Life In America Quotes

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America. ~ Anna Quindlen

He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed: ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was walking down a street and after his death and saw a billboard on the side of a brick wall for Van's shoes. It was a picture of Hopper's face, and all it said was, 'Hopper Lives.' So I think he's still part of youth culture. There are lessons to be learned from Hopper about being a young person who wants to live the art life in America. ~ Tom Folsom

As different as Emily Dickinson's parents' life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande's in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they'd raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state - something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande's life to Alice Hobson's? ~ Atul Gawande

When relatives asked, "How is your life in America?" my father would answer, Nandito pa rin kami. We're still here. ~ Alex Tizon

If you have a full understanding of what we're up against and the leadership of your country doesn't, well, hello. That's life in America today. ~ Rush Limbaugh

I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to. ~ J.D. Salinger

I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes. ~ Anne Roiphe

I know that when I look at today's Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America. On the other side, however, open immigration can't coexist with a strong social safety net; if you're going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can't make that offer global. So Democrats have mixed feelings about immigration; in fact, it's an agonizing issue. ~ Paul Krugman

It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common. ~ Sam Shepard

My trip to the former Yugoslavia had opened the world for me, and my hunger for the world. In doing so, it undid the contained, safe borders of my existence. Suddenly a woman weeping over her lost son in an image on the front page of The New York Times was no longer a theoretical entity. She was real, a woman I might have met, might have known. I was connected to her. I could no longer divorce myself from her pain, her suffering. Initially this was overwhelming. I had nightmares. I felt restless and wrong in my comforting life in America. Everything seemed absurd and pointless. I came to understand why we block out the pain and atrocities of others. That pain, if we allow it to enter us, makes our lives impossible. It forces us to examine our own values and reality. It insists that we be responsible for others. It thrusts us into the messy world where there are no easy solutions or reasons, only struggles and questions. It creates great fissures in the landscape of our insulated, so-called safe reality. Fissures that, once split open, can never close again. It compels us to act. ~ Eve Ensler

The prevailing quality of life in America
by any accepted methods of measuring
was unarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The myth of the dead Indian goes back to the Protestant settlement of the U.S. The Pilgrims wanted to start a new life in America. They wanted to believe that in some sense they had come to a new Eden and that they could leave history behind in Europe. So they convinced themselves that this land had no history, that this was "virgin" land. This made the Indians' presence inconvenient. ~ Richard Rodriguez

It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America. ~ Jay Severin

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is. ~ Neal Stephenson

I arrived in Hollywood and lived much of my life in America, but the fans did not really know me. ~ Persis Khambatta

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: "Listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I'm blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with every cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise." Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP's outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They "support our troops," though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose an eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia. ~ Joe Bageant

Our country is not in crisis; there are no tanks in the streets. No matter what the outcome of the president's situation, life in America will go on. Our lives will continue to be filled with practical matters, not constitutional ones. ~ Jennifer Dunn

Just before our wedding, a German coffee farmer warned me that I was about to make a big mistake. "The longer you live in Arusha, the poorer you'll be," he said. "Don't give up your life in America. There is nothing for you here." My ~ Sara Tucker

Excellent Sheep is likely to makea lasting mark for three reasons. One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent twenty-four years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale.He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He's a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net. Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America.Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness. ~ Dwight Garner

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America. ~ Rita Dove

The lawlessness of frontier life in America has been pictured as a remarkable phenomenon. In reality, it was the natural consequence of indiscriminate mixing of volatile substances. ~ Paul Harris

I am not ascare to die. I am only ascare that after death I be alone. Maybe because of suicide, I go to the hell? If hell all hot and crowded and noiseful, like Christian minister on TV say, then I not care because it will be just like India. But if hell cold and quiet, with lot of snow and leaf-empty trees, and people who smile with string-thin lips, then I ascare. Because it seems so much like my life in Am'rica. ~ Thrity Umrigar

I worry about a culture that devalues life and believe as your president I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world. ~ George W. Bush

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal. ~ Essex Hemphill

I want to make a toast to all at this press event who agree with Thomas Jefferson, who said that our liberty depends on the freedom of the press. So I want to lift a glass to those who defend that freedom. Our finest, the men and women in uniform who defend that freedom, our Constitution, and our exceptional way of life in America. ~ Sarah Palin

John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" has maligned into "What can my country do for me?" While I can't comment on the societal deterioration outside of the United States, within the last 20 years Sidewalking has become a way of life in America. Americans once loyally proclaimed, "Give me liberty or give me death." Now we just say, "Give me. ~ M.J. DeMarco

Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. ~ Langston Hughes

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America. ~ Langston Hughes

The quality of life of European cities and towns of almost any size make life in America look not just like a joke, but a sick joke, a horror movie. But I'd rather stay involved and do what I can to make this a better place than move to the south of France and enjoy the good life. ~ James Howard Kunstler

My mother's only wish was to start a life in America because America was the cradle of every promise and opportunity. ~ Masiela Lusha

From early Colonial days, sex life in America had been based on the custom of men supporting women. That situation reached its heyday in the Twenties when it was easy for any dabbler in stocks to flaunt his manhood by lavishing an unearned income on girls. But with the stock-market crash, men were hard put even to keep their wives, let alone spend money on sex outside the home. The adjustment was much easier on women than on men, who jumped out of windows in droves, whereas I can't recall a single headline that read: KEPT GIRL LEAPS FROM LOVE NEST. ~ Anita Loos

I was court-martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence. ~ Thomas Hardy

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories. ~ Neil Gaiman

all of us lost souls allow ourselves to live in worry and anger and self-importance and pettiness when life with God is all around us: ~ John Ortberg

You should want to act only because you want to be led to something bigger in life. ~ Stella Adler

Does God exist?
Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents' generation and her grandparents' generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said.
At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience - and that was no small achievement - Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion.
In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists.
If God exists, and I truly don't believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might ~ Paulo Coelho

In demonstrating this, the Buddha was making an important example for the ages. For almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a much more pronounced way than others, the unpredictable and unstable nature of things makes life inherently traumatic. What the Buddha revealed through his dreams was that, true as this may be, the mind, by its very nature, is capable of holding trauma much the way a mother naturally relates to a baby. One does not have to be helpless and fearful, nor does one have to be hostile and self-referential. The mind knows intuitively how to find a middle path. Its implicit relational capacity is hardwired. ~ Mark Epstein

When I stand by the stream and watch it, I am relatively still, and the flowing water makes a path across my memory so that I realize its transience in comparison with my stability. This is, of course, an illusion in the sense that I, too, am in flow and likewise have no final destination - for can anyone imagine finality as a form of life? My death will be the disappearance of a particular pattern in the water. Feeling ~ Alan W. Watts

Life happens. There is no point in being upset or down about things we can't control or change. ~ Amy Winehouse

I used to think then that all the tragic events of life were written down in books and that what went on outside was just diluted crap. ~ Henry Miller

What color is in a picture, enthusiasm is in life. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I knew there was a point in my life where I couldn't go to Baba for much; I had to hide a lot from him, and it wasn't because he wouldn't have listened. He lost my trust somewhere along the line because I didn't think he would be able to handle my life, because it was so different from his own. I want you to know both the good and bad; I want you to see me as your fellow human, and not a God. I want you to see me as your friend one day and to not fear approaching me. ~ Hani Selim

Imagine your ideal future. Visualize yourself as if your life were perfect in every respect. ~ Brian Tracy

I know, when I look into the eyes of my own children, the look of wonder when I speak of life back in the '60s. That's why the Rolling Stones are such a hit even in their 60s, why Dennis Hopper is so compelling, even when he's making pitches for something unhip as long-term financial planning. ~ Chris Matthews

The bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves. ~ Joost Meerloo

sometimes life requires you to let go of the heaviness so you can travel lighter on your journey, and put memories on a shelf in the back of your mind to create space for new ones. ~ Billy Chapata

He who misleads others in other to succeed in life will definitely be misled at his post of success". ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

I am not interested in your fine calibrations of empathy or your great mission to protect the river of history. I just to live my own life, and I want to spend it having my own private fucked-up little emotions. ~ Bee Ridgway

Life messes us up in so many ways, messes all of us right the hell up. And when we fumble and bumble around, crashing into one another, stepping on toes and hearts, it's not on purpose. Being a person is nearly impossible. ~ Lynn Weingarten

Put Jesus Christ in the driver's seat of your life and take your hands off the steering wheel. ~ Rick Warren

Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. ~ Jules Verne

You want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It's a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That's all addiction really is. It's trading away the future so you can feel OK right now. ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

I am not a snowflake. I am not a sweet, infantilising symbol of fragility and life. I am a strong, fierce, flawed adult woman. I plan to remain that way, in life and in death. ~ Stella Young

I never grew up thinking the goal in life was to be a millionaire. All the way through college, I had a part-time job. I worked hard to get the things that you need at that age. ~ Cecelia Ahern

It was in his office, though, where he told me he'd never had anal sex. His cock was very large, but anal was so trendy and ubiquitous that I thought it impossible that there was anyone left in America who hadn't tried it. ~ Charlotte Shane

You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave. ~ Joseph Campbell

In secret pleasure - secret tears
This changeful life has slipped away ~ Emily Bronte

Don't get caught sleepwalking on the conveyor belt of life, fumbling about but getting no where fast in the viscous cycle of a comfort zone. ~ Dwaun S. Cox

I think throughout my life I've had an appreciation for how all of these things have to come together in order to realize and then sustain change. ~ Maya Harris

If you want to do something in your life,

share everything but never your ideas. ~ Vikash Shrivastava

Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given him that gift that only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For though, outside the Exercises, we can lawfully and with merit influence every one who is probably fit to choose continence, virginity, the religious life and all manner of evangelical perfection, still in the Spiritual Exercises, when seeking the Divine Will, it is more fitting and much better, that the Creator and Lord Himself should communicate Himself to His devout soul, inflaming it with His love and praise, and disposing it for the way in which it will be better able to serve Him in future. So, he who is giving the Exercises should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but standing in the centre like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord. ~ Ignatius Of Loyola

I don't want to know
wreckage, dreck, and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon's belly.
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.
If you had known me
once you'd still know me though in a different
light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.
But it would not surprise you
to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean
eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always
I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth ... these are not the roads
you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching
for life and death, is the same. ~ Adrienne Rich

I find beauty in sadness, and peace ... and a mystery waiting to be solved.. the more you unfold the mystery, the more you are mesmerized by the layers of mystery lying underneath.. and solitude becomes the perfect company for sadness..
but again, the feeling you get when you realize you're not alone gives you inexplicable happiness.. and there's satisfaction in happiness,, and another mystery which is unknotted yet difficult to penetrate ~ Sanhita Baruah

I'm a hopeful romantic who adores novels with happy endings, because there are enough sad endings in real life. ~ Tammara Webber

When Corporate America finds a Jayson Blair in its midst, the standard operating procedure is to circle the wagons and deny that any form of liability extends up the chain of command. ~ Gary Weiss

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently. ~ Pema Chodron

The Screelings are loose and the Keeper may win.
His assassins have come to rip off your skin.
Golden eyes will see you if you try to run.
The screelings will get you and laugh like it's fun.

Walk away slow or they'll tear you apart,
and laugh all day long as they rip out your heart.
Golden eyes will see you if you try to stand still.
The screelings will get you, for the Keeper they kill.

Hack 'em up, chop 'em up, cut 'em to bits,
or else they will get you while laughing in fits.
If the screelings don't get you the Keeper will try,
to reach out and touch you, your skin he will fry.

Your mind he will flail, your soul he will take.
You'll sleep with the dead, for life you'll forsake.
You'll die with the Keeper till the end of time.
He hates that you live, your life is the crime.

The screelings might get you, it says so in text.
If screelings don't get you the Keeper is next,
lest he who's born true can fight for life's bond.
And that one is marked; he's the pebble in the pond. ~ Terry Goodkind

Where life is fully and consciously lived in our own neighborhood, we are cushioned a little from the impact of great far-off events which should be of only marginal concern to us. ~ Hubert Butler

So, what did you want to watch?'

'Thought we might play a game instead,' he said, holding up a familiar dark green box. 'Found this on the bottom shelf of your DVD cupboard … if you tilt the glass, the champagne won't froth like that.'

Neve finished pouring champagne into the 50p champagne flutes she'd got from the discount store and waited until Max had drunk a good half of his in two swift swallows. 'The thing is, you might find it hard to believe but I can be very competitive and I have an astonishing vocabulary from years spent having no life and reading a lot – and well, if you play Scrabble with me, I'll totally kick your arse.'

Max was about to eat his first bite of molten mug cake but he paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. 'You're gonna kick my arse?'

'Until it's black and blue and you won't be able to sit down for a week.' That sounded very arrogant. 'Really, Max, Mum stopped me from playing when I was thirteen after I got a score of four hundred and twenty-seven, and when I was at Oxford, I used to play with two Linguistics post-grads and an English don.'

'Well, my little pancake girlfriend, I played Scrabble against Carol Vorderman for a Guardian feature and I kicked her arse because Scrabble has got nothing to do with vocabulary; it's logic and tactics,' Max informed her loftily, taking a huge bite of the cake.

For a second, Neve hoped that it was as foul-tasting as she suspected just to get ~ Sarra Manning

In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly. ~ Ellis Peters

Again and again, to be sure, on the way to America, and under many other circumstances, man has passed through the most adverse climates and has survived, but he has flourished and waxed strong only in certain zones. ~ Ellsworth Huntington

Being a professional wrestler was never one of my goals in life. I always wanted to be some kind of entertainer. I used to want to be a rock singer or a guitar player but I can't sing and I can't play the guitar. ~ Ric Savage

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely. ~ Lorrie Moore

God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them. ~ John Piper

I've thought a lot about suicide and near death experiences. I'm not saying I'm going to kill myself or anything. However, I've had a lot of passive thoughts about "what's the point?". I see life for what it is. We live, we procreate, we die. So the next gen can do it again. What's my purpose or point? Why bother? What do I have to live for? The near death experiences come in with me being curious about after life. If I knew I'd be okay would I just go there, would that change my mind about my purpose? ~ Ben Caesar

Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny's face – stupid terror; the whole world opening upside down; his life exploding in a thunder of crows and the sky expanding empty over his stomach like a white ocean. Then nothing. Rotten stumps, sowbugs crawling in the fallen leaves. Dirt and dark. ~ Donna Tartt

America today is a confused society, caught up in a terror war, a culture war, and a media war, where honesty and professional standards have vanished. ~ Bill O'Reilly

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby with no regrets and I don't mind saying it's a sad, sad story when a mother will teach her daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger. And how in the world can the words that I said send somebody so over the edge that they'd write me a letter saying that I better shut up and sing or my life will be over? ~ Dixie Chicks