Alexandra Petri Quotes
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Obama isn't funny.
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No matter how successful you are, no matter how good you are at what you do, even if a golden path rolls out in front of your feet your whole life, there will come one particularly bleak Tuesday when you glance over at Facebook and notice that Jen From Down The Hall has just won an Oscar.
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At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.
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Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.
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MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
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The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.
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I tend to process stuff by making jokes about it. It's something that makes me annoying to be around in times of real crisis.
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My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before, and needless to say, I quickly lost control of the class.
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Yale students want to impress you with what they're doing. Harvard students want to impress you with how cool they look while doing it.
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No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.
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It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.
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Ferguson shows the power of social media. This could have not been a story. Or it could have just been a local story. Or it could have been something that we saw only from a distance, through the usual filters. Instead, it gathered steam.
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Harvard is a wondrously tolerant climate for debate and exchange among a wide variety of thoughts, backgrounds, and beliefs, but the voice of religion on campus is largely inaudible.
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All the weird inconveniences of adult life that you thought they made up to lend excitement and color to episodes of 'Sex and the City' are, in fact, real.
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All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'
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Success is like food caught in your teeth: much more noticeable when it happens to other people. If it happens to you, other people have to take you aside and say something.
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Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.
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George Washington didn't have to make us laugh; he just had to establish precedents and avoid chopping down more cherry trees than he could possibly help. But somewhere along the line, Americans began expecting their presidents to do more than just govern. They also had to make us laugh.
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Wilde is an invaluable acquaintance. Often, in situations where I am required to appear witty, I simply steal large chunks from his works and attempt to pass them off as my own with minor modifications.
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If you're doing what you do because you love it, you have room to be happy for others. And that's a lot of fun, when you get down to it.
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In general, sincerity is awkward.
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I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
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Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.
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Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.