Americana Quotes

“Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.”
― Walt Whitman

“Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars. With the Model T, part of the concept of private property disappeared. Pliers ceased to be privately owned and a tire pump belonged to the last man who had picked it up. Most of the babies of the period were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few were born in them. The theory of the Anglo Saxon home became so warped that it never quite recovered.”
― John Steinbeck

“There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.”
― Robert W. Service, The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses

“Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of high-velocity protein production, all of which culminate after several generations of epic nutrition in this strain of industrial-sized humans? Only America could produce such giants.”
― Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“It was like hundreds of roads he'd driven over - no different - a stretch of tar, lusterless, scaley, humping toward the center. On both sides were telephone poles, tilted this way and that, up a little, down...

Billboards - down farther an increasing clutter of them. Some road signs. A tottering barn in a waste field, the Mail Pouch ad half weathered away. Other fields. A large wood - almost leafless now - the bare branches netting darkly against the sky. Then down, where the road curved away, a big white farmhouse, trees on the lawn, neat fences - and above it all, way up, a television aerial, struck by the sun, shooting out bars of glare like neon. ("Thompson")”
― George A. Zorn, Shock!

“You Americans are a very singular people," he later recalled to one of his friends. "I went with my automaton all over my own country—the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France they exclaimed, Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe! The English set themselves to prove—one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to see me and said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like another thing like that? I can make you one for five hundred dollars.' I laughed at his proposition. A few months afterwards, the same Yankee came to see me again, and this time he said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like to buy another thing like that? I have one already made for you.”
― Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine

“The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts.”
― Rudy Rucker, Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker

“I come home from work this evening
there was a note in the frying pan
said Fix Your Own Supper Babe
I Run Off With The Fuller Brush Man

Well I sat down at the table
screamed & hollered & cried
I commenced to carring on
'till I almost lost my mind

and I miss the way
she used to Yell At Me
the way she used to Cuss & Moan
and if I ever go out
and get married again
I'll never leave my wife
at home

The Frying Pan
Diamonds In The Rough
John Prine”
― John Prine

“All that is loathsome, drooping, or decayed is here.”
― Charles Dickens, American Notes For General Circulation

“You better get it while you can
You better get it while you can
If you wait too long, it'll all be gone
And you'll be sorry then
It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor
And it's the same for a woman or a man
From the cradle to the crypt
Is a mighty short trip
So you better get it while you can”
― Steve Goodman

“You have always adored driving great distances across your country; it is the only time you ever feel any kind of patriotism.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“La condición americana, en lo esencial, es la de tener poca sensibilidad para el pasado. No nos sentimos prisioneros del pasado. Estamos como más libres, sueltos y ágiles para afrontar los requerimientos del presente y del mañana. En el fondo de toda verdadera conciencia europea hay la noción de que el ayer es más importante que el hoy. En el fondo de toda conciencia verdaderamente americana está activa la noción de que el hoy y el mañana son más importantes que el ayer. No tenemos cómo vivir de herencia, sino de faena propia.”
― Arturo Uslar Pietri, El globo de colores

“All women is brothers,' Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn't know why you thought that was funny. But, as usual, he was telling the truth. Or part of it.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“No American is UnAmerican.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“True meaning of America is not discrimination and segregation, it is equality and inclusion. And so long as that force of equality and inclusion runs through the veins of even ten Americans, no brainless bigot can succeed in poisoning the soul of our great land of liberty.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“They fought to restore voting rights.”
― David Daley, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy

“She loved the smell of old truck; thick cotton and vinyl seat covers, old gasoline and oil, the smell of country, decades of farmers, workers and families taking trips back and forth to town, up backroads to swimming holes, over fields, through all the weather. She imagined what this truck would have seen if it had eyes and a memory. She was about to become one more episode in its existence.”
― Glenda Love

“[Attending the Sun Dance] There was a smattering of tourists, both serious and recreational. Professors of anthropology and ethnology. Writers of fact and other fiction. A family from Wisconsin pausing on their long, sacred pilgrimage to The Land of Disney.”
― James D. Doss, The Shaman's Game

“It's my America, and its problems are mine.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“The American Sonnet

On Mayflower we arrived filled with hope,
Escaping persecution and atrocities.
Upon landing we became the persecutor,
And atrociously evicted communities.
Apparently we were civilized people,
Who wanted it all for ourselves.
We snatched it all from the innocent natives,
And gave reservations to help themselves.
Even today we ignore these atrocities,
And continue to perpetuate segregation.
We may look civilized on the outside,
Inside we are walking discrimination.
We are the land of liberty but only in theory,
It's time to walk the talk and embody the glory.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Boldly Comes Justice: Sentient Not Silent

“What America explores today, the world explores a decade later.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“America is impossibility made possible.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“Who are we? We are the lovers of this land. Who are we? We are the children of this land. Who are we? We are the soldiers of this land.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“It's time we become the new Americans - Americans with more accountability than recklessness - Americans with more curiosity than rigidity - Americans with more acceptability than prejudice - Americans with more inclusivity than discrimination.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America

“Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.”
― Alan Kapelner, All the Naked Heroes: A Novel of the Thirties

“What I am reveals unwanted truths about what they are: a piece of Americana - a broken person from a fractured country. I'm a product of America. I'm an American.”
― Trevor Church, The Gospel According to a Basket-Case

“Post-Racial. Trans–Jim Crow. Epi-Traumatic. Alt-Reparational. Omni-Restitutional. Jingoistic Body-Positive. Sociocultural-Transcendental. Indigenous-Ripostic. Treaty of Fort Laramie–Perpendicular. Meta-Exculpatory. Pan-Political. Uber-Intermutual. MLK-Adjacent. Demi-Arcadian Bucolic. That is the vernacular of the inclusive, hyphenated, beau-American destiny we’re manifesting here!”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book