I don't talk about my friends behind their back.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.
He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.
I think with Lyndon Johnson, the most important thing I learned was that he never had the sense of security that comes from inside. It always depended on other people making him feel good about himself, which meant that he was always beholden, continually needing to succeed. He could never stop. There was such a restlessness in him.
Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.
All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.
Life's something we already understand. Death is a mystery.
Love draws forth love.
Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish.