American Life Quotes

“It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.”
― J. Maarten Troost

“Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.”
― John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

“And it is awful here, there is no other way to say it. But I believe that Detroit is America’s city. It was the vanguard of our way up, just as it is the vanguard of our way down. And one hopes the vanguard of our way up again. Detroit is Pax Americana...America’s way of life was built here.”
― Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy

“mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the room to consider things about it, to change things about it. You make it something new. “I think I’ll add a little chili powder.”
~ Seth Asa, age 37
From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012”
― Deborah L. Halliday

“Now that she was here, she realized there were no huge teacups in which people sat and laughed, but the people still spun endlessly.”
― Marjan Kamali, Together Tea

“Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the room to consider things about it, to change things about it. You make it something new. “I think I’ll add a little chili powder.”
~ Seth Asa, age 37
From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012”
― Deborah L. Halliday

“Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets." -Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett Early Travels, p. 93”
― Wendell Berry, Andy Catlett: Early Travels

“As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.”
― Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

“Instead, they face a bizarre new world of frustrating duties and counterintuitive ideas: sit still, learn math, find a job, move away from friends, ignore kin, drive cars, leave kids in day care, and grow burdensome in old age.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the room to consider things about it, to change things about it. You make it something new. “I think I’ll add a little chili powder.”
~ Seth Asa, age 37
From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012”
― Deborah L Halliday

“Though we could always explain that our life was not as glamorous as it might seem in the telling, we did come to realize that we'd made some radical decisions. We also came to realize, however, that the life that was laid before us in that not-so-distant past – becoming an industrial engineer, for example, working fifty hours a week for a car company's profit, getting an abysmal two weeks of vacation a year, never really feeling like your work had any meaning – was its own radical path. In Europe, life was different. Ambition was secondary to leisure; long, conversation-filled meals, the norm. The parks were full of people strolling, not running; cafes with people talking, not doing work on their own solitary computers.”
― Megan Rich, Six Years of A Floating Life

“There is a lack of agency here - a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”
― J. D. Vance

“As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulatorsthat Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to ahieveperfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as 
anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the test of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and 5hen moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great- grandpa. He died of misdirection. " /”
― / "Lake Wobegon Days" Garrison Keillor

“Haley was a fierce critic of industrial elites, telling a crowd, "Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today; one the industrial ideal dominating through the superiority of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machines; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.”
― Sarah Jaffe

“By 1957 97% of all marriageable men and women were married, and if they cared to have a social life, they stayed that way.”
― Peter Jennings, The Century

“Mark: Mike, do you really remember that New Frontier stuff?

Mike: 'The energy we bring to our endeavors will light our country. The glow from that fire can truly light the world!' (He's quoting the late President John F. Kennedy).

Mike & Mark: Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha!

Mark: Heh.. (Pause) God, what's happened to us?

Mike: I dunno, man, I dunno..”
― G. B. Trudeau; Christopher Rawson (editor)