College Freshmen Quotes

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class. ~ Donna Tartt

This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students' top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.20 We live in a more individualistic society. If ~ David Brooks

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools ... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. ~ H.L. Mencken

If you believe you have a just cause, an important message, or a key contribution to make, you will be just as innovative as a college freshman desperate to see his girlfriend six hundred miles away. You will get there any way you can. ~ Laurie Beth Jones

If I had to give one piece of advice to incoming college freshmen, I'd say always be true to yourself. ~ Beverley Mitchell

I was more into music, before I got into college. In high school, I used to play guitar and sing. I did a lot of that. But, when I graduated and went to college, I remember my freshman year and this girl from across the hall, who is one of my good friends to this day, had a brother who was in the school improv team. We went to go watch a show and it blew my face off. ~ Steven Yeun

From being at art college, I've always hated people that have the gall to think that they're being incredibly different when they're doing something in a very acceptable way, something safe that they've seen someone else doing. ~ Sade Adu

When I got to college, I used to run on top of everything else, because when you gain weight in swimming, you have to do something else, like bike or run, to maintain the weight or take the weight off. ~ Summer Sanders

No one should be denied the opportunity to get an education and increase their earning potential based solely on their inability to pay for a college education. ~ Bobby Scott

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong. ~ Carl Sagan

I love college life. ~ Lil' Romeo

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education. ~ Gary Shteyngart

That was my big realization twenty years ago. It all passes. Here I am at the bathroom door, and how can I ever get to the sink? How can high school ever end, how can I ever finish college, how can I ever be married? But then I'm at the sink, I'm back out the door, I have a Ph.D., I'm married with three kids, and twenty years have passed. Here I am alive, and how can I ever die? But I will, I know I will, I know it in my soul. ~ Rudy Rucker

After Newport, I worked in television for a while, and then I went to The Royal College Of Art and did a master's degree. I really did study quite a lot! ~ Asif Kapadia

My advice to defensive players: Take the shortest route to the ball and arrive in a bad humor. ~ Bowden Wyatt

It's my whole life of being the little guy and having a little chip on my shoulder, from year to year trying to prove myself, and at the end of the day to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame is a very special honor for me. ~ Doug Flutie

Well, when I was younger, in high school, I started out smoking pot. Which escalated into taking acid on a regular basis, which escalated into selling acid. And then I started, when I went to college, I started doing opiates. ~ John Wozniak

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning. ~ B.B. King

The NFL draft is going to be this Thursday. That's a huge night for college players. That's the night they start being paid over the table. ~ Jay Leno

I simply wanted to get through college as quickly as humanly possible. I had no interest in extracurricular activities or anything that required me to be social. I was allergic to people. ~ Nadine Velazquez

I'd seen it happen, how hard it was to get out. Every year, one or two kids would visit from college for a long October weekend and simply never leave. They came home, cocooned themselves in the familiar radius of the town limits, and never broke free again. Years later, you'd see them working in the kitchen at the pizza place, or sitting at the bar in the East Bank Tavern. Shoulders hunched, jaw set, skin slack. And in the waning light of their eyes, the barest sensation that once upon a time, they been somewhere else ... or maybe it was only a dream. ~ Kat Rosenfield

Your retirement comes before your children's tuition. That's because there's no financial aid for retirement, and there's still a good deal available for college. ~ Jean Chatzky

When I was 12, that's when I went to college. All my friends were 20, 21, and I was 12. It didn't even occur to me that that was strange. ~ Joshua Bell

I didn't want to go to college, and my parents said, 'Well, then you'd better get a job, because we're not paying for you to drop out of school.' So I delivered pizza near USC for a while. We had to wear khakis and a baseball hat with the logo on it, and I worked almost every day. ~ Dylan Penn

Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal. To me, that's the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of. ~ Jim McKay

My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American accent. ~ Jennifer Ehle

I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library; a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I really enjoy playing the piano. I took lessons throughout middle school, but I had to drop the lessons. I actually got too busy, but I hope to pick up the lessons when I'm in college if I can. ~ Miranda Leek

A knowledge of the Bible without a college course is more valuable than a college course without the Bible. ~ William Lyon Phelps

My friends back in Chicago think I'm crazy when I talk about you. They keep telling me that I'm too young to feel this way. I'm not too young, Charley. I know with more certainty than I've ever had about anything in my life that you're my future. I know that when we're ready, after college or whatever, we're going to get married and that you're going to be the mother of my kids. I know that deep in my gut.
Jake ~ Samantha Young

After being raised as an evangelical Christian, I for years assumed that Christianity was the default - there were Christians, and then there were weirdos. I was shocked when, in college, I found that some people get offended when you tell them, for instance, that their recovery from surgery was a 'miracle.' ~ David Wong

Accountability measures allow administrators to require the faculty to "teach to the test," rather than devise the curriculum according to its own judgment. In this way, college professors can be reduced to the same subordinate status to which elementary and secondary school teachers have already been relegated. ~ Benjamin Ginsberg

I am a palette of emotions; I remember how I have cov-eted to be free from the school rules. I look around to see people casually dressed up and walking with an aim maybe to make a better career or just add fame of DU degree like me. The campus is buzzing with freshman and activity. I just hope, these corridors, hallways, and passages don't see me trip-ping and falling any day. I feel more comfortable standing in between the crowd of people moving. Like nobody is paying any heed. You can be yourself without feeling awkward about anything. ~ Parul Wadhwa

When our small research group moved from MIT to Dartmouth College years ago, one of the Dartmouth engineering professors watched us in seminars for a while, and then dropped by our offices. "You people are different," he said. "You ask different kinds of questions. You see things I don't see. Somehow you come at the world in a different way. How? Why? ~ Donella H. Meadows

In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions. ~ Philip Roth

11 WAYS TO BE UNREMARKABLY AVERAGE 1. Accept what people tell you at face value. 2. Don't question authority. 3. Go to college because you're supposed to, not because you want to learn something. 4. Go overseas once or twice in your life, to somewhere safe like England. 5. Don't try to learn another language; everyone else will eventually learn English. 6. Think about starting your own business, but never do it. 7. Think about writing a book, but never do it. 8. Get the largest mortgage you qualify for and spend 30 years paying for it. 9. Sit at a desk 40 hours a week for an average of 10 hours of productive work. 10. Don't stand out or draw attention to yourself. 11. Jump through hoops. Check off boxes. ~ Chris Guillebeau

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother. ~ Al Pacino

He gave her a smile that wasn't really a smile at all. "Eh, it wouldn't be so bad. I wouldn't have to study for the SATs or get a summer job or figure out my major. I can drink Elderflower wine all day, dance all through the night, and sleep on a bower of roses."
Hazel made a face. "I'm pretty sure there are some colleges where you can do that. I bet there are some colleges where you can major in that. ~ Holly Black

At college, more than anywhere else, one was likely to make the friendships that supported one through life. ~ Vera Brittain

Towers' is the name of the dormitory that I lived in in college; it's made up of these two towers – North and South – my girlfriend lived in one and I lived in the other. It's about falling in love, but also about what happens when you've long fallen out of love and those reminders are still there. You drive by them, these two buildings, and you look, and you realise that we really built that up. That we really built that love into these things, and for a long time afterward looking at them really made me feel sad; to see these empty buildings that I don't go in to anymore. But then, as time goes on, they start to become kind of joyous in their own way: you can look at them and think 'that love was great and these buildings still stand tall'. But there's also an element of the fact that they're just buildings – they're gonna fall down one day, and they're not that important because there's new love in your life and you've got to break things down that get built up. ~ Justin Vernon

Contrary to what I thought, being a college grad and fluent in English doesn't make one a good English teacher. I was surprised to learn that all the stuff I didn't know about the language was more than I knew - by a multiple of ten. I knew my nouns, verbs and adjectives. I could speak intelligently about the past, present and future tenses. No problem. But my students were asking me about aspects of English way out in the hinterlands of my understanding. Holy hell! When did English get more than three tenses? Turns out a world existed beyond verbs and nouns. A big world that, for me at the time, seemed as deep and incomprehensible as quantum physics. Tenses like the past perfect, the subjunctive, the pluperfect, the present perfect, the future perfect continuous. Often ~ Mary Williams

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think. ~ Elbert Hubbard

In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news. ~ Bob Edwards

The image of him shifted with the violent frenzy of leaves. He was there and he wasn't, as the leaves whipped and the lightning fell away in a slow strobe effect across the expanse of sky. How he had gotten up there, I had no idea, but he had been there. Crouched in the tree in the middle of the courtyard, he watched me intently through the open window. ~ Gwenn Wright

In my college days, I went wild with my hair. I dyed it every color in the book and, quite naturally, my hair would break off from all the damage. When our hair breaks off, of course, there's only one thing to do - braid it up. I wore braids for a while and would always feel like I just never knew what to do with my hair. ~ Kimberly Elise

[America]'s higher education system is excellent, both in terms of quality and accessibility. Here anybody can go to college. Many countries simply can't accommodate many students. And by the way, most people who came here in the seventies came to get an education. They didn't wake up one morning and say, 'I'm going to America to be free.' they said, 'I'll go there to get an education.' That's an important distinction. It was only after they were here for a while that they fully appreciated the freedoms we enjoy here. ~ Mahbod Seraji

When Constance was born, Aunt Glo named her after the dormitory she lived in at college: Constance Hall. ~ Sheri Reynolds

There were so many groups that I had in college, but I was always the solo singer. But what made it so unusual back in the day was that I was a black girl playing with all these white musicians, and I was also singing rock music on top of it. ~ Natalie Cole

I stared back at him with something that, I realize now, was close to cellular recognition. In one glance, he recalled my father, my first boyfriend, my college love, my future. ~ Alison Singh Gee

High school marching band was its own little microcosm of the world. More a study in sociology than in woodwinds and brass: There were the band geeks, pimply and a tad too greasy, making out with one another every chance they got. There were the no-nonsense go-getters, eager to fill a line on their college applications, marching without rhythm or passion. There was the percussion section, hipsters-to-be whose arms would be full of tattoos in a few years' time. And there were the tuba players, chunky and asexual, as if they were slowly morphing into their instrument of choice. ~ Leah Konen

Meghan and I talked about music - she loved Ella Fitzgerald. "What about all the hip acts that college kids love? Do you like any of them?"
"Like who?"
"I don't know all their names. Snoop Diggity Do and all those hip cats." Meghan shook her head and laughed. We talked about movies - she loved anything made before 1964. No wonder I thought she was older; she was an old soul in a young body.
"So what's your favorite movie?" I asked.
"To Kill a Mockingbird." My mother would have liked Meghan. She made my father and me watch To Kill a Mockingbird with her when I was in first grade. It must have been the twentieth time she'd seen it, but she still cried at the parts that made her weepy-eyed the first nineteen times. ~ Donna VanLiere