American Landscape Quotes & Sayings

Unlike the book, with a documentary, you get a chance to show much more texture and color. Film gives you get a chance to focus on much more individuals who are pivotal in changing the landscape of American culture. — Steve Stoute

The wolf is regarded by many North-American scientists like Coppinger (2003) or Peterson (1995) as an "indicator species" for intact wilderness. In Europe however, where no landscape is left that is not manipulated by humans, the wolf is at most able to life as an essentially adapted being within a cultural landscape; evidence for an individual adaptability that totally surprises US-researchers. — Gunther Bloch

But I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. — Jack Kerouac

Imagine, there is almost no possibility for a foreign language film to be distributed in America right now. That doesn't just make the industry poorer, it makes the landscape of cinema poorer, in America. The impossibility to get a good release on a really good European, Latin American, Asian movie is a tragedy. — Guillermo Del Toro

The first thing to realize is that it is is a country that is still being imagined. Here every patch of earth has a story, all your places have nuances; if you say Cornwall to an English person, they think of smugglers, and King Arthur and fish. But there are great parts of my country about which American's know nothing beyond an idea of unimaginable vastness. Of course the Indians that live there know the spirits of these places, but that is not the point. You can't imagine how blue the sky is out West, Charlotte. So much space. It's really wild, not like your Lake District with its little stone walls. In the West the landscape is unmarked by man. — Daisy Goodwin

The landscape is television has changed so much, because there are so many outlets, that the odds of getting a zeitgeisty hit - you know how 'American Idol' seems to appeal to every human being on the planet? Doing that in comedy nowadays is very, very hard. — Bill Lawrence

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment. — Galen Rowell

Hollywood can be a really tough environment for anyone trying to make a living. Unfortunately for actors of color, namely Asian Americans, opportunities have been and remain substantially limited. One place this is not the case is on 'Hawaii Five-0,' where we have three Asian American series regulars and a landscape rich with diversity. — Ian Anthony Dale

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. — Jonathan Raban

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance. — George Williamson

Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe...the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness — Thomas Cole

I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean. — Kola Boof

After some pondering, I made a decision that would affect all of my future work and writing in more ways than I could ever have anticipated. It was a decision between seminary and college teaching. More so it was a decision between two very different cultures of New England and the Southwest. I chose seminary teaching in Texas, which was a decision some of my colleague on the East Coast thought was foolish. From then on, as long as I was in the Southwest, I would feel the sting of the silent condescension and stereo typing by Eastern elites who disdained southwestern American culture. Many viewed as inconsequential everything that happened west of the Hudson River. What they disparaged was exactly what I loved, the easy going, unpretentious, common culture of my native landscape in Oklahoma and Texas. — Thomas C. Oden

When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country. — Baz Luhrmann

The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences. — Che Guevara

Buffalo is one of America's great designed cities. The interweaving of great architecture, landscape architecture and important historic sites makes Buffalo a must see destination for preservationists, designers, history buffs, and anyone wishing to see an inspiring example of American design. — Richard Moe

The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass? — Galway Kinnell

To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. — N. Scott Momaday

I will not rest until I have transformed the landscape of American politics. — Newt Gingrich

The term [Americanization] invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural mechanical shapes, of night into day, of speed for its own sake, an irrational passion for novelty at the expense of quality, a worship of gimmickry. — Robert Stone

I'm interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire — Gregory Crewdson

One truth is that racism and oppression is deeply embedded in the American experiment. History has taught that each time blacks have made strides for freedom, there has been backlash, retrenchment, and new forms of subjugation that appear on the American landscape, thus the old oppression in a new guise. The new movement is part of a long historical sweep, and it has taken many lifetimes to get to this point in the struggle. Because of the tenacity of opposition to equality of race and economics in America, we cannot "throw the baby out with the bathwater" by looking upon past struggles and tradition with disdain. Past struggles — Frank A Thomas

The only difference is that Dee's natural coloring looks like an American landscape - country-sky-blue eyes and hair the color of Tennessee wheat fields, golden strands with darker undertones. My hair is nearly black, and I have jealous green eyes. In a fairy tale, she'd play the good fairy. I'd be the evil witch's screwup second cousin. Dee — Emery Lord

New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard. There is so much history in New York State, from the Erie Canal to the Catskills, the birth of American stand-up comedy. — Adam Savage

I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers. — John Pfahl

at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it. — Bill Bryson

If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well, effects American security. — Hillary Clinton

The church-growth movement of the 1960s brought many positive insights to the American landscape. However, one negative result is that it focused leaders so intently on their organization and strategies that it blinded them to the importance of place. Further, it created such a common vision of church that leaders actually began to believe that if they organized their churches according to the church-growth metrics, they would thrive no matter where they were located. These ideas eclipsed the theology of place almost altogether. But — Verlon Fosner

I think that more diversity is a good thing, and fresh points of view articulated by people who are committed to excellence in journalism is a beneficial change in the American media landscape. — Al Gore

Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism arose during the Babylonian captivity, as white Christian fundamentalism appeared in the American South during Reconstruction, as the notion of the Master Race evolved in Germany following World War I. In such desperate times, the vanquished race would perish without a doctrine that restored hope and pride. Islamic fundamentalism ascends from the same landscape of despair and possesses the same tremendous and potent appeal. What exactly is this despair? It is the despair of freedom. The dislocation and emasculation experienced by the individual cut free from the familiar and comforting structures of the tribe and the clan, the village and the family. It is the state of modern life. The — Steven Pressfield

I think this was a nice idea we had in this country and a nice landscape to experiment with. But I think there comes a time in almost any experimentation or idea, where you have to evaluate it, maybe our time has come. In the context of the real world, not just the American world but all around, we haven't done too well. We are not a very good advertisement for the idea we represented. If you lose one wheel of the car, you might be able to get to the side of the road, and some freaks can make it on two, but if you lose three, man, you're in serious trouble. I think we've lost three. — Hunter S. Thompson

Like a Rolling Stone" gave me the faith that a true, unaltered, uncompromised vision could be broadcast to millions, changing minds, enlivening spirits, bringing red blood to the anemic American pop landscape and delivering a warning, a challenge that could become an essential part of the American conversation. This was music that could both stir the heart of your fellow countrymen and awaken the mind of a shy, lost fifteen-year-old in a small New Jersey town. — Bruce Springsteen

Now, you might think that because there are more poets than ever, there might be more opportunities for poets than ever. And you'd be correct. If your fondest wish is to become the next totally obscure minor poet on the block, well, you're probably already successful at that. This literary landscape has proven itself infinitely capable of absorbing countless interchangeable artists, all doing roughly the same thing in relative anonymity: just happily plucking away until death at the grindstone, making no great cultural headway, bouncing poems off their friends and an audience of about 40 people. A totally fine little life for an artist, to be sure. No grand expectations from the world to sit up and listen. One can live out one's days quite satisfied to create something enjoyed by a genial cult. But that's not why any of us are here tonight. We're here to conquer American Poetry and suck it dry of all glory and juice. — Jim Behrle

Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world. — Norman Maclean

Dee's natural colouring looks like an American landscape - country-sky-blue eyes and hair the colour of Tennessee wheat fields, golden strands with darker undertones. My hair is nearly black, and I have jealous green eyes.

In a fairytale she'd play the good fairy. I'd be the evil witch's screwup second cousin. — Emery Lord

The Place of Religion in Chicago is a clearly written account of a little-studied aspect of American landscape. Based on unique field surveys and supported by photographs, tables, and beautifully crafted maps, the book will form a lasting contribution to our understanding of an overlooked element of the American urban scene: the religious landscape of a major metropolis. — Peter Haggett

I would love to get a role that changes the landscape of being an African American woman in television and film. — Candice Patton

Colorado and Wyoming are America's highest states, averaging 6,800 feet and 6,700 feet above sea level. Utah comes in third at 6,100 feet, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho each break 5,000 feet, and the rest of the field is hardly worth mentioning. At 3,400 feet, Montana is only half as high as Colorado, and Alaska, despite having the highest peaks, is even further down the list at 1,900 feet. Colorado has more fourteeners than all the other U.S. states combined, and more than all of Canada too. Colorado's lowest point (3,315 feet along the Kansas border) is higher than the highest point in twenty other states. Rivers begin here and flow away to all the points of the compass. Colorado receives no rivers from another state (unless you count the Green River's' brief in and out from Utah).Wyoming's Wind River Range is the only mountain in North America that supplies water to all three master streams of the American West: Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia rivers. — Keith Meldahl

The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background. — Edith Wharton

I could never be French, I could never become German - I shall always remain American - the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes. — Marsden Hartley

The beautifully composed imagery of '12 Years a Slave' underscores the savagery of its subject, which is an American South not of knights and ladies but obscene values and a grotesque pageantry, every gorgeous shot of the languid landscape radiating toxicity like a hyperlush blossom that's poison to the touch. — Steve Erickson

If millions of Americans choose to weigh in on the outcome of 'American Idol' through text messages and the Web, then why not harness similar technological tools to encourage discourse on the political landscape? — Ruzwana Bashir

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. — William J. Clinton

The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers, he belongs just as the buffalo belonged ... — Luther Standing Bear

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. — Robert Hughes

Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember. — Dinaw Mengestu

Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east. — Rebecca Solnit

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Oh man, there's no shortage of craziness happening on the American landscape right now. I'll turn on the TV every day or check out the newspaper, and there is something to find humor in or something to find absolute fear in. Either way, it makes for good comedy. — Jordan Klepper

Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be. Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative. — Maureen Howard

To read 'Happy Talk' is to crash a party as vivid and surreal as Felini's 8. It's the business of show business, the American dream, told by a chorus of Americans locked just outside of that dream, outside of the United States, relegated to expatriate status on the shores of Haiti. Melo paints a version of Haiti that's an interior landscape perhaps even more than an externalized place. This Haiti is a plan, a memory, a morphine-drip fueled dream out to bond its inhabitants forever. — Monica Drake

At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been visionary in his efforts to preserve this country's wild and scenic areas, both in film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature's monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans. — Ansel Adams

DeFrantz's study ... is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape. — Alvin Ailey

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins. — Diane Wakoski

There is no comparison. The American landscape is so much more dangerous. They have real snakes, mountain lions, bears; we only have adders, and they're more frightened of us than we are of them. — Jim Crace

I don't know the American photographers as well, but I admit I love Ansel Adams. His landscapes are so crisp. — Vilmos Zsigmond

The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard. — Joel Salatin

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect.
The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs. — Edith Wharton

Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot. — John Lahr

I got a call froma cynical young American journalist ... You know the sort. He's lived in the Middle East for a little over five minutes so assumes he knows us natives well. I sip at a skinny mocha frappe while he fires off big important questions about 'the political landscape' and 'Islamic thought'. I stare at him blankly. — Amy Mowafi

To understand our world, we must use a revolving globe and look at the earth from various vantage points. If we do so, we will see that the Atlantic is but a bridge linking the colorful, tropical Afro-Latin American world, whose strong ethnic and cultural bonds have been preserved to this day. For a Cuban who arrives in Angola, neither the climate, nor the landscape, nor the food are strange. For a Brazilian, even the language is the same. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The historian William Cronon explains that packing plants
'distanced their customers most of all from the act of killing ... The more people became accustomed to the attractively cut, carefully wrapped, cunningly displayed packages that Swift had introduced to the trade, the more easily they could fail to remember that their purchase had once pulsed and breathed with a life much like their own ... As time went on, fewer of those who ate meat could say they had actually killed the animals themselves. In the packer's world, it was easy not to remember that eating meat was a moral act inextricably bound to killing. Such was the second nature that a corporate order had imposed on the American landscape. Forgetfulness was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products. — Steven M. Wise

The center of the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Biodiversity, there's an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred million years ago. According to the plaque, "Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between earth and extraterrestrial objects," were responsible for these events. It goes on to observe: "Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity's transformation of the ecological landscape. — Elizabeth Kolbert