Top 90 Boarding School Quotes

I was lucky enough to go to boarding school for my high school years, and I had all the resources that I possibly could needed – squash courts and every book you ever would have wanted, every art supply.

I remember joining a boarding school in the sixth grade. I was lazy, complacent, and fat. Suddenly, I realised that I had to fend for myself. That’s when I discovered this drive within myself. For the first time, I ranked first in class, which was a miracle in itself. However, it didn’t matter to my family.

I went to boarding school in the country, so there’s no real differentiation between family and friends. I went there from when I was 8 until I was 17 – it was insane. If you earn my friendship, you are my family, and I’ll do anything for you.

My mom speaks English – she moved to England in the ’70s, so she’s fluent in English. We use to speak in Spanish when I was a kid all the time, me and my mom. But when I went to boarding school, I kind of lost it a little bit.

I was privileged in terms of where I grew up, and I come from a very loving, supportive household. But when I began to go off the rails at boarding school, my behaviour wasn’t a result of an upbringing but more something that was going on within me.

I was spending most of my summers in Greece when I was a little girl, and at boarding school my first room-mate was Greek, so I guess I kind of had that Greek destiny.

Our house was like a girls’ boarding school. We were always fighting for each other’s clothes.

At boarding school there wasn’t much time for much of anything except education.

I had been kind of quite porky and happy at boarding school and not self-conscious at all; then, suddenly, I found myself in auditions being examined, and it made me angry.

I was sent to boarding school at the age of ten. I think Mummy was trying to protect me in her own way, trying to spare me living through the day-to-day reality of her illness.

I was raised to please people in authority, and I’d also come from a sheltered boarding school, so I was very naive and young for my years.

For Elektra, I just wanted to be very clear. She’s traveled the world. She didn’t go to boarding school, but that’s the type of girl that she’d be. So, I just wanted to make sure that I could bring that to her, which goes through the language.

On my first night at boarding school, I felt entirely alone. I was shocked, frightened and intensely homesick, but I soon discovered that expressing these emotions, instead of bringing help and consolation, attracted a gloating, predatory fascination.

I used to put on sketch shows at boarding school when I was eight. I’m not sure about the material, but it did used to get a laugh.

I am an Air Force brat who grew up at various Air Force bases. I changed six schools in about five years and got stability for the first time when I was sent to a boarding school, Rishi Valley. I lived outside of a cantonment-style living and was among an eclectic mix of kids and got exposed to books and other things.

I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.

I spent a lot of my childhood saying goodbye because I went to boarding school. I didn’t resent my parents for sending me there so young as I understood the limitations of the education system in Africa, where we lived at the time.

I went to a lot of different high schools. I had quite a sporadic schooling experience. I went to school in England briefly, to boarding school, and I went to a few different ones in Australia as well. I’m really lucky! I have friends in most countries.

I had a very happy childhood. But I was sent off to boarding school at quite a young age, this massive Victorian house that was suffocated in ivy. I think there is a part of that school in ‘Heap House.’

I’m a war baby: I was brought up with rationing, and my parents always had to struggle. I remember when I was sent to boarding school – Prior Park College in Bath – my father was asked how he was going to pay the fees, and he replied: ‘In arrears.’

Boarding school is a wicked thing.

In my junior year of high school, I went to a boarding school for the arts: a school called the Governor’s School for The Arts and Humanities. It was basically a mini-Juilliard – an intense training conservatory for the arts.

My parents sent me from Venezuela to the Convent of Our Lady, a boarding school in Hastings, which was horrible – like Harry Potter without the magic. Sometimes we went into town, and if we were caught chewing gum in our uniform, members of the public would take down our names and report us to the school.

When I was a kid, in a very white boarding school in England in the ’90s, I had this sort of middle part that kids had – that sort of long, floppy hair. So I was always desperate to have long, floppy hair, and I would try and brush it and spray it, and it would just look like a Brillo pad!

High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you’re there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.

Boarding school was a really pivotal moment. Before I went there, I was so happy. I’m not sure I was ready for it. I was only 13. My parents didn’t send me away; it was my choice as well. But I definitely shouldn’t have stayed for five years.

I didn’t do plays at school, because I didn’t have the confidence. At 14, I was at boarding school in Devon and I suffered from dyslexia quite badly, but they had a very good department there which specialised in it.

I grew up in a very white, privileged, old-fashioned society in South Africa and went to a boarding school run by nuns.

People say how come I’m from Scotland yet I sound like the Queen?! I went to boarding school in Somerset, which has probably got something to do with it.

I moved to Seattle when I was two or three years old. Had my early education there, and would spend summers on the farm in Maryland. Then I went to boarding school in New Hampshire, to St. Paul’s School. From there, I moved to London.

The first ‘Polly and the Pirates’ is about a prim and proper girl who gets kidnapped out of her comfy boarding school by a bunch of pirates that think she’s the daughter of their long lost queen. In the course of the adventure, she discovers she has a natural penchant for swashbuckling, despite her sheltered childhood.

I had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing and went to boarding school when I was five.

Princeton was really hard. I had learned how to write well at boarding school, and I knew if I majored in English and I just did the work, I could get B’s.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.

I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy,’ D.H. Lawrence’s novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.

Mayo College, where I got my grounding, is a private boarding school. It is a traditional school with brilliant teachers including some from overseas.

Probably spending 12 years at boarding school – comedy became a survival gene. But I think some people are funny right off the bat, as soon as they can speak or be naughty.

I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called – appropriately enough – Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.

I have a brilliant memory of being driven back to school when ‘Super Trouper’ was number one in the charts in 1980. When it came on the radio my mum just drove right past the school gates! When you’re 11 years old and meant to be going back to boarding school, that’s a great feeling.

Boarding school forces you to grow. You have to wake up at a certain time, you have to study, wash your own clothes. We used to play rugby in whites. Can you imagine washing that? And it has to be white. If it was not white, you got punished.

I love ‘Call the Midwife’; it’s an absolute gem of a programme. Filming the Christmas special and then the second series felt like going back to a boarding school that you really love and is full of friends.

It was tough going to boarding school. It was very hard work.

Growing up, I was your classic Catholic Irish kid. I went to mass every Sunday. Then in secondary school I went to boarding school, and there was mass seven days a week before breakfast – it may have put me off!

I’m from the Detroit area, just north of Detroit. But then I went to boarding school in northern Michigan, so a little bit colder up there. But beautiful, very beautiful.

I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.

I’m the first to admit I’ve had a sheltered life. I grew up in the country and went to a boarding school. It was all just part of the business – be nice to everyone and all that.

Christmas Day itself hasn’t always been great. My parents went abroad when I was very young, and I went to boarding school. We had a few Christmases before that – I remember a big sack of presents and Mummy cooking goose.

My parents divorced when I was seven. Because divorce is messy, for good or ill, they sent me to boarding school.

I didn’t have boyfriends until my late teens. I was at a girls’ boarding school, and my stepfather disapproved of me going out with anybody. I never really came across any boys. When I did, one of them asked me out, and I was petrified. I felt like a fish out of water, and it was excruciating.

At this point I was strongly advised that I was too young socially to go to college so I took a second senior year at Andover, another boarding school.

My mum was working in London, so I went to school there until I was 12. But every holiday would be in Scotland, and when I went to boarding school, I’d either be there or Scotland.

I have a theory that if you’ve got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you’re probably better off at boarding school.

I went to boarding school, and what that teaches you is to cope emotionally at a young age and to suppress a lot of emotion. Being in the army is, in a way, similar.

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.

I’m always represented as a bit of a class warrior – a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I’m actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.

I probably deserve a bit of a kicking. And having been to boarding school, I’ve learnt to enjoy a good beating.

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me – nobody, like the football coach.

At boarding school you had to wear your name across your chest and your back, and obviously I had a pretty funny name. It wasn’t Brown or Smith or Hughes.

I went to boarding school from the age of eight – first to prep school, then to Eton. One thing that kind of education teaches you is community living: there’s little retreat. That’s why people come out of it and talk about lifelong friendships forged in the furnace.

My dad was in the Army. The Army’s not great pay, but, you know, we moved from Army patch to Army patch wherever that was. The Army also contributed to sending me off to boarding school.

When I was seventeen, I left Scotland to go to Kent, a well-to-do boarding school in Connecticut, where there was a contingent of really naughty kids.

I went to an all-girls boarding school for most of my youth.

There is a latent anger in a lot of people that went to boarding school at an early age. I was eight. And I loved it over the five years, but I think the adjustments for eight-year-olds are a lot. And I think it informs who you are for a long, long time.

I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an ‘unaccompanied minor’ made me blase about the rigors of air travel.

I went to boarding school in Somerset and loved it so much that my teachers had to make me phone home when I first got there. Whenever I spoke to my mum, at the end of the call I would say, ‘Love you, Mum’, and she would say, ‘Love you the most.’

Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.

I went to an all-girls boarding school in Maryland. I used to laugh at the girls in the theater program – I was pre-med, National Honors Society; I was on that track.

When I was sixteen years old, I was sentenced to two years in prison; the Swedish government changed it, so I could go to a boarding school as part of a social programme. I was in this boarding school with some of the richest kids in Sweden.

I went through a period at boarding school when my coaches wanted me to switch to snowboarding because they thought I was no good at skiing. I was too skinny. I had terrible technique. They were saying I should be a snowboarder, and luckily, I resisted.

My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.

At the senior prom for my Catholic boarding school, I was feeling manly, so I shaved, even though I didn’t need to. Being inexperienced, I managed to slice a quarter-inch gash into my lower chin a half hour before I picked up my date.

I have a brilliant memory of being driven back to school when ‘Super Trouper’ was number one in the charts in 1980. When it came on the radio my mum just drove right past the school gates! When you’re 11 years old and meant to be going back to boarding school, that’s a great feeling.

When I was 12, I went to boarding school, where I discovered the computer, which meant I no longer had to write something down and get someone to play it, I could just type it into the computer and hear it back.

His daughter returned from her boarding school, improved in fashionable airs and expert in manufacturing fashionable toys; but, in her conversation, he sought in vain for that refined and fertile mind which he had fondly expected.

Besides, I think that when one has been through a boarding school, especially then, you have some resistance, because it was both fine comradeship and a fairly hard training.

American fantasy is not a genre we think about too often. Sure, we are familiar with the worlds of English boarding school houses and castles and fairies, but true American fantasy, fantasy that is built on the land of this country, is hard to come by.

At age 10 or 12 he’s going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.

The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to.

I think boarding school does give you an independence.

Boarding school in Tring was a bit of a bubble that burst when I went to Hackney to go to drama school.

I didn’t play a great deal of sport in primary school. It was not until I went away to boarding school in Sussex that I really got into sport.

My musical influences growing up were limited to Korean folk songs and hymns as I went to a Christian boarding school where I was not allowed to listen to secular music.

When I came back to Mumbai after boarding school, I was 16 and I picked up weight training and yoga. This is when I also started dance classes and Pilates and then I started doing different workouts every month. I am now proficient in kick boxing, gymnastics, classical dance as well as yoga.

Any institution becomes a community – whether it’s a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.

The only thing I wanted when I left school was independence. I had been at boarding school for many years. When you’re boarding, nothing is your own and your whole day is scheduled. You’re told when to sleep, what to eat and when. You have zero independence.

I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So, I didn’t bake cookies. You can buy cookies, but you can’t buy love.

I spent half my life in a boarding school where we were shown only the sporadic wholesome classic like ‘The Sound Of Music.’ So, I am not familiar with most of the works of the acting greats in Bollywood, Hollywood, or Tamil-Telugu cinema.

I wouldn’t have liked to have gone to boarding school, but for boys it’s different. Boys can thrive at boarding school. I assume they really love it.