Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade.

Jessye Norman

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All my life I've been a show-off. Ever since first grade I was a clown, and even then I tried to entertain everyone.

From the time I was in first grade or so, my dad collected 'Star Wars' toy figures from the 1970s and '80s, and we'd take weekend family trips to antique shops and to toy stores. My father collected a crazy amount of 'Star Wars' stuff over the years, and he and I traveled to many conventions.

Alexandra Bracken

War Travel Time

I only finished first grade.

Amnat Ruenroeng

T Shed She

I failed first grade, which is my biggest problem. You always feel like a failure, like you're stupid.

Amy Sedaris

Failure You Which

My dad showed me a football and would throw it up and have my dog - a German Shepherd - chase me around when I went after the ball. I caught it because I was scared of that dog. The next year, my dad talked to the commissioner of a local league and convinced him to let me play as a first grader with third graders.

Austin Seferian-Jenkins

Car Year Would

I wasn't that over-the-top, but I got sent to the principal in first grade for talking. And my father was for a long time the president of the Board of Education. That was always a hard note to bring home.

Barbara Park

Time Home Education

When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.

Beverly Cleary

Time Teacher Patience

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.

Beverly Cleary

Time Wild Were

When I was in first grade, the kids called me 'fatso.' It hurt, but the way I overcame it was to outrun every kid in the class. So I developed a thick skin, and athletics became my way of performing and being accepted.

Billy Casper

Way Very UN

If you get behind in first grade, then you're behind every grade from then on.

Blake Griffin

You Very Then

I have always been the tallest guy in my class, going back to first grade. Announcers have always had fun with it.

Brock Osweiler

Wit Ways Way

When I was in first grade, some psychologist told my mom if I didn't go to graduate school, she basically failed as a parent, because I had the aptitude to do it. Which is so dumb. Huge pressure!

Cam

Mom Which Use

One thing that I'm super fortunate of - I grew up in a house where it was all about health and fitness. My dad was a wrestler; he was a boxer. He's always been into working out, and so I was the only kid in the first grade that got carrot sticks at school instead of chips.

Carmella

Work Health Fitness

I ended up going to public school in the first grade, and that's when I knew I had to be very strategic about my survival in school. I tried my best to be friends with people who were going to protect me.

Carmen Carrera

Wit Who Were

I had my two front teeth knocked out by a sixth grader in first grade.

Chad Michael Murray

Two Teeth T

When I was supposed to go to a certified kindergarten that's supposed to teach you actual things like how to read, I went to a daycare that my parents thought was a kindergarten. I was Crayola-ing inside the lines with no fundamental education at all. So I walked into the first grade with no formal education at all.

Chip Gaines

Men Education Car

When I was a kid in school, and you asked me what I was gonna be, I mean, even as a little first grader, I was gonna be a guitar picker on the 'Grand Ole Opry.' I just had it in my head that that's what I wanted to do, having no idea how it was done.

Dickey Betts

You Wanted Want

My father was Catholic, and my mother wanted me to go to Catholic school. That's what I did in first grade. But she couldn't afford the payments. I think it must have hurt her a lot, not to be able to give me a Catholic education.

Edward P. Jones

Men Education Wanted

I knew I wanted to be an actor in first grade.

Eric McCormack

Wanted Want Ted

Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets.

Gabrielle Giffords

Men Fear Us

In the state of Wisconsin it's mandated that teachers in the social sciences and hard sciences have to start giving environmental education by the first grade, through high school.

Gaylord Nelson

My mom teaches sixth grade and also taught first grade at one point. She's into dressing up and costumes and designing her own curriculum that way. She stayed home for about eight years with me and my sister when we were young before going back to teaching, so we had a lot of time with her. She taught us to read really early.

Haley Joel Osment

I remember hearing in first grade, 'Oh, why does she get to skip school?' It wasn't like I suddenly started feeling different. I always knew that I was. I never felt I missed out.

Hayden Panettiere

I was a strange, dark little dude. I fell in love with horror movies, at a very early age. Somehow, as a first grader, I was able to convince my parents to let me go see stuff like 'An American Werewolf in London' in theaters, so I was headed in that direction anyway.

James Roday

It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

Jane Yolen

The Supreme Being I would sign up for would not prove his omnipotence by saving one life while ending dozens, or hundreds, or thousands. Nor would he summon an angel to heaven by ending a first grader's life at the hands of a gunman or sadist.

Jeff Greenfield

I had a drummer in my band who started teaching me tricks to come up with interesting rhythms. Because I don't come from a musical background, I've never studied music, and I don't know music theory at all, so a lot of stuff I discover on my own are things students would learn in the first grade of music.

Jens Lekman

I cried every day of first grade. In class. Which meant I ended up getting comfortable emoting in a place where it wasn't the norm.

Jesse Eisenberg

Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade.

Jessye Norman

I did not even go to kindergarten; I just started first grade when I was five and started reading right away. I don't know how it all worked, but I had a lot of adults and older siblings around me. So, I guess I was probably introduced to what one would be introduced to at that time in kindergarten.

Joan Ganz Cooney

In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.

Jonathan Kozol

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

Jordin Sparks

I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice... but because of his omnipresent images.

Joseph Brodsky

First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.

Juan Felipe Herrera

I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.

Justin Cronin

In first grade, I told my friends I had a third story in my house filled with jewels and lions.

Kendall Jenner

I saw a lot of movies that I probably shouldn't have seen. I saw 'Dog Day Afternoon' when I was in first grade - that kind of thing.

Lee Unkrich

I was bullied in first grade, and it's definitely not fun. But always tell somebody instead of holding it in. Communicate with people and just say, 'Hey, I'm being bullied. I need help.'

Leo Howard

I couldn't speak English. I'm in kindergarten, and the only reason I got through to first grade is because I cheated.

Louis Zamperini

When I was really little, my favorite book was 'The BFG'. I read it - my teacher in, like, first grade read it to us. I love that book.

Madison Pettis

In preschool, I would plan out my show-and-tell every week to be funny and exciting. Then in first grade I wrote a play, and my classmates and I performed it as a puppet show.

Maxim Knight

My favorite color is jungle green. At least, that's what it said on the side of my favorite crayon in first grade. I don't know if it's an official color.

Mike Posner

My father was in Congress when I was born. He was mayor my whole life from when I was in grade school - first grade - to when I went away to college.

Nancy Pelosi

My dad had his own business and was extremely busy, but on a very rare occasion, he would play guitar and sing a bit. I was always fascinated by it. I wrote my first song in first grade because my dad was making songs up during those special moments, and it seemed like a fun thing to try myself.

Natalie Prass

We tried our best to work with the school and with the other families in the school system, and we did a gradual transition. I started transitioning when I was in first grade, and every year we kind of tacked a new thing on to it.

Nicole Maines

I grew up on Long Island, and from as early as I can remember, as far back as first grade, I had two real passions - one of them was putting on plays, and the other was journalism. I was directing plays and editing school papers from first grade on, all the way through college.

R. J. Cutler

I discovered the theater when I was in the first grade.

R. J. Cutler

I think that being read to every night is the reason why I was plowing through volume after volume of 'Nancy Drew' books all by myself by the time I reached the first grade. I loved stories. I loved the escape. I had a vivid imagination.

Rachel Nichols

First grade is very cheap. It's the later grades where you have to spend a lot of money if you don't do it right.

Ray Bradbury

I came of baseball age (isn't it always around first grade?) in the last sputtering years of the A's Philadelphia tenancy. I probably plighted my fated troth in 1949, when the A's fluked into a winning season and introduced a pintsize southpaw named Bobby Shantz.

Richard Corliss