“For no matter how they might want to ignore it, there was an air of excellence about this city (Boston), an air of reason, a feeling for beauty, a memory of something very good, and perhaps a reminiscence of the vast aspiration of man which could never entirely vanish.’’

— Arona McHugh (1924-1996), American novelist who set two of her novels in her native Boston

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“The society of Boston was and is quite uncivilized but refined beyond the point of civilization.’’

— T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Nobel Prize-winning Anglo-American poet, critic, essayist and playwright who came from an old Boston Brahmin family.