You never learn a language unless you use it. - Mary McCarthy

[T]he whole concept of transcendence […] was very close to my heart, the concept that man is more than his circumstances, more even than himself.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake.