William Deresiewicz Quotes

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.

Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death.

We can start all the organic farms we want, but we can't stop congress from declaring pizza sauce a vegetable.