Graduation Gown Quotes

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.

You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

We don’t need a gown. We don’t need a stage. We are walking beside our ancestors, Their drums roar for us, Their feet stomp at our life. There is power in being robbed & still choosing to dance.

Hey, Mom and Dad, this is my “friend” Jamie. My boyfriend Jamie. We’re going to England together. Also, I met him in a secret society. We’re Diggers,folks. And Eli graduates. And in love.What do you think?

Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much.

Dolores, please!” Grandma stood over my bed, her cheeks pinkened with exasperation. The graduation gown was draped over her arm. “That poor man has driven here specially to deliver this. He’s waiting downstairs to see you. What am I supposed to say?” I stared at the TV screen in a counterfeit trance. “Tell that homo to mind his own business,” I said.

What had happened was this: I fell out of my own map. It's an easy thing to do, especially in middle age, but really it can happen at any time. We all live by different lights - success, for some, desire for others - and take our bearings along different dreams. Some of us fly west with the night, into the unknown, urged on by adventure; others look only for the harbor lights, and stay safely in sight of home. But whichever way we choose, we come to rely on the sameness of our days, on the fact that for years at a time the road ahead looks much like the road behind, the horizon clear, the obstacles negotiable. And yet from time to time we stumble into wilderness. It can happen to anyone, at any age: the graduate putting away the cap and gown, the fifty-five-year-old rereading the layoff notice, the wife staring at the empty side of the still-warm bed. Now what? they whisper as they look ahead to a place where the landmarks disappear, and the map reads TERRA INCOGNITA.

What courses are people excited about now? I asked a blonde senior in cap and gown. Nuclear physics, maybe? Modern art? Civilizations of Africa? Looking at me as if I were some prehistoric dinosaur, she said: "Girls don't get excited about things like that anymore. We don't want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college, everybody goes. You're a social outcast at home if you don't. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied, like wanting to go on and do research, would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger, that's the important thing.

Turns out, I learned a lot from not being able to go to France. Turns out, those days standing on the concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves, and- with a pair of tweezers- placing two pipe cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyor belt for eight excruciating hours a day taught me something important I couldn't have learned any other way. That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own personal "educational opportunities." They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth. They gave me faith in my own abilities. They offered me a unique view of worlds that were both exotic and familiar to me. They kept things in perspective. They pissed me off. They opened my mind to realities I didn't know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much. They put me in close contact with people who could've funded the college educations of ten thousand kids and also with people who would've rightly fallen on the floor laughing had I complained to them about how unfair it was that after I got my degree I'd have this student loan I'd be paying off until I was forty-three. They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can't buy.

In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19] Where I Rest Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear. Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here.[*] It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.

I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won’t. At age fifty-seven, I’m too damned old, and I’d look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I’m standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns. So I’ll graduate with this class, but I won’t walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I’ll have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I’ll imagine what the rest would have been like. When you’ve had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things. The ceremony is about to begin. It’s a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other. That banging sound. It’s Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold. They’ve finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

Rip ran a hand through his dusty brown hair and tried to imagine what Larsen had found. Larsen’s words “a Cosega find” had been playing over in his mind almost constantly since he’d heard them. Cosega was the reason that Rip became an archaeologist. The Jeep’s motor whined as it pushed over the unmaintained road. Rip’s thoughts drifted to the past. They always did when he was in the mountains. Fifteen years earlier he had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with honors after publishing a series of papers on the prehistory of man. His first break came when billionaire Booker Lipton, a Penn alumnus who had amassed a fortune through brutal corporate takeovers and a variety of other business dealings, immediately offered him funding. Rip had skipped the “cap and gown nonsense,” as he called it, and was already in Africa when his degree caught up with him. His first human origins digs were featured in an eight-page layout for National Geographic. Within a few years Archaeology Magazine had twice detailed his findings for cover stories. He taught courses at three different universities, and often shared his expertise on news and talk shows. Then, four years ago, he published a paper on the creation stories of all known Native American tribes entitled: Cosega. The controversy that erupted after had almost ended his career. Not yet forty, Ripley had already achieved more than the greats

An inch?” Minh held his fingers apart trying to judge the unfamiliar measurement. Shake took his hand and squeezed the fingers closer together.           “By such small amounts...we win or lose.”           “Nobody won in that fight, Minh. We both lost.”           “The dreams...”           “Yes. I have them too...and you are always there.”           “Where is all the hate?”           “Gone. It always goes...when you realize your enemy is just another man...just another soldier trying to do his duty.”           “That’s how you think of me?”           “It is now. Before this you were the black-eyed monster of my nightmares.”           “And you were the green-eyed monster...”           They smiled and studied the glow of the candle.           “You stayed in your Marine Corps...”           “Yes. I had nothing in common with civilians. Didn’t like them much. I was comfortable as a Marine...among others who understand me.”           “I understand you...”           “I believe you do, Minh.”           “Did you marry? Have children?”           “I was married but that is finished now. This is my daughter...my only child.”Shake reached for his wallet and pulled out Stacey’s high school graduation picture in cap and gown.           “A scholar. She is very beautiful.”           “Yes...she is everything to me.”           “And if I had killed you that night up on those walls, she would never have been born.”Minh handed the photo back and nodded. “I wish I had known this. It makes me feel better.

The pink?" she suggested, holding the shimmering rose-colored satin in front of Sara's half-clad figure. Sara held her breath in awe. She had never worn such a sumptuous creation. Silk roses adorned the sleeves and hem of the gown. The short-waisted bodice was finished with a stomacher of silver filigree and a row of satin bows. Lily shook her head thoughtfully. "Charming, but too innocent." Sara suppressed a disappointed sigh. She couldn't imagine anything more beautiful than the pink satin. Busily Monique discarded the gown and sorted through the others. "The peach. No man will be able to keep his eyes from her in that. Here, let us try it, chérie." Raising her arms, Sara let the dressmaker and her assistant Cora pull the gauzy peach-hued gown over her head. "I think it will have to be altered a great deal," Sara commented, her voice muffled beneath the delicate layers of fabric. The gowns had been fitted for Lily's lithe, compact lines. Sara was more amply endowed, with a generous bosom and curving hips, and a tiny, scoped-in waist... a figure style that had been fashionable thirty years ago. The current high-waisted Grecian mode was not particularly flattering to her. Monique settled the gown around Sara's feet and then began to yank the back of it together. "Oui, Lady Raiford has the form that fashion loves." Energetically, she hooked the tight bodice together. "But you, chérie, have the kind that men love. Draw in your breath, s'il vous plaît." Sara winced as her breasts were pushed upward until they nearly overflowed from the low-cut bodice. The hem of the unusually full skirt was bordered with three rows of graduated tulip-leaves. Sara could hardly believe the woman in the mirror was herself. The peach gown, with its transparent layers of silk and shockingly low neckline, had been designed to attract a man's attention. It was too loose at the waist, but her breasts rose from the shallow bodice in creamy splendor pushed together to form an enticing cleavage.

You have no intention ot majoring in business and running my grandmother’s farm after graduation.” “No.” Not without admiration I said, “You’re just milking her for everything she’s worth.” Now that he knew he was caught, he charmed me with a big grin. “Basically.” I was glad we’d faced off and I’d finally pried the truth out of him while I was propped up. But my hip ached like nothing I’d ever experienced, and I simply couldn’t balance on my tender bones any linger. “Any swindler of my grandmother is a friend of mine” came out a groan as I eased forward to lie down on my stomach on the table, one hand on my ass to make sure the paper gown didn’t ride up to reveal even more of my broken body to Hunter. His arm shot across my chest to support me as I lay down. I wondered whether he knew exactly what he was touching underneath my paper gown-but surely that was the farthest thing from his mind. Most people did not think dirty thoughts at a time like this. Only me.

As we examine our things with a critical eye, we may be surprised how much of it commemorates our past, represents our hopes for the future, or belongs to our imaginary selves. Unfortunately, devoting too much of our space, time and energy to these things keeps us from living in the present. Sometimes we fear that getting rid of certain items is equivalent to getting rid of a part of ourselves. No matter that we rarely play violin, and have never worn that evening gown- the moment we let them go, we'll eliminate our chance to become virtuosos or socialites. And heaven forbid we throw away that high school mortarboard- it'll be like we never graduated. We have to remember that our memories, dreams, and ambitions aren't contained in those objects; they're contained in ourselves. We are not what we own; we are what we do, what we think, and who we love. By eliminating the remnants of unloved pastimes, uncompleted endeavors, and unrealized fantasies, we make room for new (and real) possibilities. Aspirational items are the props for a pretend version of our lives; we need to clear out the clutter, so that we have the time, energy and space to realize our true selves and our full potential.

All at once Floyd felt what a game of child's play caps and gowns were. Graduation, for a boy, might have been youth's last call before he faced minimum wage at the diner, or years of combat, or the dark maze of the coal mines. Sobered by their own futures, those boys couldn't see that girls like Ruby and Ivy had grown up long before. They know how to feed other mouths before their own, to lie about leaving home after dark, to avert their eyes when men stared at them too long.

That night I woke up hearing voices. They were driving some kind of bargain, in a whisper. I couldnt hear the words they said, but I found out next afternoon. Dont be scared now, Mamma said; he’s just a big overgrown boy. Overgrown two hundred and forty-five pounds, I thought. All right, I said. And when she sent me to my room right after early supper, I found my gown already laid out on the bed, the new one with lace on the collar that she gave me for graduation. He came on tiptoe, barefoot, wearing a nightshirt; the sun wasnt decently down behind the mountain. Having fun up here, pet? he said. He sat on the side of the bed, smiling and showing his teeth, and plucking at tufts on the spread—he was bashful. After a while he said, Dont you think it’s a little warm for all that lace? Wait, sweetheart, let me help you. Gracious, child, how nice, how very nice. I bet nobody’s ever so much as touched them, except maybe yourself at night alone in the dark. You know what you are, sweetheart? Youre a bud, a tender bud; thats what you are.

All rituals are grounded in repetition and rigidly fixed action sequences.17 But they differ from habits in one important way. Rituals lack a direct, immediate reward. Instead, we have to invent a meaning and impose it on them. We lift our glasses to toast, blow out candles on a birthday cake, and wear caps and gowns at graduation. The act of standing silently for a song, singing while candles burn, or wearing a ceremonial costume acts as feedback, reinforcing our belief that something meaningful is taking place—an act of respect for our country, a celebration of another year, or an educational accomplishment.

After it was revealed that the Miami Police Department used images of Black men for target practice, a movement of clergy and other activists initiated the hashtag #UseMeInstead circulating their own, predominantly White photos. In another form of subversive visualization, activists called out the way media outlets circulate unflattering photos of Black youths murdered by police or White vigilantes. They used the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and asked the question “Which one would they use?” with dueling photos of themselves looking stereotypically “thuggish” (e.g. not smiling, wearing a hoodie, throwing up hand signs, smoking, or holding alcohol) and “respectable” (e.g. smiling, wearing a graduation gown or suit, playing with a baby, or wearing a military uniform).

for a truly exceptional school, graduation at the Gallagher Academy is pretty much like graduations everywhere. There are smiling parents and gushing girls, shapeless black gowns and new graduates standing on the verge of a brave new world.

In April 2020, Business Breakthrough (BBT) University in Tokyo, Japan held a graduation ceremony for students using avatar robots remotely controlled by graduating students from their homes. The avatar robots, dubbed “Newme”, were dressed in graduation caps and gowns for the ceremony, complete with tablets projecting the graduates’ face. BBT hoped the approach could be used as a model for other schools wishing to avoid large gatherings amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Spend less than you make so you can whack away incrementally at the debt dragon with all you’ve got. It’s not exactly an algebraic formula reserved only for financial whizzes. Indeed, paying off debt isn’t complex; it’s just not easy. You don’t need a graduate degree, a fancy calculator, or a smarty-pants cap and gown. You are smart enough already. God has given you all you need.

There is no middle class in Africa.There is poverty masked with graduation gowns and debts