Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them. – Greil Marcus
No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes. – Greil Marcus
It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths. – Greil Marcus
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits. – Greil Marcus
It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. – Lewis Thomas
And now it has risen above the massive and lofty tree, and throws its pleasant shadow down upon the earth—pleasant shadow that paces along the meadows, leaving behind a greater brilliancy on tree, and grass, and hedge, and flower than what, for a moment, it had eclipsed. – William Smith, Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil, 1862