I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.

Dennis Banks

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.

Adam Rickitt

Life Business Art

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.

Adwoa Aboah

Within Wit Where

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.

Adwoa Aboah

Mom Men Years

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

Ajay Mehta

Teacher Wit Where

After boarding school in Switzerland, at, like, 14 or 15, my life clicked, and I just realized, 'I don't want to be like anyone around me at my school. I don't think the world revolves around money.'

Albert Hammond, Jr.

Money Life World

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.

Alexis Denisof

Education Years Year

I deliberately went to boarding school. It was my choice. My mum was abroad and I wanted to wean myself off being dependent. It was a very important time for me to be able to create my own individual, independent life; just as a way of growing up.

Alice Englert

Time Life Wing

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.

Alice Englert

Experience Well Us

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.

Alice Hoffman

Whether Where Very

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.

Amyra Dastur

Work Art Yoga

My family owned a furniture/appliance store near Kingston, Jamaica. I worked there all summer but lived in a very structured environment the rest of the year at an all-girl Catholic boarding school.

Ann-Marie Campbell

Work Men Family

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.

Anne Reid

Great Christmas Young

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.

Arabella Weir

Life Wit Whom

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.

Arne Jacobsen

You Use Us

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.

Belinda Stewart-Wilson

Used Use Us

My obsession with eating out partly comes from having spent 10 long years at English boarding schools in the 1980s, where food was pretty low on the list.

Ben Elliot

Food Art Years

Having your adolescence at an all-male boarding school is just crap.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Your You Us

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.

Bode Miller

Good Yin Witch

My earliest memory of freedom was when I was about 14 and I stopped caring what people thought about me! I was so free and in charge! That whole year I was exploring myself, and I was so 'free' that I got sent away to boarding school.

Bria Vinaite

Freedom Car Year

With acting, I started very young, and I'd performed for a lot of children in boarding schools, late at night after the dormitory lights were out. I'd have a flashlight, and I'd be Count Dracula, or Shakespeare, or Yogi Bear, and leap from bunk to bunk. I loved the laughter; I liked the way it made people feel.

C. C. H. Pounder

Love Art Young

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

C. C. H. Pounder

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.'

Cameron Mackintosh

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.

Carmen Busquets

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.

Charles Best

I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.

Chaske Spencer

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.

Chris de Burgh

I went to boarding school Southern, religious, and straight, and I left boarding school not being at all religious and not being straight.

Chris Hughes

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.

Christopher Buckley

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

Colm Toibin

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.

Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Curtis Sittenfeld

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.

Damian Lewis

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.

Damian Lewis

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.

Damian Lewis

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.

Dan Amboyer

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.

Daniel Espinosa

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!

Deirdre O'Kane

I think boarding school does give you an independence.

Deirdre O'Kane

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.

Denise Mina

I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.

Dennis Banks

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.

Diane Cilento

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!

Ed Weeks

We lived in Germany; my father was in the Army, and they figured I would have more consistency at boarding school. That kind of gives you a thick skin.

Ed Weeks

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.

Ed Weeks

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her.

Edmund White

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.'

Edward Carey

I grew up hearing that if it hadn't been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been 'a covered person' who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher.

Elif Batuman

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.'

Ella Eyre

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.

Elodie Yung

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.

Emma Weymouth