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1 " If you ever put a student at this school in danger again-''Oh, I thought you Gallagher Girls were immune to danger.'Despite the hundred girls the filled the foyer, no one moved or gasped or tried to defend our honor. We stood silently, waiting for our headmistress to say, 'Oh, we are quite used to being underestimated, Agent Townsend. In fact, we welcome it. "
― Ally Carter , Only the Good Spy Young (Gallagher Girls, #4)
2 " She'll soon forget." " Caddy," said Saffron impatiently, " she is headmistress of the private school! She's probably never forgotten anything in her whole life! "
3 " This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds. "
― Ian McEwan
4 " The fireworks continued to burn and spread all over the school that afternoon. Though they caused plenty of disruption, the other teachers did not seem to mind them very much." Dear, dear," said Professor McGonagall sardonically, as one of the dragons soared around her classroom, emitting loud bangs and exhaling flame. " Miss Brown, would you mind running along to the headmistress and informing her that we have an escaped firework in our classroom?" " Thank you so much, Professor!" said Professor Flitwick in his squeaky little voice. " I could have got rid of the sparklers myself, of course, but I wasn't sure whether I had the authority..." Beaming, he closed the classroom door in Umbridge's snarling face. "
5 " If I had been armed with a feminist understanding that no girl deserves to be called a slut, perhaps I would have fought back by reporting the harassment to my school's headmistress or another school authority, or at least I might have had the strength to tell of the name-callers on my own. But at the time, all I knew was that if I avoided eye contact, it was a hell of a lot easier to get through my days. "
― Leora Tanenbaum , Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
6 " Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks....The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. " For the English department," she told me.... But, " To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag? "
