Frank Bruni Quotes

My fear is that these kids are always going to be evaluating their self-worth in terms of whether they hit the next rung society has placed in front of them at exactly the time that society has placed it. And that's dangerous, because you're going to slip and fall in your life.

He communicates authenticity to an electorate ravenous for it.

The mother of a student in Europe who was between his junior and senior years of high school called Motto in a frantic state. She had just read somewhere that college admissions offices looked for kids who had spent their summers in enriching ways, ideally doing charity work, and her son was due to be on vacation with the rest of the family in August. "Should we ditch our plans," she asked Motto, "and have him build dirt roads?" Motto reminded her that she lived in a well-paved European capital. "Where would these dirt roads be?" he said. "India?" she suggested. "Africa?" She hadn't worked it out. But if Yale might be impressed by an image of her son with a small spade, large shovel, rake or jackhammer in his chafed hands, she was poised to find a third-world setting that would produce that sweaty and ennobling tableau.

Thin people, God bless them, God curse them, don't get it: If you're not thin, you need to be careful and conscious about when and how you suitors initially see you.

College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to give your brain a vigorous workout and your soul a thorough investigation, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it.

Shiatsu, deep-tissue or maybe even Rolfing: Which manner of pummeling becomes a cephalopod most?

Are you telling me that the polite little note I sent my college alumni magazine has, by some unbeknownst series of errors, come to be printed in The Paper of Record, instead? What a fiasco!

Campaigns waged with lies presage governments racked by distrust. The sclerosis starts there.

But too many kids get to college and try to collapse it, to make it as comfortable and recognizable as possible. They replicate the friends and friendships they've previously enjoyed. They join groups that perpetuate their high school cliques. Concerned with establishing a "network" they seek out peers with aspirations identical to their own. In doing so, they frequently default to a clannishness that too easily becomes a lifelong habit. ....Open your laptops . Delete at least one of every four bookmarks. Replace it with something entirely different, even anti ethical. Go to twitter, Facebook etc start falling or connecting with views that diverge from your own. Conduct your social lives along the same lines, mixing it up. Do not go only to the campus basketball games....wander beyond the periphery of campus, and not to find equally enchanted realms-if you study abroad, don't choose the destination for its picturesqueness-but to see something else.

With a more expansive stretch, there's a better chance that I'll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she's smart and beautiful.

I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they're either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.

After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn't cling to extremes. He surveys the scenery and makes sure his outfit doesn't clash.