James Lovegrove Quotes

I had barely turned 12 when my parents packed me off to Doon School. I was transported to a world of confusion with 600 other kids, no home-cooked food, no made-to-order clothes. It was a shock, but I adjusted.

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

As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

Boarding school is a wicked thing.

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

So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.

When people are like, 'College! Oh my God! Ultimate freedom!' I didn't feel that way. My roommates were loving hitting the town, but I wasn't as psyched about going to the frats.

At 17, I went to Stanford University to study engineering. My time was occupied with the required reading and the extracurricular duties of managing the baseball and football teams and earning my way.

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

When I was in college, I wasn't in a fraternity or anything. I always wanted to jump around to all different types of cliques.

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.

You have been told that Real Life is not like college, and you have been correctly informed. Real Life is more like high school.

What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?

I definitely pride myself on suffering through a real high school. A lot of my friends are homeschooled, and I love them for it, but I really wanted that high school experience.

I was so driven in high school but did sometimes wish I could go out with friends, go to parties, and be a normal teenager. But having mum as my coach at home meant I couldn't sneak around.

I like autobiographies. I wouldn't mind making one of those.

I probably wish I'd worked harder in school. I loved school but it was more a social thing for me. I did well in school but I could have done better.

Growing up in New Jersey, teen clubs were your life. I'm not kidding! That was it. I was literally tied up five days a week with teen clubs; my parents would drop me off. Like, I didn't even drive.

I did a capella for a year at boarding school and then I stopped because at Yale, I think they really focus more on singing than having a beat behind them. So I just did my cello thing.

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 never went to any high school dances or proms unless I was playing in them.

I liked school except for having to get up early and, of course, high school drama!

When you think of a teenager, you think of hanging out with friends a lot or going to a full-time school. On the weekends, my friends are staying up until, like, one in the morning, and then there's me fighting to stay up until eight.

In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.

I feel like I had as normal a childhood as anyone, but it had a certain focus. Maybe other kids focused on sports.