Art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren’t the center of the universe. That others weren’t created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.
~ William Deresiewicz

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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. If that’s what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning – the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons – then you did it wrong.
~ William Deresiewicz

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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.
~ William Deresiewicz

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Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state.
~ William Deresiewicz

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If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That is itself a kind of freedom.
~ William Deresiewicz

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A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself.
~ William Deresiewicz

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