Quotes from Alexandra Petri

I think, when you're doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.

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.

Life has its trade-offs. As you age, you lose things like teeth and the ability to play in the ball pit at fast-food restaurants, and you gain things like experience and employer-based health insurance.

Any promising young white man rich enough to theoretically afford a giant oil painting of himself gets to remain young and innocent forever, and none of his actions have any consequences, whether there is magic involved or not.

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.

Being a person of faith is just another of a wide range of fun activities available to those who come to Harvard. When Harvard boasts to admitted students of its more than 40 religious groups, it does so in the same vein that it boasts of its nearly dozen a cappella groups.

George W. Bush has dutifully, if not intentionally, provided Americans with laughs for nearly a decade. He has also made them cry, sometimes for the same reason.

Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.

The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.

I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.

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.

Bad things happen, and you can only be so prepared.

I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.

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.

At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.

I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.

Almost nothing anyone told me about Harvard has been accurate.

History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.

Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.

A picture can hide as much as it reveals.

While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is 'cool.'

You do not get gold stars for cleaning your toilet. In actual life, there is a depressing lack of stickers.

One of the things I try to do - and I always regret when I'm not doing it - is I try to read as much as possible as I'm consuming news.

Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.