Sarah Churchwell Quotes & Sayings

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

Top-up fees mean that universities are increasingly under pressure to confer degrees upon students, who perceive the degree as a commodity they've purchased. Failure doesn't enter into anyone's calculations. — Sarah Churchwell

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction. — Sarah Churchwell

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. — Sarah Churchwell

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

History resembles a guest list in that sense of the invited and the gatecrashers: the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. — Sarah Churchwell

The Volstead Act, prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of "intoxicating liquors," became law on January 17, 1920. Prohibition didn't prohibit much, and incited a great deal. By September 1922 it was already obvious that prohibition, known with varying degrees of irony as the Great Experiment, was experimenting mostly with the laws of unintended consequences. Its greatest success was in loosening the nation's inhibitions with bathtub gin - what they called "synthetic" liquor. — Sarah Churchwell

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race. — Sarah Churchwell

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

The difference between old and new money is, after all, purely relative: it just depends on when you start counting. — Sarah Churchwell

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

young people no longer "believe in the old standards and authorities, and they're not intelligent enough, many of them, to put a code of morals and conduct in place of the sanctions that have been destroyed for them. — Sarah Churchwell

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

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. — Sarah Churchwell

In all likelihood, the only thing extraordinary about Tiger Woods was his golf: he had extraordinary coordination and extraordinary discipline - on the course, at any rate. That discipline was the source of his power. — Sarah Churchwell

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

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

'Sesame Street' was a pioneering educational T.V. show, intended to help underprivileged children. But even those of us middle-class kids spoilt for pedagogical choice couldn't get enough of it. — Sarah Churchwell

The artist, wrote Joseph Conrad, "speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives." That was the art that Scott Fitzgerald would find, reminding us that a mirage may be more marvelous in its way than an oasis in the desert. Gatsby's great error is his belief in the reality of the mirage; Fitzgerald's great gift was his belief in the mirage as a mirage. "Splendor," Fitzgerald came to understand, "was something in the heart. — Sarah Churchwell

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. — Sarah Churchwell

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. — Sarah Churchwell

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