Detention Quotes

“I’ll make Goyle do lines, it’ll kill him, he hates writing,” said Ron happily. He lowered his voice to Goyle’s low grunt and, screwing up his face in a look of pained concentration, mimed writing in midair. “I... must... not... look... like... a... baboon’s... backside.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Detention, Saturday night, my office,” said Snape. “I do not take cheek from anyone, Potter . . . not even ‘the Chosen One.’”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“D'you know what that - (he called Snape something that made Hermoine say "Ron!")" - is making me do? I've got to scrub out the bedpans in the hospital wing. Without magic!" He was breathing deeply, his fists clenched.

"Why couldn't Black have hidden in Snape's office, eh? He could have finished him off for us!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“Let me guess: you were one of those kids who had a chair dedicated to you in detention in school."

"Was not. They retired my chair after it sort of accidentally caught on fire. There's a plaque there now.”
― Toni McGee Causey, Bobbie Faye's Very (very, very, very) Bad Day

“Joy is meant to be felt; its not meant to be detained. It is meant to be shared with others; not to be felt alone. When all the mouths smile out their teeth together, thats when the greatest happiness can be measured. You don't smile in order to see your friends cry and claim your joy is divine.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“What is it, I wonder, that they hope to Correct? I am what I am, irredeemably, irretrievably, implacably — as are most of my fellow desperadoes here in Correctional Facility.
We are monsters.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Dexter Is Dead

“--he stopped and eyed Bill Corso--"if you choose to just sit here like a bored jungle gorilla, you will have to write out this quote as many times as you can during the next hour.”
― A.S. King, Please Ignore Vera Dietz

“I want to tell him that when we were in the camps waiting for a boat we spoke about what we imagined Australia would be like. Kangaroos, koalas, wide open spaces. Then, when we arrived, we were locked up and the images we had shrank smaller and smaller until Australia became tiny patches of sky beyond the barbed wire.”
― Randa Abdel-Fattah, When Michael Met Mina

“The desert is an unpredictable place. One day you're sweating, the next you're freezing. One moment the air is damp and cloudy like when the tide is coming in, the next the entire world is orange and dusty. The desert must be a woman.”
― Dianna Skowera, Of Those So Close Beside Me

“Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.”
― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

“With just about every script, in almost every corner of the set, I was faced with the truth: This was my parents' life. My mother had sat in handcuffs; my father had once worn an orange jumpsuit like the dozens that sat folded in our wardrobe department. For the other actors and me on our show, this was all fantasy, the re-creation of a world we knew little about; for Mami and Papi, it could not have been any more real or painful...I've had so many scenes in which Flaca & I are doing the dirty work, like cleaning the kitchen or mopping the floors, which is when I think of my parents most. Long before they ended up in prison, they'd spent years handling the nastiest jobs, the ones often avoided by others. Manual labor. Low pay. No respect. They must've felt so trapped. It must've been so hard for them to maintain their dignity when others looked down on them or, worse, didn't see them at all.”
― Diane Guerrero, In the Country We Love: My Family Divided

“Ann did detention like Whitney Houston did cocaine—frequently and without consideration of the consequences.”
― Sage Steadman, Ann, Not Annie

“All roads lead there, child. You should know that.”
“Detention?” Percy asked.
“Rome, child,” the old woman said. “Rome.”
― Rick Riordan, The Son of Neptune

“Sentence every immoral thought for detention and prosecution. Immorality is a powerful gadget that brings down great monuments of success. Don’t entertain immorality.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream

“It was just a slight malfunction of character.”
― Cath Crowley, Take Three Girls

“Integrity is one of the major charecteristics to maintain a relationship, leadership or social status in the community. If people fail to sustain this charercteritics, it can lead to economic, social , educational or environmental consequences which can negatively impact their reputation.”
― Saaif Alam

“Did you know that human beings can, in fact, cluck? /i didn't, not until Mr. Henry Wickworth found me dozing off in class the first day of seventh-grade English at the Academy. His face turned a shade of purple not normally found in nature, and me and the rest of the class had to sit through a ten-minute rant about respectful behavious and rudeness, and how he'd be expecting an essay outlining the difference by the end of detention that same afternoon.
Yeah, detention on the first day of school. Detention every day for the entire first week of school, actually. So far, I'd written papers on disrespect, inconsiderateness, and honor. I thought he was actually going to take his ruler and break it over my head when he asked for one defining wiseacre, and I only wrote one sentence: I prefer smart aleck, sir.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding

“Comparing the world's balance sheet to a seesaw, it seems like the 'war' side has been hogging the playground while 'peace' is stuck in detention.”
― Dipti