyone, yet he was a soldier too.

  Nguyen Qui Duc

  Girl, Country, War

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• At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

  Alison Bechdel

  Book, Class, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• I've been sniffing out the guys in my English class (to the extent that this is possible without getting my throat cut), but they smell the same way they always do: like feet and testicles. As opposed to freesias. I don't want to keep sniffing them, Lyd. - Letter from Seb to Lyd.

  Jaclyn Moriarty

  Cutting, Class, Smell

  Jaclyn Moriarty (2010). “The Year of Secret Assignments”, p.177, Scholastic Inc.

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• When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

  J. Courtney Sullivan

  Dog, Drinking, Feet

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