38 Quotes by Paul Collins

You could expect bread, cheese, preserved apples, eggs, and a solid draft of warm beer. Tea and coffee were only slowly taking hold at breakfast in the finer houses, and the city’s old Dutch families still drank cocoa at breakfast.

I been brought up a hatter,” he sighed, “people would have come into the world without heads.

What you mean to find matters less than what you do find.

But this much is known: Hamilton shot into the trees. Burr, leveling his pistol at his foe, did not.

It is a telling commentary on how authors control what they write, but not what is read. Poe regarded his tales of ratiocination as something of a distraction; his great loves were poetry and his “prose poem,” Eureka. “The Raven” was indeed Poe’s most famous work during his lifetime, and time has not lessened its charms – but as art it is distinctly backward-looking.

So far as any literary genre can be said to have been invented by one author, Edgar Allan Poe is that author, and the detective story is that genre.

If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity.

New York was the swing state in the upcoming presidential election – and Manhattan was the swing district in New York State. Control the city, and you controlled the 1800 presidential race.

Back then, Manhattan was the infant country.