Top 79 Contemporary American Sayings
#1. Mother's interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.
David Rockefeller
#2. Because of the structure of the contemporary American party system, every president is polarizing.
Larry J. Sabato
#3. When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.
Tom Perrotta
#4. I don't think there's a defined contemporary American musical, do you?
Harold Prince
#5. The most underrated of all contemporary American writers of fiction.
William March
#6. The dominant mood of contemporary American culture is the self-celebration of the peasantry.
William A. Henry III
#7. Spending $100 million on a fancy gym is completely unremarkable in contemporary American higher education. Yet $10 million for a really good online biology course that could serve millions of students is seen as an outlandish, unaffordable expense.
Kevin Carey
#8. I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants.
Bruce Feiler
#9. Expedience, not justice, is the rule of contemporary American law.
Abbie Hoffman
#10. In grades 1 through 4 these books introduce the child to U.S. society - to family life, community activities, ordinary economic transactions, and some history. None of the books covering grades 1 through 4 contain one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life.
Paul Vitz
#11. In contemporary American culture, the religions are more and more treated as just passing beliefs - almost as fads - rather than as the fundaments upon which the devout build their lives.
Stephen L. Carter
#12. I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular.
Alexander Payne
#13. Venice has been the living future of contemporary American history since its inception.
Liam Neeson
#14. Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.
Joshua Mohr
#15. I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
Jonathan Frakes
#16. The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.
John Burnside
#17. A lot of contemporary American culture makes its way to this county. Cuba is not some gray, isolated backwater. This is a happening place.
Assata Shakur
#18. I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.
Christian Wiman
#19. The word "Guru", as it is used in the contemporary American scene, is someone who takes all your money and tells you what to do with your life. You assume no responsibility. A lot of people want that free ride.
Frederick Lenz
#20. The backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.
Susan Faludi
#21. Contemporary American children, if they are old enough to grasp the concept of Santa Claus by Thanksgiving, are able to see through it by December 15th.
Roy Blount Jr.
#22. The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldn't.
Colum McCann
#23. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.
Jess Row
#24. Contemporary American fiction has become cheap counseling to the bereaved bourgeois.
Anis Shivani
#25. The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.
Ross Douthat
#27. Instead of kids just hearing about beads and baskets and fringe, and about what 'was' and 'were,' we present Native American culture as a living contemporary culture.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
#28. When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#29. ...forever meant different things to people at different times. They could imagine what infinity looked and felt like as much as they wanted, but could never truly grasp its meaning nor bear its full weight.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#30. I have a totally unhealthy and unrealistic fear of being eaten by a great white shark. This is because I belong to a very specific demographic called American Child Whose Parents Made the Ill-Advised Decision To Allow Her To Watch the Movie Jaws At a Sleepover During Her Formative Years.
Elle Lothlorien
#31. I know what it's like to be different. I'm a Native American in a white world.
Tamara Hoffa
#32. Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn't in vain, he was able to justify his presence.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#33. I'm not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.
Jonathan Dee
#34. For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.
Flea
#35. While you're alive there's no time for minor amazements.
Alice Fulton
#36. Today's connoisseurs of Sino-American relations seem to view the relationship through a dystopian prism; their gloomy commentaries are largely an assemblage of snapshots on contemporary interactions or day-to-day developments without a historical context.
Patrick Mendis
#37. I would really like to play someone contemporary, as I've done lots of period pieces. I would love to play an American bimbo or a grimy Londoner. But I'm probably more suited in people's minds to playing a corseted victim.
Rachel Hurd-Wood
#38. I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
Per Petterson
#39. We live in a trans period. Contemporary issues of sexuality, for example - the exciting aspects of them - have to do with transgenderedness. And there's trans-nationality. There are people like me, for example. I mean, what am I? Am I Indian? Am I American? And I'm not alone in being between things.
Vijay Seshadri
#40. Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times ...
... Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on ...
Quote on the Title Page of Love TORN Asunder
Elizabeth Funderbirk
#41. A tightrope walker uncertain if he could make it to the other side probably would not. A race car driver wondering if he was taking a turn too fast was likely to lose control. If a man feared death, whether his own or the taking of another's, death would surely come calling.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#42. There are no backwaters where things can breed - our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.
William Gibson
#43. I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
Lisa Scottoline
#44. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Emily Perkins
#45. The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Will Self
#46. The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.
C.L.R. James
#47. I've never seen anyone as beautiful as you, sweetheart. All supple and voluptuous, a mountain of curves I can't wait to climb.
N.D. Jones
#48. The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.
Will Self
#49. [American football] fanbase resemble that of contemporary boxing: rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves.
Chuck Klosterman
#50. It was almost as if she had willed him into existence, into standing before her at the precise moment she was willing to accommodate him, arriving not a minute too early or too late.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#51. We all have scars. Just because mine are hidden doesn't make them any less painful.
Nicki Salcedo
#52. The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.
Terry Teachout
#53. On occasion we stumble upon what seems to be a truth. Compared to the surrounding blackness, it sparkles and dazzles our eyes. But are these actually truths? Are our eyes really feasting upon light? Or just patches of grey?
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#54. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
Michael N. Castle
#55. We just start putting our ideas out there, yet how do we actually attack contemporary problems? We do what some of the most successful American businesses do. We outsource and collaborate
Baratunde R. Thurston
#56. I wanted to introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience.
Kevin Kwan
#58. You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
David Hare
#59. The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone.
Marco Roth
#60. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#61. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#62. I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.
N. Scott Momaday
#63. Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society - to help solve our contemporary problems - seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?
Jonathan Franzen
#64. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#65. There were many tomorrows to be lived through his children. He could only hope that they would face them more courageously than he had, that his mistakes would serve as warning signs rather than crutches to lean on.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#66. Robert Hayward THE THIRTEENTH STEP Ancient Solutions to Contemporary Problems of Alcoholism and Addiction Using the Timeless Wisdom of the Native American Church Ceremony
Robert Hayward
#67. He now realized that right and wrong were intertwined notions. His arms could not differentiate between just and unjust causes. They only knew that they were empty.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#68. As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality ... for religious liberals and many evangelicals.
Mark Galli
#69. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
[Q&A with Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2]
David Foster Wallace
#70. Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
#71. It was his experience that life worked under the same guidelines as a capitalistic society. In order to get what you wanted, it was usually necessary to give up something in return. Sometimes gaining what you defined as everything meant losing what you most needed.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#72. I wish to understand [Plato], but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.
Bertrand Russell
#73. Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.
Truman Capote
#74. Time had taught him that whether his sins were pardoned or left unforgiven, they would remain committed. Tomorrow he would hopefully choose wiser, with a stronger measure of compassion.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#75. My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#76. Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason. Perhaps everything on God's green earth was the result of a flawless plan, even that which seemed most muddled.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#77. There is something immensely scary about putting yourself out there for people to love or hate you, fan or pan you, review or screw you.
L.V. Lewis
#78. Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?
Rick Bass
#79. American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg.
Dennis Etchison
