Date: 1959

Dostoevsky advances "in the labyrinth of the unnatural, into the cellarage and morass of the soul."

— Steiner, George (b. 1929)

Date: Summer, 1991

"Elinor has constructed herself in this way around an original lack: the absentation of her sister, and perhaps in the first place the withholding from herself of the love of their mother, whom she then compulsively unites with Marianne, the favorite, in the love-drenched tableaux of her imaginat...

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: Summer, 1991

"Elinor's pupils, those less tractable sphincters of the soul, won't close against the hapless hemorrhaging of her visual attention-flow toward Marianne; it is this, indeed, that renders her consciousness, in turn, habitable, inviting, and formative to readers as 'point-of-view.'"

— Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1950-2009)

Date: December 23, 2006

"Twentieth-century intellectuals can be defined by two extremes: the Paul Valéry types who made their discoveries in the abstract laboratory of their minds and the Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway types who made their discoveries while drunk in brothels in countries where the president had just...

— Moroney, Robin

Date: August 21, 2012

"Though her book is entitled 'In Praise of Messy Lives' (The Dial Press, 288 pp., $25), Ms. Roiphe’s mind is neat as a pin, untroubled by the unexpected inference, the awareness of mitigating factors in television or film or literature that might unmake her arguments."

— D'Addario, Daniel