American Privately Built

Famous quotes containing the words american, privately and/or built:

“My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

“Rape is a culturally fostered means of suppressing women. Legally we say we deplore it, but mythically we romanticize and perpetuate it, and privately we excuse and overlook it.”
—Victoria Billings (b. 1945)

“So this is the subterranean life.
If it can’t be conjugated onto us, what good is it?
What need for purists when the demotic is built to last,
To outlast us, and no dialect hears us?”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)