Ned Rorem on youth: "We admire them for their beauty and they want us to admire them for their minds, the little shits."
Via Charles Baxter in Best American Essays 2013
Blindness cuts people off from things, but deafness, cuts them off from people.
Helen Keller via this obituary of Robert Panara
When Adam delved, and Eve span, Who was then a Gentleman?
John Balle
I think America is at the crossroads where it will have to choose between its greatness and its decadence.
Alistair Cooke
"When Boone was asked if he had got lost in that forest, he said: I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days."
Letter from Kentucky, J. D. Daniels, Paris Review 203