I've seen every highway in the United States, and they all look alike to me.
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.
America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.
When I was 17, my dad was teaching in the States. He hired an A-Team-style van, and we drove all over. My resounding memory of it was that we saw all these wonderful places but that my sister and I were being horrible, sulky teenagers.
Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.
The story of mountaintop mining - why it happens, and what its consequences are - is still new to most Americans. They have no idea that their country's physical legacy - the purple mountain majesties that are America - is being destroyed at the rate of several ridgetops a week, by three million pounds of explosives every day.
A couple times a year, I get in the car, and I'll drive 1,000 miles cross-country, going through side streets. I'll stay off the highways as much as possible. And I realize it's a huge country, and for us to be in so many places in the country is an amazing thing.
I think America is amazing for its landscape and its history. California is beautiful, New York is beautiful, but when you're a gypsy at heart, it probably suits you to be traveling.
I take space to be the central fact to man born in America. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.
...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhat far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded - at least that's what I thought then.
As I went walking That ribbon of highway I saw above me The endless skyway I saw below me The lonesome valley This land was made for you and me.
The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man's ken now are but poor-mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and clich?-shouting publicity agents. Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance, ignorance bringing them nearer to death, but nearness to death no nearer to God.
I certainly think I'll end up writing about America in some form. I've taken plenty of notes. I like America very much.
Edgar Wayburn has worked to preserve the most breath-taking examples of the American landscape. In fact, over the course of more than a half-century, both as President of the Sierra Club and as a private citizen, he has saved more of our wilderness than any person alive.
I felt like the country lays out like a pretty beautiful story itself, heading from the East Coast to West.
Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.
One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.
One of the unique things about covering politics in America is that I've gotten to see a lot of corners of this country that I never would've gotten to see. It turns out that there are a lot of really beautiful places in corners of America you wouldn't necessarily expect.
Much of my work is engaged with 'America' - the idea of America.
I became interested in photography during my first visit to the United States. I was a student at a university in Holland. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the American West. That was when I learned about the tradition of nature in American photography.
This is America, This vast, confused beauty, This staring, restless speed of loveliness, Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms, Making grandeur out of profusion, Afraid of no incongruities, Sublime in its audacity, Bizarre breaker of moulds.
It's a beautiful drive across the United States. It's so interesting. I'm a proud Canadian, and there are so many beautiful parts of Canada, but the United States also has incredible diversity in its landscape.
