Quotes from Sarah Churchwell

There is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it.

Expression and thought are inextricably linked: crude language permits only crude thinking.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

History resembles a guest list in that sense of the invited and the gatecrashers: the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Textbooks are no longer given to schoolchildren; they're too expensive. So they're given to the teachers, who probably need them more.

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

In all likelihood, the only thing extraordinary about Tiger Woods was his golf: he had extraordinary coordination and extraordinary discipline - on the course, at any rate. That discipline was the source of his power.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald's contemporaries couldn't bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

Democratic equality and economic opportunity are not the same thing, but the American dream has, for decades, been used as if they are.

The symbol of the 'one per cent' that so dominates discussions of economic inequality today comes, like the American dream it accompanies, from a century ago. The difference is that a hundred years ago many people considered billionaires un-American.

young people no longer "believe in the old standards and authorities, and they're not intelligent enough, many of them, to put a code of morals and conduct in place of the sanctions that have been destroyed for them.

The loss of cultural memory is a kind of death, for culture is sustained by memory. We do not have to accept others' narrow understanding of our meanings.

Detail tends to be the first casualty of reproduction.

This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility.

By 1940 'America first' had been entangled in America's political narrative for decades. Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee of 1940 were not the beginning of the story of 'America first'. They were the end–until Donald Trump resuscitated the term.

America was invented out of a desire for rebirth, for fresh starts. It was the place where a man could be the author of himself, reinventing himself as an aristocrat, but somehow these stories of renaissance kept ending in murder.

Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of Gatsby with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: "Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he's synthetic—and that's one of the flaws of the book.

The difference between old and new money is, after all, purely relative: it just depends on when you start counting.

In fact, Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.'12 It was in an essay