Quotes from Alex Beam

I have never met a writer who didn't need an editor, and an editor without a writer is a person without a job. It is a fraught and often-imperfect relationship, of course, dating back to the beginning of time. You remember; after God moved upon the darkness, he proclaimed, "I've put in place some very wondrous illumination here!" And Mrs. God gently suggested the more pithy: 'Let there be light.

The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own. "The digital delivery module" is a piece of molded plastic made in China, encasing a few memory chips. That is not the book, that's the "reader." Wait, I thought I was the reader. Oh, never mind.

In front of the reviewing stand, she presented Joseph with a twenty-six-star, handcrafted silk American flag, sewn for the occasion by the ladies of Nauvoo. Then the officers, the honored guests, and the twenty members of the Legion marching band assembled for the procession to the temple site. Joseph had assigned special places on the reviewing stand to the Sauk Indian chief Keokuk and his entourage, who had crossed over from Iowa to partake in the festivities.

At a university where self-regard flows like mother's milk through the hallways, Gerschenkron was a mythic figure. He

A bumptious, outgoing soul, Tillotson would later earn a footnote in literary history as the doctor whose electroshock therapy so traumatized Smith College junior Sylvia Plath that she attempted suicide shortly thereafter.

Smith answered immediately, writing at midnight on June 22. "We dare not come," he insisted—three times. "Your Excellency promises protection. Yet, at the same time, you have expressed fears that you could not control

It was the night of the New Jersey primary; General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who happened to be in Brussels, had defeated "Mr. Republican," Senator Robert Taft. The very same day, Adlai Stevenson, who would eventually lose to Eisenhower in November, announced he had no intention of running for president.

I feel like a periwinkle Left too high on the beach By the tide ... What flood was it That brought me here? Eleanor Morris, "Easter Sunday

Joseph was hardly the first prophet of America's Second Great Awakening—the tide of religious fervor that washed across the country at the start of the nineteenth century—to traffic in millenarian predictions, and he wasn't the last. But he was the most successful.

At an academic conference I learned the old adage that everything has been said, but not everyone has said it.

McLean was represented by F. Lyman Wells, a young assistant in pathological psychiatry, who told Hall he was entirely unimpressed. (James, too, was underwhelmed by Freud; "a man obsessed with fixed ideas," he reported.)