#america

Part of the success of This American Life, I think, is due to the fact that none of us sound like we should be on the radio. We don't sound professional; we sound like people you would know. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#american life #due #fact #i #i think

What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions. ↗

— Wim Wenders

#fact #films #generally #in fact #productions

I met an American woman and got married so I had to get a job. ↗

— Walter Wager

#american #american woman #get #got #had

What makes America amazing is that there have always been men and women of courage who were willing to think more about the future of their children and grandchildren than they did about their own political careers. ↗

— Scott Walker

#always #amazing #america #been #careers

The American Army has supplied, assigned a very capable man to me, to help me, bring me to military justice. I don't think I need no civilians. All I want to do is clear myself with the American Army. ↗

— Robert Jenkins

#american #army #assigned #bring #capable

In 1980, a nation in need of change selected Ronald Reagan to restore the shine to a tarnished America. ↗

— William L. Jenkins

#change #nation #need #reagan #restore

When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration. ↗

— Howard Mumford Jones

#american writer #asked #celebration #died #emerson

I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people. ↗

— Mary Harris Jones

#american people #before #country #facts #get

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#constructs #making-stuff-up #myth #personal-history #family

Whereas European films have traditionally been able to go into adult relationships. I think there's a huge audience in America for those kinds of films. ↗

— Philip Kaufman

#adult #america #audience #been #european