In white America, the printed word — the literary tradition — and its attendant values, are revered. In the Negro community, more power resides in the spoken word and oral tradition — good talkers abound and the best gain power and prestige, but good writers are scarce.

Amid the effete monarchies and princedoms of feudal Europe, morally and materially exhausted by the Thirty Years' War, the only hope of resistance to France lay in the little Republic of merchants, Holland.

There is a distinction between Dubliners on the one hand and rednecks on the other. […] The Dubs historically went to Liverpool and Birmingham, so they don't have the connections.

The face which emerged was not reassuring. […]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls.