Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

You’ll find that most people here are more adept at appearing intelligent than actually being so. They’re mostly dolts.

With no more future, the past is all you have.

It takes only an error to father a sin.

If we aren’t needlessly different, how would people know we’re so elite?”

I won’t be the chains around my child’s feet.

You can steal something with gunpowder. You can hold something down by chains. But you own it with paper.

You and I have both lost someone. I like to think they’re like the stars. Their light hasn’t gone out. Candlelight goes out. But something as bright as a star, or a soul, that light moves on.

When you love someone, time isn’t such a big obstacle.

Cady once thought they might enjoy the irony, but irony is a pleasure of privilege.

It is far easier and more pleasant to imagine happy endings, however farfetched, in all their vivid, rainbow colors than it is to face each day’s reality and let time and fortune do their worst.

The stories we tell ourselves have such power, and yet they can be mistaken, cherry-picked, or otherwise fictitious.