High School Graduation Quotes

The morning after my high-school graduation found me up early job hunting. The dream of college I put on the back burner. ~ Martha Reeves

The day after my high school graduation in 1952, I headed to Alaska. I was 17. I started out greasing equipment, then became a heavy-crane operator. I made and saved good money there for two years. ~ Dennis Washington

Education is all a matter of building bridges. ~ Ralph Ellison

Listen. I may not be much, but I'm all I've got. Maybe you need a magnifying glass to find my face in my high school graduation photo. Maybe I haven't got any family or friends. Yes, yes, I know all that. But, strange as it might seem, I'm not entirely dissatisfied with life ... I feel pretty much at home with what I am. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want any unicorns behind fences. ~ Haruki Murakami

Throw in the intensity of emotions that come with that bittersweet summer sandwiched between high school graduation and the rest of your life ... ~ Emily Giffin

Life is not fair get used to used to it ~ Bill Gates

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Life expectancy continues to rise in most of the rest of the industrialized world, but in the United States it has dropped for three years in a row - for the first time in a century. As we'll see, American kids today are 55 percent more likely to die by the age of nineteen than children in the other rich countries that are members of the OECD, the club of industrialized nations. America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans: it undermines our nation's competitiveness, especially as growing economies like China's are fueled by much larger populations and by rising education levels, and may erode the well-being of our society for decades to come. The losers are not just those at the bottom of society, but all of us. For America to be strong, we must strengthen all Americans. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

This column was an attempt to convey to British readers something of the flavor of high-school graduation, a ritual largely unknown across the Atlantic and one at odds with the basic organizing principle of English education: The continual assurances by commencement speakers that yours is the most awesome generation ever to walk the earth ring a little odd if you're a survivor of some grim Dotheboys Hall where the prevailing educational philosophy was to lower your self-esteem to undetectable levels by the end of the first week. ~ Mark Steyn

We believed we could prepare our kids for a more competitive world. And today, our younger students have earned the highest math and reading scores on record. Our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high. And more Americans finish college than ever before. ~ Barack Obama

And that's why I've been talking only about you and the tension within you, because you are - not in a clichéd sense, but in a weirdly literal sense - the future. After you walk up here and walk back down, you're going to be the present. You will be the broken world and the act of changing it, in a way that you haven't been before. You will be so many things, and the one thing that I wish I'd known and want to say is, don't just be yourself. Be all of yourselves. Don't just live. Be that other thing connected to death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun. ~ Joss Whedon

We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there. ~ Mordecai Richler

No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind. ~ Taylor Swift

Be yourself,its the best thing you can be. ~ Selena Gomez

Every show is unique, some shows have the master plan and have everything figured out and that's just the way they do things. It's like high school. Some people write their papers the second they get their assignments, and some people write it the day after it's due. I am the latter. ~ Elizabeth Meriwether

By the time they finish high school - after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents' friends - elite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers. ~ William Deresiewicz

For Alice and Mattia, the high school years were an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them without breathing, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and eventually they had noticed that it didn't make all that much difference. They had formed a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of their school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation. ~ Paolo Giordano

I'm kind of obsessed with wedges, but I go to a regular high school, so I'm not going to be wearing Vera Wang there. ~ Laura Marano

I bump into a group of girls congregating around a locker. Jessica, Willow (who is notably the only Willow enrolled in our 397-student class and in our 1,579-student school), and Abby. Miney has labeled them in my notebook, in block letters and underlined with a Sharpie:THE POPULAR BITCHES.

When she first used this designation, Miney had to give me a long lecture about how this wasn't an oxymoron, how someone could be both popular, which I presumed meant that lots of people liked you, and at the same time also be a bitch, which I presumed would have the opposite outcome. Apparently popularity in the context of high school has a negative correlation with people actually liking you but a high correlation with people wanting to be your friend. After careful consideration, this makes sense, though in my case, I am both an outlier and a great example of the fact that correlation does not imply causation. I am nice to everyone but without any upside: People neither like me nor want to be my friend. ~ Julie Buxbaum

I've been waiting for this for so long
something new, life after high school. ~ Nina LaCour

When I was in high school, my mom worked at Bed, Bath and Beyond, so I was always there. ~ Abbi Jacobson

Sixty-five percent of Americans don't have the conversation with their children. So you're sending off boys and girls off to college, off to high school, off to wherever they go, and nobody's had the conversation about how to conduct themselves. About a man telling his son how to be a man. How to respect a woman. How do you respect yourself? ~ Mariska Hargitay

I'm pretty pale. In high school I was insecure and thought it'd be cool to go to a tanning bed. Now I just let it look the way it looks. ~ Taylor Swift

After high school, I had $2,000 saved, and I packed everything I could into my '95 Nissan Sentra with no air-conditioning, and I drove out to L.A. ~ Emayatzy Corinealdi

Either I had just made the biggest error of my high school career, or I had just avoided the biggest error of my high school career. ~ Suzanne Supplee

My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe. ~ Brian Greene

When I got out of high school they retired my jersey, but it was for hygiene and sanitary reasons. ~ George Carlin

I was always interested in the arts as a child - drawing, painting, and piano - but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school - if I wasn't in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I'd be in the art room finishing up some type of project. ~ Laura Mennell

You don't want to peak in high school. If you do, the rest of your life is a disaster. ~ Candace Bushnell

The whole experience reminded me of my own 'old lady' phase that I went through in high school while I was reading Somerset Maugham ... The embroidered sweaters, the costume jewelry ... I remember genuinely WANTING to be old then, to act as if the business of my life was already all but over, and that I was preternaturally wise because of it ...
God, the stupid things you'll do to try and meet boys ... ~ Chris Ware

I don't care if you're so poor you live in a cardboard box, if you fail to graduate high school, or if thousands of miles try to separate us. I'll always love you just as much as i do now. ~ Samantha Gudger

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I didn't read a novel all the way through until after high school. Blasphemy, I know. I'm an author now. Books and words are my world. ~ Matt De La Pena

High School. Society's bright idea to put all their aggressive, naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life. ~ Chris Colfer

My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school. ~ Noam Chomsky

America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it always has been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped toward the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point. The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country which all kinds of different people share.

This leap is made in public, and it's made for free. It's not a product or a service that anyone will pay you for. You do it for reasons unexplainable by economics--for ambition, out of conviction, for the heck of it, in playfulness, for love. It's done in public spaces, face-to-face, where anyone is free to go. It's not done on television, on the Internet, or over the telephone; our electronic systems can only tell us if the leap made elsewhere has succeeded or failed. The places you'll see it are high school gyms, city sidewalks, the subway, bus stations, public parks, parking lots, and wherever people ~ Ian Frazier

My husband was working as principal of an urban transformation high school - the kind of public charter school determined to do whatever it takes to give its mostly minority, low-income student body the education they need and deserve to be successful in life. ~ Vanessa Diffenbaugh

We all say and do things we regret, but it's never to late to change, apologize and become a better person ~ Thomas Amo

For the record, I would like to point out that it is NOT being obsessive to memorize a boy's schedule so that you can accidentally bump into him. It is called being efficient. ~ Jess Rothenberg

Just as experience dictates to the ballet teacher the length of time necessary to train his students, so the horse, too, needs time to mature into a great four legged dancer. This fact cannot be obliterated by seeming successes that supposedly prove the opposite. For, even if someone should succeed in training a horse to high school level by the age of eight, this individual occurrence cannot shake the foundations of the classical art of riding, if this dressage horse is completely unsound and unusable by the age of ten. ~ Alois Podhajsky

I want to grow up, live my life, experience things, make movies about those experiences and by the time the audience catches up, hopefully they'll have a movie there that helps them get through that next phase when the discover life isn't always like High School Musical. ~ Zac Efron

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

Arkadia wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head upon the muscular cliff face he called his chest. ~ Dzintra Sullivan

I think college prepared me at a really high level. High school, you can take some plays off on the defensive end. Not on purpose, but if your man gets tired, you can rest a little bit. But once you get to college, and especially in the NBA, you can't do that. Even if my man gives the ball up, I'm on help side, helping my team out. ~ Trey Burke

In hindsight, I know that high school is a festering pit of boredom and hormones, not to be taken as seriously as it seemed while I was there. It is earthly purgatory before you enter the better parts of your life: you've got one foot in heaven and the other in hell. ~ Alida Nugent

It's difficult to not be able to just be yourself without criticism in any position, whether you're in high school, college, or this industry. ~ Raven-Symone

She will not sit down after, when we all collapse on the mats, our sweaty limbs crisscrossing. She will not sit down, will not let the steel slip from between her shoulders. She has so much pride that, even if I'm weary of her, of her fighting ways, her gauntlet-tossing, I can't say there isn't something else that beams in me. An old ember licked to fresh fire again. Beth, the old Beth, before high school, before Ben Trammel, all the boys and self-sorrow, the divorce and the adderall and the suspensions. ~ Megan Abbott

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper. ~ Dave Eggers