Sarah Churchwell > Quotes

“As this story will show, reactionary populism in the United States has historically defined itself against the same enemies–urban elites, immigrants, liberals, progressives and organised labour; and for the same beliefs–evangelical Protestantism, traditional ‘family values’ and white supremacy. Trump has once again brought Americans face-to-face with a deeply rooted populist conservatism, one that defines itself in opposition to groups of people it constructs as ‘alien’ or ‘un-American’. And that populism is consistently drawn to demagogues and authoritarians.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“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, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“The loss of cultural memory is a kind of death, for culture is sustained by memory. We do not have to accept others’ narrow understanding of our meanings.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream

“Democratic equality and economic opportunity are not the same thing, but the American dream has, for decades, been used as if they are.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“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, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“A hundred years ago, Americans got their facts from the same collective sources: first newspapers and then radio broadcasts and newsreels. (This history ends before television begins.) They had their own opinions and judgements about those facts, of course; but the facts were not in dispute. This meant it was possible to have far more shared understandings of political reality than is now the case, thanks to our hyper-fragmented, hyper-partisan, hyper-marketised new medias. We have managed to produce a world in which facts and the news themselves are in constant dispute from voices at the very top of our government and media chains. That is, as most people recognise, a very big problem.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“The ‘one-drop rule’ was the foundation of slavery and miscegenation laws in many states, literally used to determine the legal status of individuals, whether they would be enslaved or free. Its logic extended from the notorious three-fifths compromise in the Constitution, which computed slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of counting the population when apportioning representation to government. Slaves could not, of course, vote; but white slave owners wanted them to count as part of the population so that their states could send more representatives to government, surely one of the more outrageous instances of having it both ways in human history. America was a nation long accustomed to quantifying people in terms of ethnic and racial composition, as words like mulatto and half-caste, quadroon and octoroon, make clear. Declaring someone ‘one hundred per cent American’ was no mere metaphor in a country that measured people in percentages and fractions, in order to deny some of them full humanity.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“The symbol of the ‘one per cent’ that so dominates discussions of economic inequality today comes, like the American dream it accompanies, from a century ago. The difference is that a hundred years ago many people considered billionaires un-American.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“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, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“The difference between old and new money is, after all, purely relative: it just depends on when you start counting.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“Before about 1900, there is little discernible trace in American cultural conversations of the phrase ‘American dream’ being used to describe a collective, generalisable national ideal of any kind, let alone an economic one. The phrase does not appear in any of the foundational documents in American history–it’s nowhere in the complete writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or James Madison. It’s not in Hector St. John Crèvecoeur or Alexis de Tocqueville, those two great French observers of early American life. It’s not found in the works of any of America’s major nineteenth-century novelists: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville or Mark Twain. It’s not in the supposedly more sentimental novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, or even Horatio Alger, whose ‘rags to riches’ stories are so often held to exemplify it. Nor does it crop up visibly in political discourse, or newspapers, or anywhere noticeable in the public record.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“By 1940 ‘America first’ had been entangled in America’s political narrative for decades. Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee of 1940 were not the beginning of the story of ‘America first’. They were the end–until Donald Trump resuscitated the term.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“In Texas in May 1916, a black farm worker named Jesse Washington, accused of murdering the white woman he worked for, was lynched in front of the Waco city hall. Washington was not hanged. First he was castrated, then his fingers were cut off, then he was raised and lowered over a bonfire for two hours, until he finally died. His charred body was then dismembered, the torso dragged through the streets, and other parts of his body sold as souvenirs. It happened in broad daylight, in the middle of the day, as some 10,000 spectators watched, including local officials, police officers and children on their school lunch break. Photographs were taken of Washington’s carbonised body hanging above grinning white people and turned into postcards. That’s the reality of what being ‘one hundred per cent American’ and for ‘America first’ meant to a great many citizens of the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of Gatsby with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: “Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he’s synthetic—and that’s one of the flaws of the book.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“For all the Klan’s divisiveness, its extension across the country also worked perversely to reconcile North and South just as The Birth of a Nation imagined, as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ united against perceived threats from groups they sought to subordinate; the election of the Southern segregationist Wilson functioned in the same way, helping to reunite the nation in the wake of Reconstruction.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream"

“America was invented out of a desire for rebirth, for fresh starts. It was the place where a man could be the author of himself, reinventing himself as an aristocrat, but somehow these stories of renaissance kept ending in murder.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“Ultimately Fitzgerald chose not to use the word "America" at all in the novel's concluding passage. America remains an emblem -- not quite a metaphor, but a symbol, a figure, the fact as colossal as a continent -- and what it represents is not a specific nation but a human capacity, our capacity for hope, for wonder, for discovery. It represents the corruption of that capacity into a faith in the material world, rather than the ideal one. And it reminds us, too of our careless habit of losing our paradises.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“Detail tends to be the first casualty of reproduction.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream

“Drinking was a great leveller, not because it made everyone equally drunk but because it made everyone equally guilty.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Churchwell, Sarah (2014) Paperback

“In fact, Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.’12 It was in an essay”
― Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells

“Most bestselling stories are unstable emotionally, so their audiences can have it both ways: that is their pleasure and their consolation.”
― Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells

“Desire just cheats you,” laments Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned. “It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“Details tend to be the first casualty of reproduction.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream

“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, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

“History resembles a guest list, in that sense, of the invited and the gate-crashers, the people, for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. Sometimes the gate-crashers prove to be the life of the party.”
― Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby