Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.

- Sarah Churchwell

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies …

- Sarah Churchwell

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic sys…

- Sarah Churchwell

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why mu…

- Sarah Churchwell

History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.

- Sarah Churchwell

Facts might be false if they challenge the conviction of a mind already made up.

- Sarah Churchwell

People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.

- Sarah Churchwell

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

- Sarah Churchwell

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby…

- Sarah Churchwell