Edward Dahlberg Quotes

I wonder what it means when Americans say I'm an American. In Britain the culture is basically the same from one end of the country to the other. And when I came here and I saw Americans who live, I don't know, in you know, Northwestern California as opposed to Americans who live in Louisiana, as opposed to Americans who live in the Nevada desert. English even is literally a picture that I have in my mind of an oak tree in the field, a single oak in a green field. And also when I think of my Russian roots, it's the landscape that I connect with as more than maybe the poetry or the drama.

We really are 15 countries, and it's remarkable that each of us thinks we represent the real America. The Midwesterner in Kansas, the black American in Durham - both are certain they are the real American.

If you travel to Germany, it's still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity.

The Batave is much more Dutch than the Englander is English, the Frenchman is French or any other people of the world is anything. It is not exactly their patriotism which gives the Bataves the quality of eternal fixity of character, but rather their land, their climate, their whole manner of being and living, all of which resemble nothing else that can be seen on the face if the earth.

Americans, perhaps more than most people, have pondered the question of who they are and what their country is.

A lot of people tell me, 'You are from North; how do you manage to get along in the South?' I don't know what to say to them. I've always felt at home here, and by learning to speak Telugu, my connection with the place has gotten that much stronger.

I don't think it's a coincidence that 'The War Room' and 'A Perfect Candidate' are films that have been consistently shown and available for rental for 20 years. These are films that are more about the moment in which they were filmed: they also have a great deal to say about larger issues about who we are as a country.

Culture is not a matter of a change of climate.

Americans continue to rapidly homogenize ourselves into a neutered oblivion. For a country founded on the protection of the unique, we relish our sameness.

The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use.

I left the Midwest thinking I didn't fit in. But when I got to New York, I realized how truly Midwestern I was.

If the immigrant is responsible for assimilation of the country, and some of these people are in fact are born there. But if you find it unwelcoming to your own barbaric notions of equality, that is not on the country, that is on you. If you leave a horrible place, please leave your horrible practices behind.

Basically, there are two kinds of stereotypes out there in the world about America. There's America the Goliath - the big, powerful, bullying country that pushes its way around the world and gets its ways, pursues its own interests nakedly, irrespective of what others want. And the other stereotype is America, the land of opportunity, where everyone can go and do anything, be anything, make any dreams come true.

People from all over the world came to America and assimilated into a single culture rooted in the founding, which is rooted in individual liberty and primacy of citizen over government. Everybody who came here, that's what drew them.

I've never left my culture. I've left my country, but I've not left my culture. In the same way, you shouldn't be worried why George Lucas is going to the outer galaxy to make a movie. He's still making a film within his culture; he's making an American film. I go to Thailand or the Peruvian jungle, the Amazon, and I still make Bavarian films.

The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.

New York has become almost a third-world country. When I was growing up it was mostly a Euro-American country. And it wasn't until LaGuardia was elected in 1933 that Italians were even considered Americans. We're at a great transition point in terms of population, demographics, and what it means to be a human being.

When a tiger changes his nature, Englishmen will change theirs.

The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.

Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners ... California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart ... The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

Our way of life, our government defines the way America is. I mean, it's not luck.

The US ... cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth ... it lives in a perpetual present. in the US everything human is artificial. The country is without hope. What is arresting here is ... both the absence of architecture in the cities and the dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

I think that as far as language goes I'm an American, I'm afraid, my accent is American, my way of talk is an American way of talk, I'm an old-fashioned American. That's probably one of the reasons why I'm in England now and why I'll always stay in England.

Assimilation is really a psychological process where you come to identify with a new country as yours. The ease of overseas travel and information access interferes with that.