Sublime

I have to write to discover what I am doing. —Flannery O’Connor

Hemingway offered to modify the noun with “lousy” or “lesbian,” but if anyone was ever a bitch, he said it was Gertrude Stein.

One of Laurel Manderley’s profs at Wellesley had once criticized her freshman essays for what he’d called their tin ear and cozening tone of unearned confidence, which had immediately become dark parts of her own self concept.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Eisenhower’s Dartmouth College speech notwithstanding, McCarthy had a pernicious impact throughout the government.

She could neither resolve nor dismiss. There were these scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile and—this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—not much voice.