Wellesley College Commencement Quotes

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996] ~ Nora Ephron

Broad-Based Education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

- Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005 ~ George Beahm

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. ~ John Updike

At Newsweek only girls with college degrees
and we were called "girls" then
were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to "clippers," another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn't smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out releveant articles with razor-edged "rip sticks," and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. "Being a clipper was a horrible job," said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, "and to make matters worse, I was good at it. ~ Lynn Povich

Wellesley's president, Nannerl Overholser Keohane, approved a broad rule with a specific application: The senior thesis of every Wellesley alumna is available in the college archives for anyone to read - except for those written by either a 'president or first lady of the United States.' ~ Bill Dedman

I was never educated to be an actor. I went to a regular college. It was a great thing for me because I feel that the main thing to get out of college is a thirst for knowledge. College should teach you how to be curious. Most people think that college is the end of education, but it isn't. The ceremony of giving you the diploma is called commencement. And that means you are fit to commence learning because you have learned hot to learn. ~ Vincent Price

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ~ Anna Quindlen

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

From "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," Mills College 1983 ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The first time I spoke to a group this large was at my college commencement in 1969. ~ Hillary Clinton

I did go to Wellesley, a women's college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs. ~ Madeleine Albright

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated. ~ Garry Trudeau

The senior thesis of Hillary D. Rodham, Wellesley College class of 1969, has been speculated about, spun, analyzed, debated, criticized and defended. But rarely has it been read, because for the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency it was locked away. ~ Bill Dedman

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegia ~ John Barth

I hate school at that time. Now, little did I know that actually if I had stayed in school I would've actually really liked college. I wasn't aware enough to know that the junior high I was suffering through would be school at its worst. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound, explain. ~ Neil Gaiman

And there's this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street! ~ Spider Robinson

My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

I started directing out of necessity, the first play I wrote in college because I didn't know anyone who could direct it. ~ Conor McPherson

The detailed, scientifically acceptable studies of Dr. Joseph B. Rhine at Duke University, of Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, Department of Psychiatry, of Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler at the College of the City of New York, and of many other serious researchers prove that this can be done. ~ Brian L. Weiss

If you wanted to kill a city, that is the recipe. And yet Flint was very much alive. In 2014, the year of switch to a new source of drinking water, it was the seventh-largest city in the state. On weekdays, its population swelled as people commuted into town for work in teh county government, the region's major medical centers, four college campuses, and other economic anchors. For all the empty space, teens in shining dresses still posed for prom photos in the middle of Saginaw Street, the bumpy brick road that is Flint's main thoroughfare. Parents still led their children by the hand into the public library for Saturday story time. Older gentlemen lingered at the counter of one of Flint's ubiquitous Coney Island diners, and the waitresses at Grandma's Kitchen on Richfield Road kept the coffee flowing. For about ninety-nine thousand people, Flint was home. ~ Anna Clark

The habit of looking at life as a social relation - an affair of society - did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession - such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents - it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. ~ Henry Adams

I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together. ~ Ronald Reagan

It was much later that I realized Dad's secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a college president. He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say. ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

It was fun being an actor, but by the time college rolled around, I was ready to try some new things. By the time I graduated, I realized I enjoyed having a normal life and I never went back. ~ Jeff Cohen

I now have two kids of my own in college, so I know how important it is that we keep the dream alive for every family and I share the concern about rising tuition costs. ~ Mark Kennedy

You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university. ~ William Hazlitt

I was a terrible student. Still, I managed to get into college, but my daydreaming threatened to sabotage me. I used behavior modification to break the cycle. I started by setting an arbitrary time limit on studying: for every 15 minutes of study, I'd allow myself an hour of daydreaming. I set the alarm. ~ Sandra Cisneros

In one universe, they are gorgeous, straight-teethed, long-legged, wrapped in designer fashions, and given sports cars on their sixteenth birthdays. Teacher smile at them and grade them on the curve. They know the first names of the staff. They are the Pride of the Trojans. Oops – I mean Pride of the Blue Devils.

In Universe #2, they throw parties wild enough to attract college students. They worship the stink of Eau de Jocque. They rent beach houses in Cancún during Spring Break and get group-rate abortions before prom. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there. ~ Shreya Ghoshal

Fine. Such a stupid word really. It feels empty and weightless. It's the kind of word you use to hide the truth. ~ Krista Ritchie

If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum! ~ Emmy Rossum

In many college classes, laptops depict split screens - notes from a class, and then a range of parallel stimulants: NBA playoff statistics on ESPN.com, a flight home on Expedia, a new flirtation on Facebook. ~ Samantha Power

Just remember this: college is the most expensive place to be confused in the whole entire world. ~ Brittany Gibbons

The future that we want - this is it. This is the future of all the previous thoughts you've ever had about the future. You're in it. You're already in it. What is the purpose of all this living if it's only to get some place else and then when you're there you're not happy anyway, you want to be some place else. It's always for 'when I retire,' 'when I graduate college,' 'when I make enough money,' 'when I get married,' 'when I get divorced,' 'when the kids move out.' It's like, wait a minute, this is it. This is your life. We only have moments. This moment's as good as any other. It's perfect. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

I joined Khalsa College just opposite Don Bosco in class XI, but soon I quit studies and was sent to Bangkok by my father to learn martial arts, as that is the only place we could afford given that I would also work there to support my training. ~ Akshay Kumar

To me, this goes beyond disappointing. It shows that we are failing to gain ground on the very conditions we need to reverse to improve our graduation rates and produce more students who are ready for college and the workforce. ~ Bob Wise