122 Quotes by Michael Dirda

'The Admirable Crichton' is probably Barrie's most famous work after 'Peter Pan', nearly a pendant to that classic.

I didn't work for any newspapers in college, never worked for any newspaper before 'The Washington Post'.

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.

Not all of E. Nesbit's children's books are fantasies, but even the most realistic somehow seem magical. In her holiday world, nobody ever goes to school, though all the kids know their English history, Greek myths, and classic tales of derring-do.

It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

I suppose movie theaters are the churches of the modern age, where we gather reverently to worship the tinsel gods of Hollywood.

From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the December issue of almost any general-interest magazine regularly featured a holiday horror or two.

I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history.

For me, the two weeks between Christmas and Twelfth Night have come to be reserved for desultory reading. The pressure of the holiday is over, the weather outside is frightful, there are lots of leftovers to munch on, vacation hours are being used up.