From his novel Nicholas Nickleby. I’ve thought about this quotation often over the past few months as we collectively endure isolation and grieve gatherings. In his own time, Dickens (and his characters) also contended with a "dread disease," consumption, and...
From his beloved poem, Sympathy, which he wrote in 1899 while working as a clerk at the Library of Congress. On the most immediate level, the poem was a response to the stifling confinement and heat he felt as he worked...
The opening line of Dante's Inferno sets up the Divine Comedy’s epic, allegorical journey through hell, purgatory and heaven. Everything about the story, structure, and poetry aims for symmetry and balance, and it's no accident that the poem begins exactly...
The final line of The Great Gatsby, the Fitzgerald novel that defined the jazz age. It was the era that ushered in modernity, a time of material excess, liberation and intoxication. But even in the midst of the party, Fitzgerald could sense the toll such...
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep." - William Shakespeare From Act IV of The Tempest, this line is spoken by Prospero, as he compares his magical illusions "melted into...
