You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he’d never be another Shakespeare.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::
Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::
Learning for its own sake means exactly what it says: learning is the only reason that you’re doing it, because learning is what matters.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::
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
:::
That’s how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don’t belong to you.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::
The compulsive overachievement of today’s elite college students – the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can – is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn’t capable of handling the pressure.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::
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.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::
What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.
~ William Deresiewicz
:::