maturation

Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.

I had intended to visit the haunting ground of my school days. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface.

As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.

It's a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [ He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they took? It didn't work, so they went back and started from where they were. It's so raw in this version. It actually makes the sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn't stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each of these recording. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect.[ As he listens to the third take, he points out how instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, " Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

I did not come into this Army to serve one man, to serve a friend.

The military was providing him (George H.W. Bush) with an education that was not available at Andover or Yale.

A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.

My countenance in my old-age does injustice to my heart. John Quincy Adams

The author's differing experience of school geography as a faculty member going from parking lot to parking lot and to locations centered around HER office and her experience of the more scattered life of a student speaks to a larger truth. As adults, we are used to following the same routine and look romantically on anything different.

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

The writer as boxer says he develops by, "learning from everyone who'll spar with me.

The author jokes that the culture at his first job at Entertainment Weekly chased away the worthwhile aspects of his Brown education, but in so doing he makes a subtle point about the profound impact of the culture with which we surround ourselves and how easily we can be defined and constrained by our jobs.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.

He has not shown the special interest in reading that we should like to see but he likes shop work. George H. W. Bush's parents on his Andover application

Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

Just out of high school, you didn't realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.

When you enter heaven you shall find Him there bearing the dew of His youth; and through eternity the Lord Jesus shall still remain the perennial spring of joy, and life, and glory to His people.

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.