As a fan of classical antiquity, I enjoy seeing ancient quotes crop up in the most unlikely places. Whether splayed across a national monument or displayed as a screenname beneath a wonderful blog post (see below), famous quotes worm their way into all sorts of situations.

But the Greeks and Romans aren't our only sources of inspiration. There's a stock of famed authors such that any sentence - no matter how banal - is infused with new life simply because of who may have said it in a fit of passion, frenzy, or delusion.

Nor is our adoration confined to quotes. If a well-loved author experienced adversity in childhood or faiied to eke out a living in her own lifetime, she becomes an inspiration. And rightly so. This post is not meant to detract from the remarkable feats and perseverance of famous authors in history. Instead, it only asks why the modern literary community is so captivated with alluding to and citing those who came before.

For instance, I have recently encountered an article that examines the role of antiquity in comforting us. That is, we look to the past to see that others have experienced similar pain or similar pleasure - that we are not the first to encounter the trying times which frequently define a human experience. But I feel that this is only a small part of the answer to a very large question.

Recently, I have been grappling with the challenge authors face when incorporating foreign languages into their writings. Many choose to italicize the given language in order to set it apart from the rest of the text. Mor often than not, the given phrase is then given a short translation -- either in a subordinate clause or sequestered away in parentheses. Cormac McCarthy has the pertinacity to use foreign phrases as regularly as English ones; let the reader be damned if he can't translate it properly. Strunk and White's little book on grammar has long held sway as an authoritative powerhouse of english language usage. I came across an interesting portion of it that deals with just this issue. The advice? Don't use foreign languages. At all. Avoid completely if possible because it just makes you sound worldy in a pretentious way and turns the reader off. As fellow writers, I am hoping you all could weigh in on this matter with any opinions as to whether one should include foreign phrases and, if yes, how to best do so.

People don't usually pick up nonfiction for fun. The genre, dominated by celebrities and their ghost writers, offers little more than a skewed view through which we can vicariously partake in debauchery. The more literary giants -- such as Annie Dillard and Joan Didion -- are hardly household names. I often wonder what it is that turns a reader off from nonfiction. After all, fiction writers inadvertently follow the cliched adage "write what you know." Stephen Elliott's Adderall Diaries are brimming with tribulation and intrigue and it shot to the top of the bestsellers list. But the truth is, he lived that. He grew up in group homes in Chicago and engaged in all forms of deviant sexual practices and the only reason it's not an autobiography is because. Well why, exactly?

Tim O'Brien, award-winning author of The Things They Carried, has an interesting contribution to this question. His novel is a collection of stories that loosely follow an American platoon stationed in Vietnam before, during, and after the war there. O'Brien narrates from the first-person, causing one to frequently blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction. In interviews, he reports that these events did take place, are real to him. But in order to properly convey the moral turpitude he legitimately feels to his readers, he is forced to exaggerate the facts. It is unimaginable to him to lose one friend, but the reader must see him lose ten. It is awful to have loved and lost, but O'Brien throws a tumor into the relationship. Fiction offers an outlet for what humanity perpetually feeds on: grief, lust, and gore.