The wit of JM Coetzee

Though Whitman gives the impression that he witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater and provides a dramatic description of the event, he was not in fact there. But he did believe he enjoyed a special relationship with Lincoln. Both men were tall. 

- JM Coetzee, in the NYRB

[Untitled]*

I think I am going to have to buy this book.

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* 'Anticipation is everything!'
- Abraham Lincoln

Because I HAD often wondered...

Up to the Civil War “the United States” was invariably a plural noun: “The United States are a free country.” After Gettysburg it became a singular: “The United States is a free country.” This was a result of the whole mode of thinking that Lincoln expressed in his acts as well as his words, making union not a mystical hope but a constitutional reality.

- Gary Wills, via Andrew Sullivan