#america

I had been an eyewitness to a truly historic moment in American pop culture. ↗

— Jean Shepherd

#been #culture #had #historic #i

I made a gym, it's the best gym in Nicaragua, I have kids that this year July 6th through the 11th will be fighting and then will go on to the Central American Games and I'm sure at least one will win a gold medal. ↗

— Alexis Arguello

#best #central #fighting #games #go

American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has. ↗

— Don McLean

#american pie #feel #found #loss #niche

The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution. ↗

— Theodore H. White

#christianity #u-s-constitution #age

Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see…So the fantasy corners of America…you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one. ↗

— Andy Warhol

#art

Heade’s calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God’s grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes. ↗

— John Updike

#art #martin-johnson-heade #art

Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved. ↗

— John Updike

#art #james-mcneill-whistler #art

We Americans... like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#change #change

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. ↗

— Steven Pressfield

#art #consumerism #creativity #destiny #soul

McKisco's contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else - an attitude which reached its apogee in the "Harvard manner" of about 1900. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#attitude