Quotes About Washington Irving

They claim to be the first inventors of those recondite beverages, cocktail, stonefence, and sherry cobbler.

Washington, in fact, had very little private life, but was eminently a public character.

[I]n the gloomy month of February.... The Deserts of Arabia are not more dreary and inhospitable than the streets of London at such a time.

Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

What remains difficult to fathom is how White, a president of the American Historical Association, justified to himself his grotesquely unhistorical (mis) use of sources—from resorting to the romanticized fictions of Washington Irving for "facts" about Columbus to the strategic truncation of a quotation from St. Augustine to make the African Doctor appear to say something exactly opposite to what he meant.