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9ee8842
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You didn't need a college degree to become one of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own.
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education
life
college
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Jeannette Walls |
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dc7f312
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What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists?
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suicide
college
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Bret Easton Ellis |
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602f0fc
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Oh, why does college have to happen to perfectly good people?
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perfectly-good-people
trials-of-apollo
college
percy-jackson
rick-riordan
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Rick Riordan |
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24140ea
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Loneliness wasn't just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt... it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It was merely that she had no friends. She didn't even have a sanctuary in which she could simply be alone.
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loneliness
college
friendless
lonely
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Tom Wolfe |
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ec47c18
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"Most of us are pseudo-scholars...for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive, and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties. Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning. It also has an economic side, on which we need not be hard. Most of us must get a job before thirty, or sponge on our relatives, and many jobs can only be got by passing an exam. The pseudo-scholar often does well in examination (real scholars are not much good), and even when he fails he appreciates their inner majesty. They are gateways to employment, they have power to ban and bless. A paper on King Lear may lead somewhere, unlike the rather far-fetched play of the same name. It may be a stepping-stone to the Local Government Board. He does not often put it to himself openly and say, "That's the use of knowing things, they help you to get on." The economic pressure he feels is more often subconscious, and he goes to his exam, merely feeling that a paper on King Lear is a very tempestuous and terrible experience but an intensely real one. ...As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment were contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider."
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writing
market
employment
falsehood
jobs
scholarship
college
economics
faculty
exams
university
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E.M. Forster |
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9acbceb
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Sometimes people graduate but they don't leave. They hang around for years, for no reason. I would think of ghosts like that, I decided.
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letting-go
college
ghosts
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Maureen Johnson |
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1fa3493
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I used to think all that game playing was par for the course and even kind of exciting. It just felt logical to pursue a boy the same way I applied to college--by expending exorbitant time and energy showing what a great catch I am and what a perfect match we'd be, so that after a lengthy waiting period I might get accepted. But now the idea of reliving any version of that charade seems like hell.
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college
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Daria Snadowsky |
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f431aaf
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I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can't open and close the door whenever they feel like it.
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college
teaching
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David Sedaris |
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cc6c1c6
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"Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks.... The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?"
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poetry
awakening
college
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Annie Dillard |
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3e14608
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I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction.
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reading
fiction
english-classes
english-degrees
college
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Flannery O'Connor |
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5b3e3bf
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Boy needs to get a good night's sleep. Otherwise, he'll be lucky to get accepted at SUNY-So Far Upstate You Might As Well Be In Canada, ?
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sleep
humor
college
insomniac
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Rachel Cohn |
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397964a
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Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber- I suspected both. If I wasn't literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I'd lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you're one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one.
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struggle
intelligence
classes
college
academics
dumb
school
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Curtis Sittenfeld |
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daeaa11
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Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.
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selectivity
college
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Rebecca Goldstein |