...one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in tha… - Randall Jarrell

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

I have trouble knowing what to do at parties. Prisoners tame mice, or make rings out of spoons: I analyze people’s handwriting...or else ask you to tell me what you read when you were a child. (People speak unusually well of the books of their childhood, don’t they? Or is this one more life-giving illusion?) I love to see a hard eye grow soft over Little Women... And, I’ve found, there’s no children’s book so bad that I mind your having liked it: about the tastes of dead children there is no disputing.

...“originality” is everyone’s aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: “It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel’s discoveries.”