Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In preschool, I would plan out my show-and-tell every week to be funny and exciting. Then in first grade I wrote a play, and my classmates and I performed it as a puppet show.
Fortunately, unlike my teachers and classmates, my parents never forced gender roles or even a ended identity on me. I grew up on a farm, so all that mattered was working hard.
No, no, I was only funny on stage, really. I, I, think I was funny as a person toward my classmates when I was very young. You know, when I was a child, up to about the age of 12.
I have this recurring nightmare where I'm giving a speech in front of my old high school classmates, and they start laughing at me, and I look down and realize I'm naked. And a shark.
When you're 10, 11, 12, and you're watching your idols, you feel like you know them. I found more in common with these people when they talked in interviews than I did with my classmates.
I think, even before social media, it was really hard to not look at other classmates and say, 'Well I wish I looked like her.' Or even to look at celebrities and wish that 'I looked like them.'
I was heavily into sport from 10 to 15, I was in all the teams, and it was everything to me. But I was very young for my school year and when puberty kicked in for my classmates I got left behind.
In high school ethics, they went around and asked what everyone thought their classmates were qualified to do. For me, everyone said actress. But to me it was very much 'if it happens, it happens.'
Few of my classmates looked like me. While we shared similar aspirations and many good times, there's much to be said for making any challenging journey with people of the same cultural background.
Courtney Vance and I are college classmates, weirdly enough. We're both Harvard class of 1982. Courtney, as a work-study job, was a typesetter at the Harvard 'Crimson,' the newspaper where I worked.
The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum.
I was five years old; I got addicted to being on stage. I felt like it was the most wonderful place on Earth, performing in front of an audience, who in this case were a bunch of classmates, kids my age.
I was so afraid to even read a paper in front of my classmates. It is very funny because at that point my teachers would never have believed that I could speak in front of an audience of over 2,000 people.
I was in sixth grade at Koko Head Elementary School in Honolulu, and was chosen to pin the 50th star on the American flag in front of my teachers and classmates at a special assembly to celebrate statehood.
When I was growing up, and periodically going to India to visit my grandmother, my classmates would often ask me about the trains. There was an exotic fascination with people sitting on top of the carriages.
At nine or ten, I was playing guitar in music class in my elementary school in Jackson, Michigan. They had a guitar class, and I played with ten of my classmates, and we did a little guitar orchestra for a school music.
My classmates could see I was not similar. So they made me their scapegoat. They hit me or locked me in the toilets. During the break, I would take refuge in the chapel, or I would arrange to stay alone in the classroom.
When I came out of Stanford, I looked at my brilliant classmates, who were going into Wall Street high finance, Silicon Valley, advanced engineering, and I said to myself, 'Jeff, go into an industry where nobody can add.'
In elementary school, I loved the 'Bailey School Kids' series. It was about a group of classmates who would speculate whether adults in their lives were supernatural beings. I read literally every single book in the series.
We used to tie-dye T-shirts and sell them to classmates. We used to make egg rolls and sell them at street fairs. I worked at the mall. My parents probably spent more money on the gas driving me to different jobs than I made.
My parents always got a kick out of my art. I was always able to make them laugh. As I got older, I remember the thrill I got when I graduated from making my classmates laugh to making adults laugh. Kind of a watershed moment.
In fact, if they didn't let me commute, I would not have taken the role because I wanted to graduate high school with my classmates. I remember my agent's jaw dropping when I told him if I couldn't commute I didn't want the role.
Teachers, people, and, to be honest, some of my classmates didn't understand me. I was the person they didn't like because I would always speak my mind and had a lot of energy. I'd be bouncing around all the time, being very opinionated.
I wasn't into making classmates laugh - or any of the comedy cliches. I wanted to disappear. I was a nonentity. I wasn't too clever but I wasn't in the bottom group. I wasn't loud but I wasn't quiet. I wasn't a bully and I wasn't bullied.
With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.
It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture.
I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
Out of the 72 kids that I went to high school with, I still talk to 25 of them on a fairly regular basis. Seven of my classmates live in L.A., and five of them are in the entertainment business, and we constantly talk and play fantasy football together.
When I turned 16, I got my driver's license like the rest of my classmates, but I also got an extra present: a two-day practice session in a Formula Ford: my first open-wheel racing car and the first step on the ladder toward becoming a professional driver.
People often ask me why I continue to speak out if it's hurting my family. But that's exactly why I speak out. The people Erdogan is targeting are my family, my friends, my neighbors, my classmates. I need to speak out, or my country will suffer in silence.
We know that we are often judged by the company we keep. We know how influential classmates, friends, and other peer groups can be. If any of our companions are prone to be unrighteous in their living, we are better off seeking new associations immediately.
My mother would organize huge parties for my elementary school classmates. To prepare, she would go back to the bakery in her old neighborhood of Inwood and get special shamrock cookies. Hawaiian Punch was served and we had shamrock napkins. It was a lot of fun.
It felt like I was the only one who cared about the climate and the ecological crisis. My parents didn't care about it, my classmates didn't care about it, my relatives didn't care about this. I mean nobody I knew cared about this and I felt like I was the only one.
I love high heels from the age of 10! Short skirts and then high heels. My classmates used to make fun of me. Like, 'Ooh, she's so skinny and she's wearing high heels.' But I just wore what I like, and I didn't care about people's opinions, the same as I don't care now.
There was a time in my life when people called me 'Denim Dan.' I didn't like it. And fortunately for my self-esteem, it didn't stick for very long. I was 12, and I was given the name by my classmates after I showed up to the first day of school in - wait for it - triple denim.
When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.
Because I was from the Midwest and untrained, I was completely open and ready to try anything. Many of my classmates were cynical and jaded; some already had conservatory training, and they were there simply to get that Yale stamp of approval, which they saw as a career stepping-stone.
As a kid growing up, I didn't want to tell any of my classmates I did figure-skating because I knew they'd be like, 'Oh, you're a skater, you're gay, blah blah blah.' So I kept it to myself. Once I started getting to more of an elite level, I didn't really care what people thought, though.
When I went to California Institute of the Arts, I was classmates with a lot of like-minded weirdoes, some of who have gone on to create other cartoon shows-J.G. Quintel, 'Regular Show;' Pen Ward, 'Adventure Time.' We were all friends in school and pushed each other and made each other laugh.
Sloppy casual has always been my default look. My preppier classmates in high school would sometimes sport two, three, even four shirts at a time - Lauren, Izod, Brooks Brothers, all collars-up - while I wore secondhand faded olive German-army fatigues and this cool T-shirt with a troll on it.
My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.
I was mostly bullied by my classmates. People would come up to me and say, 'You're so dark.' I'd always fight back by calling out one of their insecurities, like, 'Well, you have a big nose.' Today, I'd tell them that I really love them. I'd thank them because they made me realize how unique I am.
I couldn't help but to think back to my classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio. They had the same talent, the same brains, the same dreams as the folks we sat with at Stanford and Harvard. I realized the difference wasn't one of intelligence or drive. The difference was opportunity.
Back in my days as a children's book editor, my superiors caught on to the fact that teenagers were using the Internet to gossip about each other, and thought it might be nifty to develop a series of books about an anonymous high-school blogger who gossips about her classmates. The concept was passed on to me.
I knew more about produce from the sea than any of my schoolmates, and my reports in school, from kindergarten on, amused and shocked my classmates and teachers. I told them how we ate with chopsticks, had rice and seaweed for breakfast, raw fish, octopus, and sea urchin eggs for supper, and cakes made from sharks.
When you're a writer, you hear your internal critic, and that's really hard to get over. And then sometimes you hear critiques from classmates and stuff. But when a book comes out, it's just hundreds of opinions and you have to learn to separate out the ones you want to listen to or figure out many you want to listen to.