American Experience Quotes

I came to America at the age of 17 as an exchange student, and a year later, I was a student at Dartmouth. I would say that the rather weak foundation of my Christianity was effectively battered at Dartmouth. I've had mostly a secular career. But I became intellectually interested in Christianity again in my mid-30s.

My first American experience was in the harbor of New York City when I saw that amazing big, tall lady. I remember thinking, 'Oh my goodness, a lady runs this country.'

My whole life, I grew up with this double vision, this vision of America but also Latin community.

When I put on my first Man Utd training kit, it felt enormous in a way that was really special in kind of like a childhood dream type way. Obviously, we don't have that history in the U.S., so to be able to put on a shirt like that as an American was really special.

I'm proud to be an American, I'll tell you. What a program and what a place and what an experience.

I've grown up feeling very American but being constantly bothered by people - there's internalized racism and feeling weird about being second-generation.

I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.

That morning of 11 September 2001, as we watched the twin towers crumble on live television, America and I would develop a bond that has proven deeper and more enduring - for better or worse, through sickness and health - than the one I had with my now ex-husband.

It is a complex fate being an American.

You've got Washington picking winners and losers. And so, all of a sudden, decisions are being made on what helps politicians, not what helps the economy. Some will call it socialism. Some will call it a command and control economy. Whatever it is, it's antithetical to the American experience.

I've been in America for almost ten years. I've had many parts of the American experience. I've been all over this country and seen many different parts of it. It's just that I'm not an American. I've never become an American. I'm talking about the whole thing-psychologically, citizenship, the whole trip. Of course I've definitely been influenced by America-I'm definitely influenced by the music and the culture.

The magic of the American experience is that we've upheld the rule of law for everybody, everybody treated equally beneath the law.

My experiences growing up in both a Chinese American household and the Catholic Church define much of who I am.

People want to see this America, this real America.

I spent more time in America, but I developed a very English sense of humour. I clicked into it deeply with Peter Sellers, who is still probably my favourite comedian.

What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don't fight war on our soil, we don't have direct experience of it, so there's an openness about the meanings we give to it.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

My father cared about the world he lived in, and so he admitted his confusion about his place in America because he didn't want me to make the same mistake in my life.

Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.

My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.

Having people that really reflect the spectrum of American experiences is important to have on the Supreme Court.

I had this DVD that my coach in Cameroon had mailed to me when I first came to America. It was an hour-long tape of Hakeem Olajuwon and some other legendary big men. I probably watched that DVD every single day for three years.

I love films from all these different points of views that used the idea of the school as a way to talk about the American experience. It took me a while to figure how to write a movie like that, because that's not something you learn at film school

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.