Best 15 quotes of Elizabeth Drew on MyQuotes

Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits.

How frail and ephemeral is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a permanence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter! Conveyed by uncertain transportation, over which the sender has no control; committed to a single individual who may be careless or inappreciative; left to the mercy of future generations, of families maybe anxious to suppress the past, of the accidents of removals and house-cleanings, or of mere ignorance. How often it has been by the veriest chance that they have survived at all.

It takes two to write a letter as much as it takes two to make a quarrel.

Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust itsvitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. People are very inclined to set moral standards for others.

Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It's a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.

The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

The pain of loss, moreover, however agonizing, however haunting in memory, quiets imperceptibly into acceptance as the currents of active living and of fresh emotions flow over it.

The Republicans’ plan is that if they can’t buy the 2012 election they will steal it.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.

Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversations.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

A telling example of what it has all come to can be found in the person of Rick Santorum, the junior Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Elected to the House in 1990 and then the Senate in 1994, Santorum, forty, is the apotheosis of the brash newer member who imposes himself on the working order of the Senate, demonstrates little respect for the institution, becomes a one-man ideological enforcer, and brings down the level of civility. Toothy, with a shock of dark hair, Santorum looks the perfect pol for the television age. Unburdened by brilliance, he makes his impact through pestiferousness.