Parenting & Family Quote by Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton delivers this like a punchline that lands as a bruise. “I hated school” is blunt, almost childlike in its simplicity, but the real bite is in how the feeling refuses to stay in the past. The school bus isn’t nostalgia-coded Americana here; it’s a moving symbol of dread, a yellow reminder that certain institutions don’t just educate, they sort, shame, and wear people down. When she says it’s “depressing,” she’s not describing a memory so much as a reflex - the body keeping the score decades later.

The turn to “The poor little kids” is classic Parton: compassion as both shield and critique. She doesn’t frame herself as uniquely wounded; she widens the lens to a whole parade of children trapped in a system that often confuses conformity with character. It’s empathy with an edge, because it implies the problem wasn’t only her fit in school, but school’s fit for the kind of bright, working-class, creatively wired kid she once was.

Context matters: Parton grew up in rural poverty in East Tennessee, and her public persona has always fused warmth with clear-eyed memory of scarcity. This line threads that biography into her broader cultural project - the woman who built the Imagination Library also understands why kids might need an escape hatch from the classroom story. The genius is that she makes the critique without sanctimony. She mourns the children first, and lets the institution indict itself.