I know from my own personal experience. I was bullied in middle school and high school and went through my fair share of hard times thereafter. Also one of my really good friends committed suicide when I was in high school.

I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

While I was trying to save money to go to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Australia I ended up getting all of this experience which meant that by the time I had enough money in the bank to go to school I didn't really need to go to school anymore.

I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.

I didn't go to high school so I don't have a high school experience. I was home-schooled during high school.

Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go but without the discipline of real life they remain of the nature of theory only.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.

In high school I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done and nobody was really interested in getting anything done.

I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.