Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

The only thing left worth saving is wilderness.

Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.