Let’s face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

Going to a therapist is not something you do when you’re growing up as a street kid in Toronto.

I feel like when I try to fit in, it comes across as not genuine, and that is not good. I’d rather just do me and have people say, ‚Oh. That’s interesting,‘ than try to fit in.

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.

I really miss being able to blend in with people.

You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

When you’re thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

I got a fancy reputation. During high school, every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

Hermits have no peer pressure.

America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce in the world.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

Even Gaddafi’s adversaries assure us that he stood out for his intelligence as a student; he was expelled from high-school for his anti-monarchic activities. He managed to enroll in another high-school and later graduated in law at the University of Benghazi at the age of 21.

The funny thing is, all my friends are short. I wasn’t aware of tall people till I got to high school. I didn’t know they existed. I was sheltered.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I wasn’t a pretty girl. I was six feet tall at 15, you know.

My mind doesn’t work, my memories don’t work like a computer file where I can just retrieve them and, boy, there it is. My mind is selective in terms of memories. When I try to think back to college or high school, there are gaps. I try to fill them in. But I can’t tell you it’s always the truth.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

The internet has been a boon and a curse for teenagers.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late ’70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

That’s correct, I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write.

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

When I got outta High School I was driving a truck. I was just a poor boy from Memphis, Memphis.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

When I went back to my old high school, all these kids looking at me like I’m the real big homie, the same way I look at Jay Z, Nas, or Dr. Dre. You would’ve thought Michael Jackson walked through that joint off the excitement that they had.

You think I’m going to ask these sweet 14 year olds to ask their parents to buy a $100 ticket then run around in latex and lip sync? No way.

I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

In high school, I majored in brick masonry. We had the wood shop, the machine shop, so I know about all that. I wanted to build buildings when I graduated from high school. I do know my way around that stuff.

We cannot live being obsessed with what other people think about us. It’s impossible to live like that. Not even God managed to please the entire world.

It feels kinda weird being back in a high school cause I haven’t been in a high school for about a year. So um, it’s kinda interesting coming back, and y’know seeing the lockers, with all the signs, the handmade signs, so being in high school again is a little bit strange but in a good way.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.

I’m afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit that will become unnecessary.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

Akron, Ohio, is my home. I will always be here. I’m still working out at my old high school.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

I wish all teenagers can filter through songs instead of turning to drugs and alcohol.

When I first stopped going to high school, I was about 15, 16. It had to be, like, 2000, 2001.

People tend to think that because I’m a performer and I don’t go to a regular high school that I haven’t personally been affected by bullies. But it’s actually quite the contrary.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

As supportive as my hometown is, in my high school, there are people who would probably walk up to me and punch me in the face. There’s a select few that will never like me. They don’t like what I stand for. They don’t like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy. They’re going to be negative no matter what.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‚We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.‘

In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you’re nuts, and you’re not as popular with girls as you should be.

Everybody around me had a Snapchat, and I said I would never get on it. I’m still on Instagram, you know? They convinced me to get Snapchat.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

I remember when I was in high school I didn’t have a new dress for each special occasion. The girls would bring the fact to my attention, not always too delicately. The boys, however, never bothered with the subject. They were my friends, not because of the size of my wardrobe but because they liked me.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

Sometimes, wearing a scarf and a polo coat and no makeup and with a certain attitude of walking, I go shopping or just look at people living. But then, you know, there will be a few teenagers who are kind of sharp, and they’ll say, ‚Hey, just a minute. You know who I think that is?‘ And they’ll start tailing me. And I don’t mind.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

They used to call me ‚Touchdown T.‘ I remember in high school, we had homecoming, and I got in front of the pep rally, and I told them, ‚I’m going to run for three touchdowns.‘ I ran for three touchdowns, kicked the extra point, and took myself out the game.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.