“Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night. The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge.”
“The inaugural morning at Merston High was officially over. It was no longer a mysterious place in Melody s imagination, filled with endless possibilities and hooks on which to hang hopes for a better tomorrow. It was completely - boringly - normal. Like meeting an online crush after months of e-flirting, the reality didn t live up to the fantasy. It was dull, predictable, and way more attractive in the photos.”
“Don’t you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world?” asked Connor irrelevantly.”
“A good roommate may be the single most important thing to have when one is away at school.”
“...your zeal to face life s rough and tumble, your ardor to accept the responsibilities of adulthood is hardly congruent with the aspirations of most graduate students... He shook his head of disagreeable hair. I need not tell you, he deplored, sinking to paralipsis, that there resides in almost every one of em the unconscious desire not to grow up. For once the academic goal is attained and the doctorate irradicably abbreviated after the name, the problem of facing the world is confronted. The subtlest, most unremitting drive of the student is his unconscious proclivity to postpone the acceptance of responsibility as long as possible.”
“Because there are so many kids, they run schools like factories, or dare I say, jails. You re put into lines and rows and moved when a bell rings. None of this is conducive to deep thinking or creativity. You start to go deep into a subject, and a bell rings to pull you out of it.”