Quotes by American Authors - Page 294

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it," [John] Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantage.
Fareed Zakaria
Nick wanted to meet on campus at Love Library. (That was the actual name; thank you for your donation, Mayor Don Lathrop Love.)
Rainbow Rowell
He's like the anti-Ben, but his attention is like a shot of adrenaline.
Jessica Calla
This was one of those non-glamorous parts about college that people never tell you about - worrying that the dilapidated apartment hosting a party would fall apart with you in it.
Alyssa Rose Ivy
I rub my hand down my face, frustrated. This girl in front of me tests my patience like hell. When she ran to me after her dad kicked her out, I thought she still had feelings for me. She needed a place to stay, and I needed her. I offered her a room, thinking if she was around me every day, she would remember she loves me. I was dead wrong. Somewhere along the way, we switched roles, I became the one who so desperately needed her and she became cold and closed off. She isn’t my savior; she’s my punishment.
Brittany Butler
A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.
Mary Karr
Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.
Mary Karr
Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder.
Mary Karr
On the hot, fragrant afternoon of my graduation from college it seemed that good fortune was not merely latent but unavoidable, folded and in the bag.
Geoffrey Wolff
Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors' orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her.
John Wray
It is a shock to many college graduates that their segway into the real world is one of obligation, profound debt, and countless sacrifices of the soul.
Chris Matakas
It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.
Marina Keegan
Et supper?" Foote asked."No, sir," Stoner answered.Mrs. Foote crooked an index finger at him and padded away, Stoner followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she motioned him to sit at a table. She put a pitcher of milk and several squares of cold cornbread before him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry from excitement, would not take the bread.Foote came into the room and stood beside his wife. He was a small man, not more than five feet three inches, with a lean face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller, and heavy; rimless spectacles hid her eyes, and her thin lips were tight. The two of them watched hungrily as he sipped his milk. "Feed and water the livestock, slop the pigs in the morning," Foote said rapidly.Stoner looked at him blankly. "What?""That's what you do in the morning," Foote said, "before you leave for your school. Then in the evening you feed and slop again, gather the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. Weekends, you help me with whatever I'm doing.""Yes, sir," Stoner said.Foote studied him for a moment. "College," he said and shook his head.
John Williams
No matter how much you learn in college, it never prepares you for the real world.
Donald Allen
He's a cocky SOB. He knew the Nick Adams Stories. Probably a frustrated English major who graduated from college qualified to drive a cab.
Peter Heller
And by the way, I know my title said “10 Reasons” and I only listed “6”. I didn’t learn to count in college.
James Altucher
College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.
Garth Risk Hallberg
In almost 25 years of experience as a high school guidance counselor, a regional college representative, and a private college counselor, I have noted the kinds of things that make the college process productive, successful, and enjoyable. I have worked with so many students who have blossomed in part due to their college search and application process. It can be a period of maturation and of self-exploration, with an honest assessment of skills and interests, development of task organization and discipline, renewed intrafamily communication, and travel to interesting cities and small college towns. I firmly believe when the journey to college is fully embraced, it can truly be loved.
Jill Madenberg
I was brand-new in San Francisco, right out of college, and I thought it was thrilling, a guy buying me a drink. I didn’t think, how tacky, this creep is buying me a drink. I thought, how amazing, I put on lipstick and a short skirt and look what can happen.
Marcy Dermansky
Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I'd simply been on a long vacation. ..What happened to me? I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.
Mitch Albom
Yet here was Morrie talking with the wonder of our college years, as if I'd simply been on a long vacation. ..I once promised I would never work for money, that I would join the Peace Corps, that I would live in beautiful, inspirational places.
Mitch Albom
...and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on "college life" before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?
Grace Metalious
It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman dorm. Are we the ones keeping Lincoln's memory alive? Or are we burying it?
Eric Foner
Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, 250% in the Soviet Union, 400% in France, and more than 200% in China by 1965. Gaddis writes, "What governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was.
John Gaddis
When I was at the University of California at Berkeley, I went to some classes that must have had more than four hundred students in them. I almost always sat in the far back of the auditorium so I could read the newspaper. I remember that I stayed late one day to ask the professor a question, and when I got up to him, all I could think to myself was, 'So this is what the professor looks like.
Stephan Pastis
When you're in college you haven't had that much life. Parents, school, assorted youth activities—that's about it.
Martha Moody
This is an extra letter in the middle of the month because I'm rather lonely tonight. It's awfully stormy; the snow is beating against my tower. All the lights are out on the campus, but I drank black coffee and I can't go to sleep.I had a supper party this evening consisting of Sallie and Julia and Leonora Fenton - and sardines and toasted muffins and salad and fudge and coffee. Julia said she'd had a good time, but Sallie stayed to help wash the dishes.
Jean Webster
I was never educated to be an actor. I went to a regular college. It was a great thing for me because I feel that the main thing to get out of college is a thirst for knowledge. College should teach you how to be curious. Most people think that college is the end of education, but it isn't. The ceremony of giving you the diploma is called commencement. And that means you are fit to commence learning because you have learned hot to learn.
Vincent Price
Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn't take half a semester to read one book of poems... that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him.
Maureen Johnson
And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means
W.E.B. Du Bois
A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing “classical” music; that two, he was doing it “softly”; and that three, “there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man multitude.
Vladimir Nabokov
Though outwardly Kristina maintained that a clean room was a symptom of a diseased mind (for how could she, while studying the world's greatest thinkers, be bothered with such mundane earthly issues as cleaning?), inwardly she hated untidyness and made a point of spending as little time in the room as possible.
Paullina Simons
Of a sudden he felt that fraternity life was the only way to exist at college. How could he have doubted? (126)
Ferrol Sams
Christ, seven years of college, down the drain.
John Belushi
Look, Mrs. McGillicuddy, it's not my fault your son jumped out a dorm room window on Christmas eve. I've written over fifty books as a Columbia professor, all right? You don't do that by holding hands with every at-risk undergraduate who says he's homesick, or he's turning gay, or the dog ate his term paper. I write about Lincoln, and freedom, and great ideas. I don't always have time for students. It's like Dean Martin used to say: if you want to talk, go to a priest. Hey -- what's the gun for?
Eric Foner
Hey, Pedro, could you get your shopping cart out of my faculty parking space? Yes, I know you live on the street. But you know how hard it is to find a parking spot on the Upper West Side. After all, you used to be one of my best students! So how's that Columbia degree working out for you? Not so good, huh? Sorry about that. Really! But you know, a college degree isn't like some cheap used car. There's no warantee. Right, there's no Lemon Law either. Buyer beware! Look, Pedro, I don't want to call security again. Yes, I know they're your cousins. What's that? You'll wash my car for a dollar? Well, I guess that's a good deal. Where's your sponge bucket? What's that? You've got a hose? What do you mean, it's tucked in your pants? Hey Pedro -- no, no, no don't -- aw, Pedro!
Eric Foner
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Herman Melville
High school parties exhausted me because I always felt like I was the only thinking person in a room mostly full of morons obliterating precious IQ points with every gulp of whatever booze they managed to steal out of their parents' liquor cabinets. College parties are exhausting in a diametrically opposite way. They are full of smart, funny people who are all used to being the smartest, funniest person in the room, so they spend the whole party talking over one another, overlapping and overtaking the conversation to prove that they are the smartest, funniest person in the room, if not the entire planet.
Megan McCafferty
What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth.
Anne Rice
You're sure your new roommate won't be like the last one who wore tinfoil socks and had a tendency to occasionally urinate in the refrigerator. You're sure you'll pass Math 106 this time around. You're determined to actually join some clubs this year and not just sit around in your dorm eating spray cheese from a can and watching youtube videos about cats.
Patrick Rothfuss
Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.
Abbie Hoffman
But if you tell folks you're a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you're talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn't work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.
Chuck Palahniuk
All questions have a basis in love. All answers lead to LOVE. If you can color everything in love, you have all the colors in the world.
Eve Evangelista
Look out from within and observe the words, actions, reactions, and feelings that evolve from you. Release the identity with what you have observed if it creates tension and stress. Surely you will dissolve into effortless being that way.
Franklin Gillette
Nature is self-renewing as it adjusts to maintain balance. Nature becomes even more vibrant as it yields to allow recycling. It is best to align with success and become nature with your health, wealth, and relationships.
Franklin Gillette
To see the divine in others, we have to love. Where love is thick, faults are thin. If you really love someone, then it is difficult to find fault with him. His faults seem negligible, for love means oneness. This oneness comes from our conscious acceptance of his reality as it is.
Sri Chinmoy
One who walks in love sees the world through the envelope of their mission.
Bryant McGill
When the peace in not inside, we seek it outside. When the peace is not outside, we turn inside. Whether there is internal peace or an internal storm, it spirals outward to everyone you see and everything you touch.
Franklin Gillette
We never stopped being each other.
Alicen Grey
Most organized religions often succeed in enslaving the soul through useless traditions, prejudices and ideological divisions. Yet, true spiritual enlightenment and everlasting freedom can only be found in the perfect wisdom that LOVE is the truest most fundamental foundation of every faith which should, inevitably, lead every seeker down the path to the most profound introspective spiritual understanding one could ever know...we are all one.
Jason Versey
We all come from different paths in life but we can find common ground.
Nanette Mathews
Genuine love is ever constant, unchanging. There is no separation by degrees, levels, or kinds. There is no comparison or judgment since there is just one kind and it is inside everyone. Ego and the world around would have us believe otherwise.
Nanette Mathews
Beneath all the polarization, we are all God consciousness.
Lynne Cockrum-Murphy
All that you know; or believe to be true;Is no limit for All that Is;on a tiny planet whirling through an Infinite Sky.So be open. Be an empty vessel.Have the innocent curiosity of a childof the Universe. In this Way allow the Universe to flow freely through your Onenessand your profound inner silenceof open heart, mind and Spirit.Surrender all preconception.become only immersed withinthe Infinite Way of Love Light and Oneness
Leland Lewis
Why is it considered so glorious to kill an enemy, when it is not considered contemptible to create one?
Anne E.G. Nydam
Choose your friends carefully but don’t worry about your enemies, they will choose you
Carl Henegan
This squirrel is inadequately afraid of humans! Squirrel, I am a threat to you! We are enemies! Please get off my bench! Oh, god! Oh, god! Don't touch me—oh, god!
John Green
I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive
Barbara Deming
But, most important, we must not become as base and treacherous as our enemies.
Danielle Trussoni
Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that is who you become most like, Anna tosses Nietzsche's quote up into the air. She serves up words she has heard me say in the past.
Patricia Cornwell