English Class Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I translated Beatles songs for my English class.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?'

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.

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.

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.