“WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.”

“The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.”

“Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. ”

“The belle is a product of the Deep South, which is a product of the nineteenth century and the Age of Romanticism. Virginia is a product of the eighteenth century. It's impossible to extract a belle from the Age of Reason.”

“When I asked her what she'd thought of Pride and Prejudice, she only wondered aloud how anyone could have written a novel set in the first part of the nineteenth century without once mentioning Napoleon.”

“he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism.”