Dan Chiasson Quotes
The events in America now have the quality of things you would find out about long after the fact, and think: if only we had known. Well, we do know now. But what are we doing? Maybe a poet like Lowell brought America a little nearer to its boiling point.
Quotes to Explore
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We should cease thinking about men as the enemy of children and women.
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America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.
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Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
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There has been talk of lack of consensus, but we all know that this is the veto of foreign powers, the intolerable situation in our 21st century America.
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I think of the past and the future as well as the present to determine where I am, and I move on while thinking of these things.
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I would have loved to have met Buster Keaton.
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What I think you are going to see is with DACA being gone, it gets rid of the magnet of drawing people over here, thinking they are going to come in and get amnesty.
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Teach For America is working hard to be one significant source of the leadership we need.
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But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
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America was probably Europe's equal scientifically by the end of World War I and certainly surpassed it after the chaos of World War II.
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If I want to go out and eat at a restaurant with amazing food, I'll do that, like, once a week where I'm not thinking about it. I want to indulge! I want to do things that are not necessarily healthy sometimes.
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The war is coming to the streets of America and if you are not keeping and bearing and practicing with your arms then you will be helpless and you will be the victim of evil.
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'I want to say it again, and again, and again: Islam is not a religion, it's a political system meant on - bent on world domination, not a religion. It masquerades as a religion, but the religion covers a worldwide attempt to exercise power and to subjugate the world into their way of thinking.' 10
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America is ripe for lies and lethargy. The pure mountain air is going and gone. It is a huge burden and a sadness for us all.
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I have great sympathy with America. It's very, it's very tough to be the only remaining superpower in the world.
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America is the biggest gang in the world.
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But if Saddam had been in a position credibly to threaten America or any of its allies – or the coalition's forces – with attack by missiles with nuclear warheads, would we have gone to the Gulf at all?
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There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.
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I remember sitting in school and thinking, 'I don't know why I'm here, because I know I'm going to act and I know I'm going to America.'
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All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.
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I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
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I live in Europe and care about democracy and sovereignty of nation states there.
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The events in America now have the quality of things you would find out about long after the fact, and think: if only we had known. Well, we do know now. But what are we doing? Maybe a poet like Lowell brought America a little nearer to its boiling point.
