Joanna Russ Quotes

The hard part is majors are exhausting on their own. They're a long week. So the hard part is your energy levels.

Sundays in my teens were spent on homework: from 8 am until at least 8 pm, with stoppages to be fed and watered. I was carrying up to ten subjects simultaneously.

I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week... there's not much room for novels.

I got into Cambridge and it all went downhill.

I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs.

I'm taking a pretty light load. I'm doing well. Gideon and Jason are both in school too, so we find time between shows to get work done, and during the day. I really like Columbia. Unlike high school, I don't feel any pressure to get straight-As. I just like learning.

The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad.

I did not enjoy Cambridge. But I shouldn't blame Cambridge alone. I wasn't ready for university or for the wrench of leaving home. It was a big cultural shock.

I went to university and I was a bit out of my depth, socially.

Essays just aren't my thing: no matter how hard I tried, it seemed I was always a bit average.

At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.

Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.

Boarding school is a wicked thing.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.

I would have been miserable in college. I always hated school.

I was never a bright student, potentially never good at dramatics; I was sometimes given one-line roles that I was happy to do so that I could bunk classes. My mother used to cry three times a year, and that is when my report card used to come.

At boarding school there wasn't much time for much of anything except education.

At 12 I dropped out of school but I had lost interest in it at a much earlier age. For me, school was very very stressful.

I went to Columbia University because I knew I wanted to go to a school that was academically rigorous. I prided myself on getting good grades, but I also hated it.

Like, in high school, I was a good student and got straight As. It was very strict and you couldn't do well there unless you studied very hard, but every time there was any trouble, I was the first person they would be talking to.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

My time at Barnard was fun but stressful. I transferred there from the acting conservatory at NYU, and my Rolling Around On the Floor Pretending to Be a Lion classes didn't translate into many academic credits.

School was very difficult. I was conscious of how I looked.

High school sucks! It's hard.