The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience. When it attempts to resolve contradicti...ons, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a general rule, it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor." These qualities constitute the uniqueness of that branch of the novelistic tradi tion which has flourished in this country. They help to account for the strong element of "romance" in the American "novel." By contrast, the English novel has followed a middle way. It is notable for its great practical sanity, its powerful, engrossing composition of wide ranges of experience into a moral centrality and equability of judgment. Oddity, distortion of personality, dislocations of normal life, recklessness of behavior--these the English novel has included. Yet the profound poetry of disorder we find in the American novel is missing, with rare exceptions, from the English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American... life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gent...lemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country- houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of the intrinsic differences that separate Americans from English the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the ...environment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth century and those of the English. The latter have lived under a relatively stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of good report. Until the First World War brought chaos to most of their institutions, their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other people save the Spaniards, by regard for precedent. The Americans, though partly of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.... [The Nazis] have made ...it clear that not only do they intend to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is a place in the United States for the Negro. They are real American citizens, and at home. They have fought and bled a...nd died, like men, to make this country what it is. And if they have got to suffer and die, and be lynched, and tortured, and burned at the stake, I say they are at home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity. ...When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as tha...t of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Chinese were born ... with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplan...ted too young, these qualities ripened in them.... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and... along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »