Flunking Out Of College Quotes

I decided to grow my hair out during college, and it's kind of stuck ever since. Even when I thought about cutting it or trimming it, common sense kicks in, and I don't think the fans would recognize me; people wouldn't know who I am. It would almost be like Santa Claus losing his powers. ~ Clay Matthews III

I never took my SAT's. I never applied to college. I moved right out here and jumped into the thick of things. Whether that was the smart move or not, I'm sitting here talking to you now, so it paid off. ~ Scott Foley

I didn't go to Ivy League schools. I dropped out of college to go into movies. ~ Rob Lowe

If you've already worked in some capacity or done any internships, your contacts are everybody you've met in your work plus all your personal contacts. If you haven't been employed yet, you still have plenty of contacts. "Take out your college yearbook," says Wein. "Who sat next to you in class? Who do you know that's gone into the field you're interested in? You don't have to know them well to put them on the list." You'd also include any contacts your parents have, friends of your parents, people you met on family vacations, even kids you knew in summer camp. ~ Kate White

I laughed when she said "utilize" and she said "what?" and I said "just utilize, it's a meaningless word" and then she tried to tell me that it "communicated" something different from the word "use" and the way she looked at me, chuckling, glancing over at James like "oh, how sweet, it tried to talk," made me so mad that I might have said, maybe, something along the lines of "yeah, it communicates something, it's a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn't have any books in the house, and you're self-conscious about your upbringing so you want to stand out by using elitist intellectual language, but you don't actually know any long words, so you just truss up the word 'use' for no fucking reason other than to try to make people feel like you're the one with the big mental dick, even though 'utilize' is basically just administrative jargon and completely déclassé to them that knows. ~ Halle Butler

I rub my hand down my face, frustrated. This girl in front of me tests my patience like hell.
When she ran to me after her dad kicked her out, I thought she still had feelings for me. She needed a place to stay, and I needed her. I offered her a room, thinking if she was around me every day, she would remember she loves me. I was dead wrong. Somewhere along the way, we switched roles, I became the one who so desperately needed her and she became cold and closed off. She isn't my savior; she's my punishment. ~ Brittany Butler

A Life like Mine:

Round and round, round and round, this is how life is feeling at the very moment. Why on earth, would anyone want to live in a life that is never ending chaos? Not me, she thought to herself. Gloria Jacobson, 19 years old, was on her way to a life of success when she was finally looking into a life of school, love, and a family that could look up to her for being the next honor roll student. Well, ok, technically speaking, she wasn't an "Honor roll" Student, and she wasn't in love yet. But she did have one thing, and that was a family that loved her. Skeptical or not, as she was, she was headed to sleep after a long day's journey through thoughts and school. She went to a College Prep school, so it wasn't exactly the easiest. In fact, sometimes school to her could become one of the toughest things.
She rolled up her jean legs and through on her purple hooded jacket then slipped out the door. "Mom will hopefully allow her to go to the school ball tomorrow night"; she thought as she crossed her fingers. It was going to be a school formal, and all the way through elementary and middle school, she wasn't ever allowed to go. Why on earth wouldn't her parents ever let her just be a normal teenage girl. After all she only turns 20, towards the end of graduation. Her entire life was devoted to school work, college apps, and volunteer work at different places after school, and church activities. She never seemed to have any time for boys or even f ~ Ann Clifton

She knows her flesh parents are in the stands somewhere. Knows what they're saying, sees the gestures and expressions. Dad trying to use old college logic to make sense of it all. Mom wearing the haunted stare that means she was put on earth strictly to suffer. They're all around us, parents in the thousands, afraid of our intensity. This is what frightens them. We really believe. They bring us up to believe but when we show them true belief they call out psychiatrists and police. We know who God is. This makes us crazy in the world. ~ Don DeLillo

I was still hoping that it might be a phase, that I'd wake up the next day and be normal. In the best of times, it seemed like such a short leap. I did fantasize about having a girlfriend - never the sex part, but the rest of it I had down. I knew what she'd look like and how she'd hold her long hair back from the flame when bending over a lit candle. I imagined us getting married the summer after I graduated from college, and then I imagined her drowning off the coast of North Carolina during one of my family's vacations. Everyone needed to be there so they could see just how devastated I was. I could actually make myself cry by picturing it: How I'd carry her out of the water, how my feet would sink into the sand owing to the extra weight. I'd try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and keep trying until someone, my father most often, would pull me back, saying, "It's too late, son. Can't you see she's gone?"

It seemed I wanted to marry just so I could be a widower. So profound would be my grief that I'd never look at another woman again. It was perfect, really. Oh, there were variations. Sometimes she'd die of leukemia, as in the movie Love Story. Occasionally a madman's bullet would fell her during a hostage situation, but always I'd be at her side, trying everything in my power to bring her back.

The fantasy remained active until I was twenty. Funny how unimportant being gay became once I told somebody. All I had to do was open up to my best friend, and w ~ David Sedaris

I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? ~ Steve Jobs

Jack Travis was a novelty in my experience, an old-fashioned man's man. None of the boys I had gone to college with had been anything more than that, just boys trying to figure out who they were and what their place in the world was. Dane and his friends were sensitive, environmentally aware guys who rode bikes and had Facebook accounts. I couldn't imagine Jack Travis ever blogging or worrying about finding himself, and it was pretty certain that he didn't give a damn about whether or not his clothes were sustainably produced. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Your education never stops and college is just the beginning. You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you've ideally and more times than not you've come out with a love of learning and that's what matters above all. ~ David McCullough

I dropped out of college and ended up making this feature film I wrote when I was 19 with some friends. It was terrible. ~ Jason Woliner

I want to go to college, obviously go to London and just kind of figure out the rest of my life. ~ Shawn Johnson

Everyone tries to talk you out of going to college. The consensus being that people are just gonna forget about you, you know, and that's the way the business works. ~ Larisa Oleynik

We're not going to give tax breaks to billionaires and then cut back on the needs of our elderly or poor or kids or education. We're not going to privatize Social Security - in fact, we're going to strengthen it. We're going to provide quality education for every kid in America, from preschool through college. We have to take on these corporate leaders who are selling out the American people, whose allegiance is now much more to China than it is to the United States. If we have the courage to take these people on, I think we can overwhelm George W. Bush and his friends. ~ Bernie Sanders

That's what college is for - getting as many bad decisions as possible out of the way before you're forced into the real world. I keep a checklist of 'em on the wall in my room. ~ Jeph Jacques

I started with capital of about $1,500, a princely sum for a student coming out of college, an amount I borrowed from my father. ~ Sunil Mittal

Sky, if you're wondering if I have commitment issues, the answer is no. Someday in the far, far, far away future ... like post-college future ... when I propose to you ... which I will be doing one day because you aren't getting rid of me ... I won't be marrying you with the hope that our marriage will work out. When you become mine, it'll be a forever thing. I've told you before that the only thing that matters to me with you are the forevers, and I mean that. ~ Colleen Hoover

Blueprints are for Harvard MBAs. I dropped out of college. ~ Daniel Snyder

My family was very supportive of my acting. They didn't really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything. It paid my way through college and helped my family out. ~ Ajay Naidu

Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I'd just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn't gotten kicked out of school I wouldn't be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history. ~ Brian McKnight

So, what comes next for leadership? Absolute Honesty, fairness and justice – we are dealing with people. Those of us who have had the good fortune of commanding hundreds and thousands of men know this. No man likes to be punished, and yet a man will accept punishment stoically if he knows that the punishment meted out to him will be identical to the punishment meted out to another person who has some Godfather somewhere. This is very, very important. No man likes to be superceded, and yet men will accept supercession if they know that they are being superceded, under the rules, by somebody who is better then they are but not just somebody who happens to be related to the Commandant of the staff college or to a Cabinet Minister or by the Field Marshal's wife's current boyfriend. This is extremely important, Ladies and Gentlemen. ~ Sam Manekshaw

That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your salary was spare. The Legion served as recompense. So the physical comforts you bouth there - hot boudain sausage and cold beer - had value. You attended the place, by which I mean you not only went there but gave it attention your job didn't deserve. Pool got shot not as metaphor for some corporate battle, but as itself alone. And the spiritual comforts-friendship, for instance - couldn't be confused with payback for something you'd accomplished, for in the Legion everybody punched the same clock, drew the same wage, won the same prize. ~ Mary Karr

Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next generation. While the university's busy exploiting you for cheap labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then, if you're unsually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Internet's booming, and the kids we gave C pluses to are waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn't even cover the rent. ~ Tom Perrotta

Even after all the hurt and the pain, I still love you so much. Probably too much for someone my age. I used to believe it was because we were made for each other. That we had a special kind of love most people never find. Now, I wonder if it's the opposite. If we were put together to show the destructive side of love.
You have always been my light and my dark.
My sun and shadow.
My strength and weakness.
You bring out the best and the worst in me. ~ Siobhan Davis

I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 kids! ~ Eddie Van Halen

The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor's job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror. ~ Randy Pausch

Have you ever noticed," said Dimble, "that the universe, and every bit of the universe is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?"
His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.
"I mean this," said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. "If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family – anything you like – at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. ~ C.S. Lewis

God brought me to Himself at about the age of 4. My parents were devout believers and my Dad was in Bible College at the time. I remember hearing the gospel in Sunday School and I talked to my Mom about it one night before bed. It was clear to me that I was a sinner and I was not going to heaven if I died without accepting Jesus Christ and what He did on the cross for me. I was brought to Christ out of fear of going to hell. I didn't want to go there if I died and there was only one other choice in my mind as a 4 year old. I wanted to go to heaven. It was and is that simple. ~ Ben Zobrist

I used to be a happy person. A person with a sparkle in her eye. I was carefree, easygoing, fun, and knew joy on a regular basis. I'm smart. I have a college degree from a good school. I've built a career from my degree and I'm good at it. I had friends. Lots of good friends. I used to go out. I was passionate about life and love and myself. None of that person exists anymore. She's been stripped of all redeeming qualities. ~ K. Larsen

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

I worked at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, when I went to community college there. And I got fired because a sorority had rented out a theater to watch 'Titanic,' and they were being really rude to me while they were waiting for the movie. So as I tore their tickets, I told them the end of the movie. ~ Bill Hader

I turned down a contract with a major network in New York my senior year of college in order to move to Los Angeles and pursue my acting career. But so far it's working out. ~ Justin Hires

I think it go serious in college when I found out I really enjoyed making people laugh. It makes me happy. I said, I wanna be a comedian, I wanna get good.' You're not good in the beginning. You're still trying to figure out what the things are that you are going to talk about, what your angle is going to be and there's a lot of trial and error. I just never gave up and that was the beginning of my career. Just experimenting, trying it out and falling in love with it. ~ Bill Bellamy

The Beatles were hard men too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia
a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the f***ing Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys
they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles
not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always s**t on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear. ~ Lemmy Kilmister

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

I'm not a good writer, and I don't care. Unfortunately, after I left college, I didn't have time much for literature. I wish I did. Most of the time I read documents, and that's not going to help your writing. But I'm a very logical writer, and you can't get out of me. Once I've nailed you, you're finished. ~ Norman Finkelstein

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure. ~ Julia Alvarez

J.J. Moses was a star football player in college. He was drafted by the Houston Texans and played for them for six years. He was the kick returner and punt returner. He was as fast as lightning! When he had the ball, he electrified fans, darting here and there. He was amazing to watch.
Playing in the National Football League in front of millions of fans, J.J. was at the pinnacle of success. But during the off seasons--and any time he didn't have a game--do you know where J.J. was every Saturday night?
J.J. was not at home with his feet up. He was not out enjoying his celebrity. He was at our church in Houston, serving others as an usher, helping people to their seats, showing visitors around, passing the offering plates, and making everyone feel welcome.
Many of those who came to church didn't know he was a star football player. In the stadium all the lights were on him. Fans wanted his autograph or pictures with him. J.J. could have allowed his fame to go to his head and thought, "I'm big-time, I'm not serving as an usher. I'm not waiting on people--I want them to wait on me."
Instead, J.J. told me, "My greatest honor was not playing in front of eighty thousand people in the stadium each week. My greatest honor was ushering in my section at Lakewood every Saturday night."
J.J. offers testimony to the fact that you are never too big to serve, never too important, never too influential. ~ Joel Osteen

Many kids come out of college, they have a credit card and a diploma. They don't know how to buy a house or a car or health insurance or life insurance. They do not know basic microeconomics. ~ Jesse Jackson

At one point in college I was so shy that I'd drop out of a class if asked to speak in front of other people. ~ Joe Flanigan