American Pastoral Quotes

#1. We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

Bill Ayers

#2. Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.

Nick Hornby

#3. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral - into the indigenous American berserk.

Philip Roth

#4. Every time I hit the ball on the wall I uses to pretend I was there (Wimbledon). When I went to sleep I used to pretend I was there.

Evonne Goolagong Cawley

#5. In life we try to grow and better ourselves. As an artist, I feel like I've grown tremendously.

Pras Michel

#6. The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers.

Philip Roth

#7. The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged,

Michael Lewis

#8. The more keenly we are awake to the perils of life, the higher and grander is the possibility of being truly brave.

Henry Van Dyke

#9. When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.

Gene Tierney

#10. You always have to evolve - the minute you start building a moat around you to keep yourself safe, you're going to lose.

Diplo

#11. Banking doesn't involve fraud, banking IS fraud.
(from video by Paul Grignon done for United Financial Consumers (2002) )
(Added to goodreads by Mike Tobin)

Tim Madden