“Launching a nice little war to divert national attention was a gambit no less appealing to nineteenth-century politicians than it is to their present-day counterparts.”

“In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.”

“The Little War?How can there bea little war?Are some deathssmaller than others,leaving motherswho weepa little less?”

“These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they live, and they therefore see in it nothing more than an indifferent framework for life, either more or less favorable to production.”

“Ornate language tended to unsettle him. Passages from nineteenth-century novels might glow like hot coals or squirm like heaps of snakes. In fact, he tried not to read anything written before the First World War. Hemingway made a good cutoff point. Hemingway's sentences were a nice deep blue, and they mostly held still, like stalks of wheat on a windless day.(p18)”

“...the Midwest is coping with a twenty-first-century problem [globalization] with a nineteenth-century political and social structure [relying on state and city solutions rather than regional solutions].”