Lorna’s Reviews > Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth > Status Update

“In this wonderful and intoxicating way all of Paris defiled past them like a great glittering toy, a splendid map of rich, luxurious shops and great cafes, an animated and beautiful design of a million gay and fascinating people, all bent on pleasure, all filled with joy, all with something so
vivid, bright, particular and incomparable about them that the whole vast pattern resolved . . . “

“More and more I am convinced that to be a great writer a man must be something of an ass. I read of Tolstoy that he read no newspapers, that he went away and lived among peasants for 7 years at a time, and that for six years he read nothing except the novels of Dumas. Yet such a man could write great books. I almost think that because of this that he did.”

“Such a man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To me, he is not one of the great English poets. He is The Poet. To me he has not to make obeisance at the throne of any other monarch—he is there by Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.”

”So did that great treasure of unread, purchased, and forgotten books speak to him in the silent watches of the night, as they stood there, lonely, small and bought, obn a rich man’s shelf.”

“And above all else, the Hudson River was like the light—oh, more than anything it was the light, the light, the tone, the texture of the magic light in which he had seen the city as a child, that made the Hudson River wonderful.”

“So had their hundred voices welled up from the earth and called to him, their son and brother, above the pounding of the mighty wheels that roared above them. And the memory of their words, their triumphant tongue of deathless silence, and the full weight of the inheritance . . out of the earth into the swarming canyons and the million tongues of the unceasing, the fabulous, the million-footed city.”

“It was the beginning of that dark time of blood and crime, and terror which the years of prohibition brought and which was to leave its hideous mutilation not only upon the soul and conscience of the nation, but upon the lives of millions of people—particularly the young everywhere.”