Heaven lies about us in our infancy ... and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies—thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
—D.H. (David Herbert)
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)