“We have to take life — society and human relations — more or less as we find them. The only thing we can really make is our work. And deliberate work of the mind, imagination and hand, done, as Nietzsche said, ‘notwithstanding’, in the long run remakes the world.”

— Edmund Wilson, writing to Louise Bogan in 1937 (quoted in Vivian Gornick, Letters are Acts of Faith)