I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly - and with very little financial encouragement - saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle.
Interpretation
Community colleges provide valuable education and support to their local communities.
In this quote, Kay Ryan emphasizes the significant yet often overlooked role that community colleges play in transforming lives and minds within their communities. Despite limited funding, these institutions operate as vital resources for education and personal development, akin to the simplicity and effectiveness of a bicycle in fostering growth and connection.
In practice
During a graduation speech to inspire students about the value of education.
It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be as whole and well as I could be, and as happy. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn’t try to torment itself? What did I have to know? What did I have to do rather than what can I torment and bend myself into doing? What was the fruit on that tree?
The day misspent, the love misplaced, has inside it the seed of redemption. Nothing is exempt from resurrection.
Tenderness and Rot Tenderness and rot share a border. And rot is an aggressive neighbor whose iridescence keeps creeping over. No lessons can be drawn from this however. One is not two countries. One is not meat corrupting. It is important to stay sweet and loving.
Gaps don't/just happen./There is a/generative element/inside them,/a welling motion/ as when cold/waters shoulder/up through/warmer oceans./And where gaps/choose to widen,/coordinates warp,/even in places/constant since/the oldest maps.
Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress, because once you are truly educated, you will not ask for power. You will take it.
I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.
True teaching liberates the student from his teacher.
The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.
I don't want to write for adults. I want to write for readers who can perform miracles. Only children perform miracles when they read.
Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.