Sarah Churchwell Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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