Alex Beam > Quotes

“I have never met a writer who didn't need an editor, and an editor without a writer is a person without a job. It is a fraught and often-imperfect relationship, of course, dating back to the beginning of time. You remember; after God moved upon the darkness, he proclaimed, "I've put in place some very wondrous illumination here!" And Mrs. God gently suggested the more pithy: 'Let there be light.”
― Alex Beam

“The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own. "The digital delivery module" is a piece of molded plastic made in China, encasing a few memory chips. That is not the book, that's the "reader." Wait, I thought I was the reader. Oh, never mind.”
― Alex Beam

“In front of the reviewing stand, she presented Joseph with a twenty-six-star, handcrafted silk American flag, sewn for the occasion by the ladies of Nauvoo. Then the officers, the honored guests, and the twenty members of the Legion marching band assembled for the procession to the temple site. Joseph had assigned special places on the reviewing stand to the Sauk Indian chief Keokuk and his entourage, who had crossed over from Iowa to partake in the festivities.”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church

“At a university where self-regard flows like mother’s milk through the hallways, Gerschenkron was a mythic figure. He”
― Alex Beam, The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship

“Joseph also administered the new, secret rite of the Second Anointing for chosen couples upstairs at the store. He sealed polygamous marriages in the second-floor office, never revealing them to the Saints at large. Smith and Brigham Young kept coded records of these events, sometimes using pseudonyms. In his diary, Smith occasionally called himself “Baurak Ale.” To record his marriages, Young might write “saw E. Partridge,” a code which meant “[s]ealed [a]nd [w]ed Emily Partridge,” or “ME L. Beaman,” which would mean “married for eternity Louisa Beaman.” One of Joseph’s plural wives, Willard Richards’s sister Rhoda, lived in the store, which was also the site of Brigham Young’s soon-to-be-famous, botched seduction of British teenager Martha Brotherton.”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church

“Nabokov famously never had a home. In the United States he and his wife, Vera, always rented. At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he taught for a decade, they occupied homes vacated by professors on sabbatical. The Nabokovs ended their days in a small suite of rooms at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland. When asked to explain his peripatetic life of exile, Nabokov said, “Nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me.” His hero Pushkin was a wanderer, too, exiled from St. Petersburg by the czar for years at a time. Like Nabokov, “To the end of his life he remained deeply attached to what he considered his real home, the Lyceum, and to his former fellow students.”
― Alex Beam, The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship

“Joseph was hardly the first prophet of America’s Second Great Awakening—the tide of religious fervor that washed across the country at the start of the nineteenth century—to traffic in millenarian predictions, and he wasn’t the last. But he was the most successful.”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church

“Smith answered immediately, writing at midnight on June 22. “We dare not come,” he insisted—three times. “Your Excellency promises protection. Yet, at the same time, you have expressed fears that you could not control”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church

“... I feel like a periwinkle Left too high on the beach By the tide ... What flood was it That brought me here? Eleanor Morris, “Easter Sunday”
― Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital

“A bumptious, outgoing soul, Tillotson would later earn a footnote in literary history as the doctor whose electroshock therapy so traumatized Smith College junior Sylvia Plath that she attempted suicide shortly thereafter.”
― Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital

“It was the night of the New Jersey primary; General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who happened to be in Brussels, had defeated “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert Taft. The very same day, Adlai Stevenson, who would eventually lose to Eisenhower in November, announced he had no intention of running for president.”
― Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books

“McLean was represented by F. Lyman Wells, a young assistant in pathological psychiatry, who told Hall he was entirely unimpressed. (James, too, was underwhelmed by Freud; “a man obsessed with fixed ideas,” he reported.)”
― Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital

“At an academic conference I learned the old adage that everything has been said, but not everyone has said it.”
― Alex Beam, The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship