“He pointed to a mop leaning against his room wall. Like most mops in this country, it can be wrung by a sliding mechanism on the handle. He thinks that’s hysterical—absurd. In Zimbabwe everyone wrings mops with their hands.”
Frank Bruni
more infosource: “Doors Swinging Open,” New York Times, September 26, 2011.
category: Africa, America, cleaning, culture, mop, Zimbabwe
medium: Op-Ed
“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.'”
David Sedaris
more infosource: “Standing By,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 33–35.
category: America, clothes, fashion, travel
medium: nonfiction
“America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.”
Paul Krugman
more infosource: “America Goes Dark,” The New York Times, August 8, 2010.
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category: America, future, nowhere
medium: Op-Ed
“The man who preached about two Americas will be remembered for doing it with two faces.”
Maureen Dowd
more infosource: “Kicking the Hornet’s Nest,” The New York Times, July 6, 2010.
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category: America, duplicity, John Edwards, lie, politics
medium: Op-Ed
“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”
Kurt Vonnegut
more infosource: Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Dial Press, 2005) 49.
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category: America, gift shop, life, materialism
medium: science fiction
“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.”
John Adams
more infosource: Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, Abigail Adams (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1976), 194.
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category: Abigail Adams, America, declaration of independence, founding father, history, Independence Day, July 4
medium: letter
notes: Congress voted for and approved the resolution of independence on July 2, which is why this letter is dated July 3, 1776. John Dunlap printed the first copies of the Declaration of Independence during the night of July 4. Delegates to the Continental Congress signed the document on August 2.
“…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.”
Elizabeth Bishop
more infosource: 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.
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medium: letter
America