A biography for Alexandra Petrihasn’t been written yet.
“MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.”
“Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.”
“Obama isn't funny.”
“Snow is like a manic pixie dream girl: fun and whimsical when you encounter it only through the barrier of a movie screen - but absolute misery to have to put up with in real life.”
“It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'”
“Bills ought to be passed with deliberation by committees. Change should be achieved in a bipartisan manner. Incrementally, day by day, we should reach a consensus - not perfect, by any means - but something that we can be proud of, nonetheless.”
“Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.”
“Ferguson shows the power of social media. This could have not been a story. Or it could have just been a local story. Or it could have been something that we saw only from a distance, through the usual filters. Instead, it gathered steam.”
“No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.”
“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.”
“Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.”
“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.”
“I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.”
“If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.”
“Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.”
“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.”
“My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far, no one has.”
“Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.”
“Anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it.”
“History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.”