SchoolNotes.com - Notes Page

Photo: Grandpa reads The Princess Bride to his sick grandson.
- novel & screenplay written by William Goldman -
Photo from the movie, The Princess Bride.

LETTERS YOU WROTE TO YOURSELVES
in the late 1990s

In 2008,
nearly two years after I retired from teaching
and began a new career as a photographer
and became a volunteer publicist
for a community concert ssociation,
and volunteer photographer
for MS NYC fund raising events,
I mailed the letters
my 8th grade students wrote to THEMSELVES
at the end of our Writing classes in 1998 and 1999.

Thank you so much
to each student and parent
who emailed me to tell me you received the letter
and to tell me a bit about your journey
over the past 10 or so years.

It was with great JOY that I read your good news,
with profound SORROW that I read your sad news,
and with a big SMILE that I read about how hilarious
many of you found it to hear from your middle school selves.

And, remember,
all students are always welcome to contact me
by using the email feature at top of this page,
or the Contact Me page of ParryPix.com

warm hugs - Ms. Parry

* * * QUOTES OF THE DAY * * *

1. "Life is too short to be small." -- Benjamin Disraeli

2. "He that is good at making excuses is seldom good at anything else." -- Benjamin Franklin

3. "I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances." — Martha Washington

4. "Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." -- Joseph Addison

5. "Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." -- John Watson

6. "Hard writing makes easy reading." -- Wallace Stegner

7. "Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got." - Janis Joplin

8. "Hold fast to dreams / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird / That cannot fly." -- Langston Hughes

9. "Don't worry about knowing people; just make yourself worth knowing." -- Unknown

10. "What goes around comes around." -- African American saying

11. "People will forget what you said. . . . People will forget what you did. . . . But people will never forget how you made them feel." -- Unknown

12. "Like a ten-speed bike, most of us have gears we do not use." -- Charles Schulz

13. "When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion." --Ethiopian proverb

14. "Beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing." -- Aesop

15. "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." -- Henry David Thoreau

16. "The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything." -- Edward Phelps

17. "If you were another person, would you like to be a friend of yours?" -- Unknown

18. "You can't unscramble eggs." -- John Pierpont Morgan

19. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke

20. "Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent." — Eleanor Roosevelt

21. "Don't judge a book by its cover." -- English proverb

22. "To speak kindly does not hurt the tongue." -- Proverb

23."You will never have a friend if you must have one without faults." -- Unknown

24. "You can encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated." -- Maya Angelou

25. "Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

26. "We haven't failed. We now know a thousand things that won't work, so we are much closer to finding what will." -- Thomas Edison

27. "We must be authors of the history of our age." -- Madeleine Albright

28. "The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail and not his tongue." -- Unknown

29. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." — Margaret Mead

30. "No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it." -- George Washington Carver

31. "We may all have come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

32. "Choose your socks by their color and your friends by their character. Choosing your socks by their character makes no sense. Choosing your friends by their color is unthinkable."-- Unknown

33. "Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration." -- Thomas Edison

34. "There is a great distance between said and done." -- Puerto Rican proverb

35. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Chinese proverb

36. "A friend who lies for you may also lie against you." -- Unknown

37. "The price of your hat isn't the measure of your brain." -- African American Saying

38. "The wastebasket is a writer's best friend." -- Isaac Bashevis Singer

39. "Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise." -- William Penn

40. "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." -- Unknown

41. "People don't get along because they fear each other. People fear each other because they don't know each other. They don't know each other because they have not properly communicated with each other." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

42. "You have brains in your head./ You have feet in your shoes./ You can steer yourself any direction you choose. / You're on your own./ And you know what you know. / And you are the guy / Who'll decide where you go." -- Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

43. "Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright." -- Benjamin Franklin

44. "He that flings dirt at another dirties himself most." -- Thomas Fuller

45. "Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech that you will ever regret." -- Ambrose Bierce

46. "The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer; it's that there are so many answers." -- Ruth Benedict, anthropologist

47. "The sleeping fox catches no poultry." -- Benjamin Franklin

48. "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. When I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." -- Mark Twain

49. "One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -- Elbert Hubbard

50. "Statistically 100 percent of the shots you don't take don't go in." -- Wayne Gretsky

51. "If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." -- Benjamin Franklin

52. "Everyone must row with the oars he has." -- English proverb

53. "You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do." -- Henry Ford

54. "This thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down but the staying down." -- Mary Pickford

55. "If you're going to do good work, the work has to scare you." -- Andre Previn

56. "We must be careful what we say. No bird resumes its egg." -- Emily Dickinson

57. "Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." --Vernon Saunders Law

58. "For all of us today, the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily & inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

59. "Life is like a trumpet. If you don't put anything into it, you don't get anything out of it." -- W.C. Handy

60. "To err is human, to forgive is divine." -- Alexander Pope

61. "A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked." -- Bernard Meltzer

62. "Truth may be stretched but cannot be broken. It always gets above falsehood as oil does above water." -- Miguel de Cervantes

64. "My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it." -- Chuang-tzu

65. "Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold." -- Anonymous

66. "Not failure, but low aim, is crime." -- James Russell Lowell

67. "Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world." -- William James

68. "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." -- William James

69. "The main thing is to care. Care very hard, even if it is only a game you are playing." -- Billie Jean King

70. "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

71. "You can't win unless you know how to lose." -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

72. "One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning." -- James Russell Lowell

73. "An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes." -- Cato the Elder

74. "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship." -- William Blake

75. "[I]t is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling -- and indeed healthy -- to ask why you have been given so much." -- Condoleezza Rice

76. "You have to be true to yourself, but you have to be true to your best self, not to the self that secretly thinks you are better than other people." -- Stephen Gaskin

77. "Your children need your presence more than your presents." -- Jesse Jackson

78. "Even monkeys fall out of trees." -- Japanese proverb

79. "To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks." -- A. A. Milne

80. "Things turn out the best for people who make the best of the way things turn out." -- John Wooden