"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"Calvin (to Suzy)- You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!"
— Bill Watterson

"Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, can you tell us what Lewis and Clark did?

Calvin: No, but I can recite the secret superhero origin of each member of Captain Napalm's Thermonuclear League of Liberty.

Ms. Wormwood: See me after class, Calvin.

Calvin: [retrospectively] I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information."
— Bill Watterson

"It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.' "
— Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)

"Don't ever let anyone tell you that high school is supposed to be fun. High school is to be endured. College is fun."
— Stephenie Meyer

"CONJUGATE THIS

I cut class, you cut class, he, she, it cuts class. We cut class, they cut class. We all cut class. I cannot say this in Spanish because I did not go to Spanish today. Gracias a dios. Hasta luego."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"You can drag my body to school but my spirit refuses to go."
— Bill Watterson (The Essential Calvin and Hobbes)

"Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack."
— Max Brooks (The Zombie Survival Guide)

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education."
— Harold Howe

"Haruhi:Will you please stop making more trash?
Tamaki: It's not trash... it's home for a hamster..
Haruhi: You don't have a hamster, senpai.
Tamaki: I'm not your senpai, just some one you know."
— Haruhi Fujioka and Tamaki Suou

"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."
— Jacques Barzun

"Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be (65)."
— Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)

"My school colors were clear. We used to say, "I'm not naked, I'm in the band."
— Steven Wright

"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite."
— May Sarton

"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog."
— Mark Twain

"The human heart is my school."
— Anne Rice (The Vampire Armand)

"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," Pulitzer wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."
— Joseph Pulitzer

"To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself."
— bell hooks

"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
— Edmund Burke

""You need to be more careful, or you could hurt yourself."
Right. Thank you, Mrs. Detweiler. I never would have come to that conclusion by myself. I was planning on incorporating a backflip into my next walk across the classroom but on second thought..."
— Janette Rallison (Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Free Throws)

"Prison for the crime of puberty -- that was how secondary school had seemed."
— David Brin (Earth)

"This dress exacerbates the genetic betrayal that is my legacy."
— Heather Mooney

"But to go to school in a summer morn,
O! It drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay."
— William Blake

"when life gives you lemons,
make grapefruit with it and let the world wonder how you did it"
— kevin G

""It wasn't school that I dreaded at all. School was not half bad. In many ways, this year had been downright fun. No, what I hated most about school was the fact that I had to come here all by myself. Simon and Peter went to their classes and did their own things, and I had to do my own thing. The thing I loved about summer was that I shared it with my brothers. Sure, my brothers and I often fought, but the best times in my life came when I was with them. School was a time when I had to go and do something without a brother at my side.""
— Matthew Buckley (Chickens in the Headlights:)

"...your zeal to face life's rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students...' He shook his head of disagreeable hair. 'I need not tell you,' he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, 'that there resides in almost every one of 'em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible."
— Millard Kaufman

"School should be the best party in town"
— Peter Kline

"If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.
Your school wasn't on fire, you were."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)

"It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)

"Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. "
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)

"Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth tim now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year-plan, the going concern. You couldn't be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You'd retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D-enriched chocolate milk.
Two black guys from the projects, twins, were actually named Ronald and Donald MacDonald. The twins themselves only shrugged, couldn't be made to agree it was incredible."
— Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude)