Graduate Students Quotes

“Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn't know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“They're not people at all, they're graduate students, there's a difference. They fuck like bunnies and drink like fish and stay up late worrying that somebody somewhere is getting something that they're not getting." - Erika Jones”
― Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love

“Anyhow, tired to the point of collapse was a default state. The expectation was simply that, through some combination of strong coffee and Lembas Bread, one pushed through until all deadlines were met and one could collapse into an indefinite coma without consequence. Alice had spent most of graduate school in this state, and it was not so bad.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis