“ Rome took all the vanity out of me, for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair.Why should you, with so much energy and talent?Tha… Louisa May Alcott
“ Not long ago, after my last trip to Russia, I had a conversation with an American very eminent in the field of politics. I asked what he read, and he replied that he studied history, sociology, politi… John Steinbeck
“ ...that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, h… Jack Kerouac
“ Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it w… Maureen Corrigan
“ Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity. Tony Kushner
“ Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literat… Leslie Fielder
“ Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it i… William Least Heat-Moon
“ Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out … Ben Marcus
“ Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They f… Deborah L. Halliday
“ I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have v… John Fante
