"American Literature" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 122.
Source: As quoted in “Race & Resistance Literature & Politics In Asian America" (2002) p.3
“Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.”
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
[…] it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
“I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing.”
1880s, Garfield's Words (1882)
Context: I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.
“Life is so beautiful that even the idea of death must be born before it can be realized.”
A vida é tão bela que a mesma idéia da morte precisa de vir primeiro a ela, antes de se ver cumprida.
Source: Dom Casmurro (1899), Ch. 133, p. 255
Source: Let the Great World Spin
Preface
The Great Rehearsal (1948)
Context: The most momentous chapter in American history is the story of the making and ratifying of the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution has so long been rooted so deeply in American life — or American life rooted so deeply in it — that the drama of its origins is often overlooked. Even historical novelists, who hunt everywhere for memorable events to celebrate, have hardly touched the event without which there would have been a United States very different from the one that now exists; or might have been no United States at all.
The prevailing conceptions of those origins have varied with the times. In the early days of the Republic it was held, by devout friends of the Constitution, that its makers had received it somewhat as Moses received the Tables of the Law on Sinai. During the years of conflict which led to the Civil War the Constitution was regarded, by one party or the other, as the rule of order or the misrule of tyranny. In still later generations the Federal Convention of 1787 has been accused of evolving a scheme for the support of special economic interests, or even a conspiracy for depriving the majority of the people of their liberties. Opinion has swung back and forth, while the Constitution itself has grown into a strong yet flexible organism, generally, if now and then slowly, responsive to the national circumstances and necessities.
