Strange American Sayings

#1. With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#2. The American people are strange in their attitudes toward their idols," he (Taft) mused. They lead them on and then "cut their legs from under them," simply "to make their fall all the greater.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#3. I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

James Laughlin

#4. I've always liked American actors particularly. Because that was my first impression. I was very enamoured of America when I was a kid because we were surrounded by American soldiers during the war, the accent was very strange to me, it was very exotic and very captivating.

Anthony Hopkins

#5. And we are in a strange conundrum. You can kill an American citizen overseas. But according to this administration, if you capture him in the United States, they've got to be read their Miranda rights.

John McCain

#6. They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.

Lauren Willig

#7. Emergency rooms will be used the way they were intended to be used: not for primary care, but for when the average freaky American get some strange object up his ass.

Bill Maher

#8. Would you like tickets for tonight's tour? (Andrei)
Like another hole in my head. (Esperetta)
That's American slang for 'no thank you. (Francesca)
Strange. When I was in New York it was slang for 'no fucking way.' (Andrei)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#9. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture.

David Foster Wallace

#10. It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.

John Steinbeck

#11. There are two factors in American politics that may seem strange to Europeans: race and religion.

P. J. O'Rourke

#12. You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the Chinese leaders periodically, and while I don't say they've endorsed the missile shield, it has not been in the forefront of their discussions.

Henry A. Kissinger

#13. Social scientists have written papers analyzing Eshelman's every move in there, including the strange detail that the more brutally he behaved, the more American South his accent sounded.

Jon Ronson

#14. I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.

Brad Parks

#15. Strange it was that the British commander-in-chief, known for his chronic gambling, seemed to give no thought to how his American opponent might play his hand. O

David McCullough

#16. I keep forgetting I'm speaking in an American accent sometimes. The dangerous thing is that you end up forgetting what your real accent is after a while! It's really strange; I've never done a job in an American accent before.

Robert Pattinson

#17. We are creating a political demolition derby, not a presidential debate. Those strange impulses in the American soul that have produced mud wrestling and The Gong Show seem to have claimed the national campaign.

Hugh Sidey

#18. That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.

Olaf Stapledon

#19. For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.

Pauline Kael

#20. 'Night Watch' itself is a very Russian movie. It's impossible to imagine this kind of movie somewhere else: a movie with a depressing ending, a lot of inexplicable storylines, strange characters. It's a Russian reflection of American film culture.

Timur Bekmambetov

#21. That strange conflict in the American character: we pride ourselves on being the melting pot of the world but we insist on regarding most immigrants with suspicion.

Gene Tierney

#22. So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.

Stephen Karam

#23. I'm in kind of a strange position - I have a strong Australian career and a strong British career. Then there's the American career. For every movie I do here, I do two somewhere else. I bounce back and forth between the three places.

Caroline Goodall

#24. My accent has changed my whole life. When I was younger, it was very Nigerian, then when we went to England, it was very British. I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I use most of the time.

Toks Olagundoye

#25. Iraq is a strange country. Where else can American civilians like me be protected by terrorist human shields?

Michael Totten

#26. What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it.

Linda Hogan

#27. When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.

Alice Hamilton

#28. American culture is one that is so easily in denial. We have such a strange dichotomy, so hypocritical. The truth can be blaring in neon letters but our culture will find a reason not to hear what the truth is.

RuPaul

#29. When we first sold the Wallace and Gromit shorts to America, people suggested we get rid of the strange British accents and put clear American voices on them, and we held out.

Nick Park

#30. Anything that's strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn't have Chicago plumbing, it's nonsense.

Ray Bradbury

#31. The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they're still back at home.
I saw it as a place for lost souls.

Amy Plum

#32. Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange.

Gilbert Sorrentino

#33. I was a strange, dark little dude. I fell in love with horror movies, at a very early age. Somehow, as a first grader, I was able to convince my parents to let me go see stuff like 'An American Werewolf in London' in theaters, so I was headed in that direction anyway.

James Roday

#34. American Horror Story re-energized me; it re-energized my career. There's no shame in recognizing that. It's exposed me to a whole new generation, which is a little strange. I'm not used to young people thinking I'm cool.

Jessica Lange