Women From The United States

"The White Stripes weren't all about Jack White's howling, ripping guitars, even if that's where the conversation tends to go in certain circles. The fact is, Meg White's minimalistic style was the perfect counter to Jack's shredding, a primal dynamic that gave their tunes that definitive garage stomp. Jack provided the flash, Meg provided the feel."

"A really unique feel and super heavy because of the space between the hits. Very influential on me as a teenager. I often think of her when doing certain kick and cymbal hits together. —"

"We've never had problems. We love each other, understand each other, and get past anything."

"I wasn't brought up with any religion, actually."

"We were like a moth right next to the flame. It's like, do any more and you go down. We were so tired. One final lap, and then have a rest."

"It's in this book I was reading. Apparently, there's a little red demon dwarf that haunts the city, and before every major bad thing that's happened, it's appeared to somebody. Last time, he appeared in a Cadillac."

"Actually I don't. I've never played with a bass player before, so I wouldn't even know. It wouldn't feel like it's missing, I just think it's normal … I prefer it that way so I only have to concentrate on Jack."

"I don't want to know about my biggest idols. I don't want to read their autobiographies, I don't want to find out what they're really like."

"I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely."

"At Ault, it wasn't just that we weren't supposed to be bad or unethical; we weren't even supposed to be ordinary, and stealing was worse than ordinary. It was unseemly, lacking subtlety, revealing a wish for things you did not already have."

"When I read Curtis Sittenfeld's debut novel Prep, I highlighted passages for the first time since I was a student. So many of the main character's high school observations rang true that I couldn't help myself."

"The newly minted author of the novel Prep talks about high school, gratuitous sex, and why her parents shouldn't be worried"

"I forgot, over and over, that the fact of my wanting something wasn’t enough to make it happen."

"But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgment in all our parts."

"But then she’d know what she’d probably only suspected- how messed up I really was, how much I’d been misleading them for the last four years."

"Hardly ever did it matter if you brushed your hair before driving to the grocery store, rarely did you work in an office where you cared what more than two or three people thought of you. At Ault, caring about everything was draining, but it was also exhilarating."

"How did you even know if you loved another person? Was it a hunch, like a good smell that you couldn’t identify for sure, or did a time come when you had evidence? Was it like walking through a house and once you’d crossed a certain threshold, that was love and you could never turn back? Maybe you’d go into other rooms, you’d fight or even breakup, but you’d always be on the other side of love, after and not before it. My interest in couples felt anthropological - even liking Cross, even wanting to hear from Martha that she could imagine me dating him, I myself could not imagine us together... When I through of Sin - Jun and Clara - and I did so often- what was hardest to wrap my head around was how they’d been a couple while living in the same room. How had they known when to fool around and when to just sit at their desks doing homework? Hadn’t it been either too intense, too tiring to always be around the person you wanted to impress, or else too familiar? Maybe in such close quarters you gave up hope of impressing them and sat there picking your earwax and not caring if you looked cute. But didn’t you lose something there, too? If that was what people meant by intimacy, it didn’t hold much appeal for me- it seemed like you’d be fighting each other for oxygen."

"I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible."

"As I watched her leave, my mind shot ahead to a time in the future when we would not share a room, when our daily lives would not overlap. The idea made me feel as if I were being held underwater. Then I thought, you’re being so ridiculous; you have almost three more years together, and I could breathe again. But I knew, I always knew- and as unhappy as I often was, the knowledge never made me feel better; instead it seemed the worst part of all- that our lives at Ault were only temporary."

"Flawed as I was, someone recognized me."

"Before or after your stole my best friend? But the real question is if you were using me to get to Martha all along, or if you just took an opportunity when you saw it."

"I have always found those times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will - that is the part that's almost unbearable."

"For the whole movie, I had that sense of heightened awareness that is like discomfort but is not discomfort exactly -- a tiring, enjoyable vigilance. I did not get a grasp on the movie's plot, or the names of any of the characters. Then it was over and the lights came on… Maybe this was the place Cross and I would part ways, I thought. And maybe we wouldn't even say good-bye, now that he was with his friends again; maybe I was just supposed to know."

"I did not scream or hug anyone. In fact, as the noise gained momentum, I felt its opposite, a draining of excitement. But not a draining of tension - my body was still stiff and alert, and the impulse I had, strangely, was to weep. Not because I was sad but because I was not happy, and yet, like my classmates, I'd experienced an emotional surge, I too felt the need for expression. This phenomenon -- being gripped by an overwhelming wave of feeling that was clearly not the feeling of the people around me -- had also happened at a pep rally: It made me uncomfortable, because I didn't want anyone to notice that I wasn't jumping up and down or cheering, and it also thrilled me, because it made the world seem full of possibilities that could make my heart pound. I think, looking back, that this was the single best thing about Ault, the sense of possibility… In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with."

"As for the politics here, what can you do? There’s a lot of posturing, but it’s all kind of meaningless."

"Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. … It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

"Some Never Trumpers helped create the conditions that created President Trump. What would be helpful from them now is not pyromaniac fantasies but constructive modesty, even humility. The party’s national leaders and strategists don’t have a lot to be proud of the past few decades. The future of the party will probably bubble up from the states. But it matters that the past six months Mr. Trump has been very publicly doing himself in, mismanaging his crises — setting himself on fire. As long as that’s clear, his supporters won’t be able to say, if he loses, that he was a champion of the people who was betrayed by the party elites, the Never Trumpers and the deep state: “He didn’t lose, he was the victim of treachery.” Both parties have weaknesses. Liberals enjoy claiming progress that can somehow never quite be quantified. Conservatives like the theme of betrayal. It will be unhelpful for Republicans, and bad for the country, if that’s the background music of the party next 10 years."

"...developing AI is biting the apple. Something bad is going to happen. I believe those creating, fueling and funding it want, possibly unconsciously, to be God and on some level think they are God. It will have to begin with tens of millions of voters who previously supported Mr. Trump. It will have to decide where it stands, its reason for being."

"When the Trump experience is over, the Republican Party will have to be rebuilt. It will have to begin with tens of millions of voters who previously supported Mr. Trump. It will have to decide where it stands, its reason for being."

"Judgments on the president’s pandemic leadership have settled in. It was inadequate and did harm. He experienced Covid-19 not as a once-in-a-lifetime medical threat but merely a threat to his re-election argument, a gangbusters economy. He denied the scope and scale of the crisis, sent economic adviser Larry Kudlow out to say we have it “contained” and don’t forget to buy the dip. Mr. Trump essentially admitted he didn’t want more testing because it would result in more positives. And the virus rages on, having hit blue states first and now tearing through red states in the South and West — Arizona, Florida, the Carolinas, Texas. The protests and riots of June were poorly, embarrassingly handled. They weren’t the worst Washington had ever seen, they were no 1968, but still he wound up in the White House bunker. Then out of the bunker for an epically pointless and manipulative photo-op in front of a boarded-up church whose basement had been burned. Through it all the angry, blustering tweets issued from the White House like panicked bats fleeing flames in the smokestack. It was all weak, unserious and avoidant of the big issues. He wasn’t equal to that moment either."

"Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged, and at a moment when people are worried about the continuance of their country and their own ability to continue within it. He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows."

"Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party's turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don't know about.I think they are and I think it's this: a Romney win."

"I think it's Romney. I think he's stealing in "like a thief with good tools," in Walker Percy's old words. While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney's slipping into the presidency. He's quietly rising, and he's been rising for a while."

"Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy."

"The most qualified? No. I think they went for this — excuse me — political bullshit about narratives."

"At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"?"

"Imagine for a moment that angels exist, that they are pure spirits of virtue and light, that they care about us and for us and are among us, unseen, in the airport security line, in the room where we watch TV, at the symposium of great minds. "Raise your hands if you think masturbation should be illegal!" "I'm Bob Dole for Viagra." "Put your feet in the foot marks, lady." We are embarrassing the angels. … Lent began yesterday, and I mean to give up a great deal, as you would too if you were me. One of the things I mean to give up is the habit of thinking it and not saying it. A lady has some rights, and this happens to be one I can assert. "You are embarrassing the angels." This is what I intend to say for the next 40 days whenever I see someone who is hurting the culture, hurting human dignity, denying the stature of a human being."

"I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor."

"Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He's normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He's not exotic. But if there's a fire on the block, he'll run out and help. He'll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, "Where's Sally?" He's responsible. He's not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world. And then when the fire comes they say, "I warned Joe about that furnace." And, "Does Joe have children?" And "I saw a fire once. It spreads like syrup. No, it spreads like explosive syrup. No, it's formidable and yet fleeting." When the fire comes they talk. Bush ain't that guy. Republicans love the guy who ain't that guy. Americans love the guy who ain't that guy."

"The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation. But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation. In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial."

"I would think to myself [...] that the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain."

"Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk."

"Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature. John Kennedy had wit, and so did Lincoln, who also had abundant humor; Reagan was mostly humor."

"Resentment isn't a magnetic personal style."

"He looks as though he's been weaned on a pickle."

"I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both."

"I valued my independence from an early age and was always something of a individualist … Well, a show-off anyway."

"I've always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development."

"I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches."

"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."