This article is featured in the 2026 Commencement special issue.
I am deviating significantly from the typical format of Through The Looking Glass because, when I sat down to write, I quickly realized there is no single message I want to impart. As I reflect on my time at Dartmouth, I cannot point to any singular event that captures my entire experience. Like many others, I have changed considerably over the past four years. For better or worse, I am not the same person who moved into the fourth floor of Judge Hall on a sweltering day in September 2022. However, one part of me has remained constant: I derive great joy from sitting with quotes — whether nuanced or direct — and dissecting them in every way I can. While I came across some of these before arriving at Dartmouth, all of the following have occupied my thoughts while in Hanover. I hope my friends recognize me in these quotes, and for those I have yet to meet, consider this a partial introduction. I sincerely hope you find them as valuable as I do.
Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”:
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
“Things do not change; we change.”
Charles Dickens, “Great Expectations”:
“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.”
“We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”
“Life is made of so many partings welded together.”
Warren Earl Burger, shortly before being appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:
“In a country like ours, there is no public institution, or those that run them, that is above public debate.”
Tony Benn, former Member of Parliament:
“If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”
“If you can have full employment to kill people, why in God’s name couldn’t you have full employment and good schools, good hospitals, good houses?”
Jonathan Swift, “The Examiner”:
“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin):
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
“My pain may be the reason for somebody’s laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody’s pain.”
“Life could be wonderful if people would leave you alone.”
“I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying.”
John Milton, “Comus”:
“Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?"
Oscar Wilde:
“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused.”
Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”:
“‘At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,’ was his mildly cadaverous reply.”
Australian Aboriginal proverb, famously quoted by Queen Elizabeth II:
“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love ... and then we return home.”
John Lennon’s final words to Paul McCartney:
“Think about me every now and then, old friend.”
