Home > Author > Frank Bruni
21 " ...my favorite Congressional incongruity: ...Red State legislators galumphing from meeting to meeting in full pancake makeup. Estee Lauder may well make more money on Capitol Hill than in Beverly Hills. "
― Frank Bruni
22 " 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
23 " 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. "
24 " 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 and even smaller part of it. "
25 " 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 "
26 " 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
27 " topic underscore how much contentment has to do with what we accept, what we expect and what we measure our current "
28 " It required attention, openness, humility. It required the recognition that something small could be enough, that something ordinary could be extraordinary. "
29 " While we have minimal control over the events that befall us, we have the final say over how we regard and react to them. "
30 " Dried pasta from a box didn’t advertise how long and hard you had labored. "
― Frank Bruni , Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater
31 " 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. "
32 " 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? "
33 " 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—all of this will probably enhance your cognitive fitness, your mental "
34 " 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, "
35 " 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. "
36 " For all our claims and gestures of dominion over this earth, all our gravity-defying explorations beyond it, all our artistic triumphs, all our athletic feats, we are a breakable species, "
37 " 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. "
38 " contentment has to do with what we accept, what we expect and what we measure our current situations against. "
39 " what determined people’s happiness wasn’t their physical conditions or capabilities but what they paid attention to, what they emphasized, what they accomplished within the possibilities available to them. "
40 " That was the story of college: one obsession after another; an advance followed by a retreat; a breakthrough dissolving into a setback. It was a reprise of the years preceding it and an omen of the years to come.It It could be broken down into the forces and schemes that propelled me "
