30 Quotes by Sarah Churchwell

In fact, Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

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.

This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility.

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.

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

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Expression and thought are inextricably linked: crude language permits only crude thinking.

Textbooks are no longer given to schoolchildren; they're too expensive. So they're given to the teachers, who probably need them more.

There is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it.