Sarah Churchwell Quotes

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

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

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

Facts might be false if they challenge the conviction of a mind already made up.

Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

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.

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

History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.

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

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.