Familiar American Sayings

#1. Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?

Colson Whitehead

#2. Women survive their men. Men
men like him
don't live long when their women are gone. You'll see
he'll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he's gone.

Neil Gaiman

#3. In movies and in television the robots are always evil. I guess I am not into the whole brooding cyberpunk dystopia thing.

Daniel H. Wilson

#4. I have some art, but I am a hobbyist. I would not consider myself an expert but in the course of writing this novel I became very familiar with the various movements in American Modern Art from 1900 onwards.

Nicholas Sparks

#5. I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.

Haruki Murakami

#6. The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.

Noam Chomsky

#7. A lot of individuals I've met that I've done a song or two with. But to be honest I'm not incredibly familiar with the scene. I mean, I'm more familiar with people coming from other countries like Latin-American MCs and African rappers ... that type of stuff I'm really starting to get a hold on.

Immortal Technique

#8. There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

H.L. Mencken

#9. American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.

Noam Chomsky

#10. I grew up watching a lot of American television and so the American sound has been in my psyche somehow for a long time and is quite familiar and so that does make it easier.

Toni Collette

#11. I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.

Monique Truong

#12. Certitude drives people mad.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#13. I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people.

Lois Lowry

#14. New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.

Henry David Thoreau

#15. You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time".

John Lydgate

#16. I can't go to sleep unless I've watched at least two episodes of American Dad on Hulu or iTunes. It just feels familiar. It's like a lullaby.

Gabourey Sidibe

#17. I think it's a fun thing, and perhaps maybe very so slightly as an American, it's a slightly different thing that they didn't do as much of when the show was 100 percent written by Brits just because I'm not sure they were quite as familiar with some of these little moments in our government system.

David Mandel

#18. Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it, thanks. I'll eat it here.

Frederick Busch

#19. For an American, though, Australia seems pretty familiar: same wide streets, same office towers. It's Canada in a thong, or that's the initial impression.

David Sedaris

#20. I have a cousin who is a spiritual advisor for Native veterans in Canada, so I'm very familiar with the history of Natives in the military. And growing up as an American Indian myself, the story of Ira Hayes is one that is often told.

Adam Beach

#21. There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.

Harry S. Truman

#22. Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history.

Robert Dallek

#23. In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

#24. Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.

Sam Neill

#25. Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy.

Wesley Morris

#26. Search for the cause may be a hopeless pursuit because most disease states are the indirect outcome of a constellation of circumstances.

Rene Dubos

#27. It was suddenly heartachingly clear how much he wanted this and how easy it was to imagine it with near provocative clarity. She was not just his friend. She was more.

Jessica Park

#28. I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

Allegra Huston

#29. A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar to our ears all the days of our lives - "NOBODY TO BLAME.

Mark Twain