A good deal of education consists of unlearning — the breaking of bad habits, as with a tennis serve. This was emphatically true of a Vassar educatio… - Mary McCarthy

The essence of Vassar is mythic. Today, despite much competition, it still figures in the public mind as the archetypal woman's college. […] It signifies a certain je ne sais quoi; a whiff of luxury and the ineffable; plain thinking and high living. […] For different people, in fact, at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner. The inscription on it varies with the era or with the ideas of the beholder and in the final sense does not matter — the flushed cheek and tensed arm are what count.

He would only come if she were unprepared. Or would he come only if she were prepared? With her lamp trimmed like the wise virgins? Christianity would tell her to buy food for two, but the pagans would say, 'Don't risk it.'

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished equation.