"Not to bring up something upsetting, but when you leave here today, you may go through a period of unemployment. My suggestion is this: Enjoy the unemployment. Have a second cup of coffee. Go to the park. Read Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman loved being unemployed. I don't believe he ever did a day's work in his life. As you may know, he was a poet. If a lot of time goes by and you continue to be unemployed, you may want to announce to all appropriate parties that you have become a poet."
- John Patrick Shanley, commencement '09 at College of Mt. St Vincent
"There is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. Never was, never will be. We are all, as were those in the footsteps we follow, shaped by influences and examples of countless others - parents, grandparents, friends, rivals. And by those who wrote the music that moves us to our souls, those whose performance on the playing field or stage that took our breaths away, those who wrote the great charters which are the bedrock of our system of self-government. And so many who, to our benefit, struggles and suffered through times of trouble and grave uncertainty. And by teachers ... I want to stress as emphatically as I can the immmeasurable importance of teachers."
- David McCullough, commencement '09 at University of Oklahoma
(both excerpted by The New York Times, Sunday, June 14, 2009)
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