“ 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
