Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

There's very little solid research on readership, yet people make pronouncements about it all the time.