A Quote by Edith Wharton

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background. — © Edith Wharton
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.
You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American.
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
The Place of Religion in Chicago is a clearly written account of a little-studied aspect of American landscape. Based on unique field surveys and supported by photographs, tables, and beautifully crafted maps, the book will form a lasting contribution to our understanding of an overlooked element of the American urban scene: the religious landscape of a major metropolis.
Baseball is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, Performance, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility.
I've got nothing against any individual American, except that there aren't any. They're always Irish-American, African-American... There's never an American-American you can blame.
I didn't want to be on screen not nailing an American accent. It's an insult to an American! There are plenty of great American actors who can already do an American accent, so me, coming in and stealing their roles, the one thing I have to perfect is the accent. So for years I practiced. And we're lucky because the whole world is raised on a library of American movies. I would pretend to be Jim Carrey, and, I say Robin Williams now because he's in my mind, but those actors really inspired us to be crazy and be theatrical.
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. ?He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. ?This is one of the essential images in American mythology.
Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.
I'm Greek-American, and I come from an immigrant-type background, and Greek-American parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer. Because that's how you make money, and it's very respectable.
My concern is to develop a North American type of anarchism that comes out of the American tradition, or that at least can be communicated to Americans and that takes into consideration that Americans are not any longer people of European background.
My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices.
The American War of Independence is the expulsion of the intrusive elements, alien to the American essence. If American reality is the reinvention of itself, whatever is found in any way irreducible or unassimilable is not American.
You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.
I think what I'm doing is quintessentially American because I'm not American - even though I am on the verge of getting my American passport next week - I have a fantasy of what is American. Big spaces, Marlon Brando, James Dean, easy living.
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