Frank Bruni > Quotes

“I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they're either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.”
― Frank Bruni, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater

“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.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“You can make a successful run for political office in this country without an especially thick résumé, any exceptional talent for expressing yourself, a noteworthy education or, for that matter, a basic grasp of science.

But you better have religion. You better be ready to profess your faith in and fealty to God — the Judeo-Christian one, of course. And you better be convincing. A dust-up last week in the 2014 race for a United States Senate seat from Arkansas provided a sad reminder of this, showing once again that our ballyhooed separation of church and state is less canyon than itty-bitty crack.”
― Frank Bruni

“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.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“People who flourish make a decision to flourish. They point themselves toward joy.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“There was nothing like a martini to blunt the day and polish the night.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“Rejection was arbitrary. Rejection was survivable.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“Although the Internet could be making all of us smarter, it makes many of us stupider, because it's not just a magnet for the curious. It's a sinkhole for the gullible. It renders everyone an instant expert. You have a degree? Well, I did a Google search!”
― Frank Bruni

“Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thought in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.”
― Frank Bruni

“Imagine that our hardships, our hurdles, our demons, our pain were spelled out for everyone around us to see. Imagine that each of us donned a sandwich board that itemized them.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“A 2011 study done by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who served for two years as the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Stacy Dale, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research, tried to adjust for that sort of thing. Krueger and Dale examined sets of students who had started college in 1976 and in 1989; that way, they could get a sense of incomes both earlier and later in careers. And they determined that the graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7 percent greater than graduates of less selective colleges, even if the graduates in that latter group had SAT scores and high school GPAs identical to those of their peers at more exclusive institutions. But then Krueger and Dale made their adjustment. They looked specifically at graduates of less selective colleges who had applied to more exclusive ones even though they hadn’t gone there. And they discovered that the difference in earnings pretty much disappeared. Someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn State but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn. It was a fascinating conclusion, suggesting that at a certain level of intelligence and competence, what drives earnings isn’t the luster of the diploma but the type of person in possession of it. If he or she came from a background and a mindset that made an elite institution seem desirable and within reach, then he or she was more likely to have the tools and temperament for a high income down the road, whether an elite institution ultimately came into play or not. This was powerfully reflected in a related determination that Krueger and Dale made in their 2011 study: “The average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“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.”
― Frank Bruni

“As our physical muscles grow weaker, our emotional muscles grow stronger, and we’re better at seeing the comedy in the tragedy, the advance in the setback, the good in the bad.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“topic underscore how much contentment has to do with what we accept, what we expect and what we measure our current”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“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.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“Defiance or resignation? It seemed to me that both were in order, but the proportions of each had to be right. The mix—the recipe—had to make sense. The same went for hope and dread. I could wade into but not wallow in either.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“It required attention, openness, humility. It required the recognition that something small could be enough, that something ordinary could be extraordinary.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“Why me?” There’s a better question, of course: “Why not me?” Why should any of us be spared struggle, when struggle is a condition more universal than comfort, than satiation, than peace, maybe than love? Should we even be calling or thinking of it as struggle, which connotes an exertion beyond the usual, a deviation from the norm?”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.”
― Frank Bruni, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater

“If you maintain a robust agenda of activities, if you nurture a rich network of relationships, if you intellectually challenge yourself, if you pay attention to your diet, if you exercise regularly and vigorously, if you latch on to a sense of purpose”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“While we have minimal control over the events that befall us, we have the final say over how we regard and react to them.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“Ambivalence and ambiguity aren't necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events we don't yet understand, with outcomes we can't predict.
But they don't make for bold sentences or tidy talking points.”
― Frank Bruni, The Age of Grievance

“But if I’d been so fortunate as to have a God-given talent like yours, I wouldn’t have wasted it.” Mom wasn’t particularly religious, but when laying on a guilt trip, she liked to bring along backup, and she figured God was the only disapproving authority as fearsome as she.”
― Frank Bruni, Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite

“He knew the particular and special solace of traveling down streets, pulling into parks, and slipping into restaurants that compose a living, breathing photo album of your path to the present.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“Fisher elaborated on that in the book itself, a chilling portrait of profit-minded, audience-obsessed tech entrepreneurs devising formulas for engagement often antithetical to the values essential for democratic societies.”
― Frank Bruni, The Age of Grievance

“Graduates fared better if, during college, they did any one of these: developed a relationship with a mentor; took on a project that lasted a semester or more; did a job or internship directly connected to their chosen field; or became deeply involved in a campus organization or activity (as opposed to minimally involved in a range of things).”
― Frank Bruni

“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.”
― Frank Bruni, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania

“One was the repurposing of trauma or upset as a badge of honor, the turning of the statement “I can’t believe what I’m going through” from a complaint to a boast, from “I can’t believe what I’m being put through” to “I can’t believe what I’m managing to get through.”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

“Why me?” There’s a better question, of course: “Why not me?” Why should any of us be spared struggle, when struggle is a condition more universal than comfort,”
― Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found