63 Quotes by William Deresiewicz

I was also missing something else: the joy that comes when you stop feeling threatened by other people’s accomplishments and let yourself be open to the beauty that they bring into the world. For that is one of the greatest curses of the high-achieving mentality: the envy that it forces on you – the desperation, not simply to be loved, but to be loved, as Auden says, alone.

That’s how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don’t belong to you.

By the time they finish high school – after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents’ friends – elite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers.

We are not teaching to the test; we are living to it.

The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They’ve learned to “be a student,” not to use their minds.

Online instruction isn’t just conducted on the Web; it embodies an idea of knowledge that’s been shaped by the Web – by Google, by Wikipedia – a confusion of information with understanding.

I sentimenti sono anche il modo primo di conoscere un romanzo; e i romanzi sono il terreno di prova per conoscere il mondo, santuari dell’immaginazione dove affinare e mettere alla prova i nostri valori, le nostre scelte. I sentimenti sono lo strumento di lavoro dei romanzieri, i colori della loro tavolozza.

Jane Austen’s life may have seemed uneventful compared to her aunt’s or cousin’s or brothers’, or indeed, compared to just about anyone’s. Her genius began with the recognition that such lives as hers were very eventful indeed – that every life is eventful, if only you know how to look at it. She did not think that her existence was quiet or trivial or boring; she thought it was delightful and enthralling, and she wanted us to see that our own are, too.

We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments – that is, the sacrifices – to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.