63 Quotes by William Deresiewicz

The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. In.

But it is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true, and it is our job to deal with it.

I can tell you right now where you’re going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us. Does it really matter exactly where? People get to places like Yale and think that they’ve “arrived,” only to discover that there are still other places to arrive at, and other places after that, and so on and so forth in an infinite recession, like the vista in a double mirror.

When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people.

Don’t try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You are going to be a very different person in two or three years, and that person will have his own ideas. All you can really figure out is what you want to do right now.

The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity.

When a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time, I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.

The very fact that we still have majors at all in this country represents a compromise between the ideals of depth and breadth –.

In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace has his narrator remark that “it was a little bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.