Quotes from Sarah Churchwell

Details tend to be the first casualty of reproduction.

Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.

History resembles a guest list, in that sense, of the invited and the gate-crashers, the people, for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. Sometimes the gate-crashers prove to be the life of the party.

Desire just cheats you," laments Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned. "It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.

History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.

'Sesame Street' was a pioneering educational T.V. show, intended to help underprivileged children. But even those of us middle-class kids spoilt for pedagogical choice couldn't get enough of it.

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

Top-up fees mean that universities are increasingly under pressure to confer degrees upon students, who perceive the degree as a commodity they've purchased. Failure doesn't enter into anyone's calculations.

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.