American Quotes

″‘Chinese people do many things,’ she said simply. ‘Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.‘”

″‘I’m as American as the next,’ [Call] said, taking his hat and picking up his rifle. ‘You was born in Scotland,’ Augustus reminded him.”

“Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. ”

“Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.”

“I wondered if anybody thought what we were doing was unpatriotic. It was weird. Thinking that to protest was somehow un-American . . . This was very American.”

“‘Of course, we knew something was going on,’ Aziraphale said. ‘But one somehow imagines this sort of thing happening in America. They go in for that sort of thing over there.‘”

“Mameh’s sisters were more about money than anything else, and any hurts that popped up along the way, they just swept them under the rug. They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind.”

“She had won, indeed, but her triumph was full of air. Her fleeting victory had left in its wake a vast, echoing space, because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers.”

“American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”

“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.”

“‘Yes, oh yes,’ said the other with bitterness. ‘American citizenship is a precious privilege when every goggle-eyed German--’ His anger choked him.”

“The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”

“We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine.”

“No longer an American, Benedict Arnold was never accepted as an Englishman, either.”

“It would be the twentieth century before the opening of the British Headquarters Papers at the University of Michigan proved what the eighteenth century refused to believe that a young and beautiful woman was capable of helping Benedict Arnold plot the greatest conspiracy of the American Revolution and then completely fooling the astute warriors around her.”

“American impudence! I’ve heard of it before. They call it precocity and freedom. Beastly, impudent bad manners; that’s what it is!”

“I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.”

“I love America more than Maggie Bunn or Lida or Jane! I’m more American than all of them. because- because they were unkind to Father in England.”

“Nobody they knew could afford to own a book, something we all take for granted these days. But they owned a piano and it seems that several of the girls had lessons. We have to run a stall selling vegetables to raise money for music lessons.”

“We don’t cheat in America, but you can, if you choose,” said Jo angrily. “Yankees are a deal the most tricky, everybody knows. There you go!” returned Fred, croqueting her ball far away.

Mr. Tudor’s uncle had married an English lady who was third cousin to a living lord, and Amy regarded the whole family with great respect, for in spite of her American birth and breeding, she possessed that reverence for titles which haunts the best of us—that unacknowledged loyalty to the early faith in kings which set the most democratic nation under the sun in ferment at the coming of a royal yellow-haired laddie, some years ago, and which still has something to do with the love the young country bears the old, like that of a big son for an imperious little mother, who held him while she could, and let him go with a farewell scolding when he rebelled.

In France the young girls have a dull time of it till they are married, when ‘Vive la liberte!’ becomes their motto. In America, as everyone knows, girls early sign the declaration of independence, and enjoy their freedom with republican zest, but the young matrons usually abdicate with the first heir to the throne and go into a seclusion almost as close as a French nunnery, though by no means as quiet.