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Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Van Wyck Brooks

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Van Wyck Brooks
Age: 77 †
Born: 1886
Born: February 16
Died: 1963
Died: May 2
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Plainfield
New Jersey
Peacock
Clothed
Gray
Bright
Genius
Virtue
Often
Found

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The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
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The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.
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Never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.
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Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
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No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
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No one in this country has any root anywhere we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.
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It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.
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No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.
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Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.
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Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
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The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.
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How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world around them.
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Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.
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As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
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If men were basically evil, who would bother to improve the world instead of giving it up as a bad job at the outset?
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The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.
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Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.
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Nothing is sadder than the consequences of having worldly standards without worldly means.
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There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.
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Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
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