America
I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.
Letter to Robert Lowell, dated August 28, 1957, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 229.
I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles.”
“Standing By,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 33–35.
America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
“America Goes Dark,” The New York Times, August 8, 2010.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dial Press, 2005) 49.
I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration and support and defend these States. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means.
Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, Abigail Adams (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1976), 194.