David S. Brown > Quotes

“Chicago delighted me,” he wrote, “because it was just as chaotic as my own mind, and I found my own preposterous state of consciousness reflected and exaggerated at every turn.”
― David S. Brown, The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams

“Freedom,” in other words, had paradoxically penned Adams in. Responsible only for himself, he too often tangled with abstractions, unable to take life on more immediate, multiple, and generous terms. He once presumed to compensate for his intellectual isolation by sending copies of the Education to various colleagues and acquaintances for criticism, but almost none of the manuscripts was returned. Who, after all, would dare to dispute the dismal truths arranged in this forbidding tome? And who could hope to disabuse its erudite author of the enemies he had so lovingly assembled?”
― David S. Brown, The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams