![Perhaps Algren was our Cassandra: he was right when he argued for the significance of "squalor” and for the literary significance of the vast demographic of the dispossessed. The city was integral to what Algren observed and animated in his best fiction; thanks to Algren and a few others, Chicago framed American conversations about urban reality from the Thirties all the way through the Seventies and Eighties. [... Algren was] the most perceptive and humane novelist produced by Chicago in the 20th century. (Nelson Algren)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/91/nelson-algren-american-best-970691.webp)
Perhaps Algren was our Cassandra: he was right when he argued for the significance of "squalor” and for the literary significance of the vast demographic of the dispossessed. The city was integral to what Algren observed and animated in his best fiction; thanks to Algren and a few others, Chicago framed American conversations about urban reality from the Thirties all the way through the Seventies and Eighties. [... Algren was] the most perceptive and humane novelist produced by Chicago in the 20th century.
Nelson AlgrenRelated topics
best century city few integral novelist perhaps right seventies significance squalor thanks vast way others eighties cassandra demographicRelated quotes
Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is - or should be - the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all - perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.
Rachel Carson
From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states-the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. "Reality”-history as we had known or inferred it-was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.
Robert Charles Wilson
Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio - empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how - has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home - within the family, so to speak - our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.
Václav Havel
Conditions to the north of us, in the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts zone of action, and our offensive on Kharkov demands that we not lose time and we commit all forces so that we can draw off as many divisions as possible from Kharkov. And even if we do not draw them off, at least we will not give Manstein the ability to take any of his units from our part of the front. If we attract one or two German tank divisions - it will be the best contribution to the defeat of the enemy in the south.
Aleksandr Vasilevsky