“There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.”

— Elizabeth Hardwick

"Locations: An Introduction" (pp. xix-xx)
American Fictions (1999)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over…" by Elizabeth Hardwick?

Elizabeth Hardwick 14

Novelist, short story writer, literary critic 1916–2007

Related quotes

“The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Thursday
Context: The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

“Consumerism has created a culture that values style over substance, image over reality, and perception over performance.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable articles appeared about Lanner and Strauss.”

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) austrian musician and musicologist

Quoted by Bob January http://bobjanuary.com/waltz.htm

“There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”

Sarah Schulman (1958) American writer

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 51

“From north to south, from east to west.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, Second Day. Compare: "From north to south, from east to west", William Shakespeare, A Winter's Tale, act i. sc. 2.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

“I have always read that the world, both land and water, was spherical, as the authority and researches of Ptolemy and all the others who have written on this subject demonstrate and prove, as do the eclipses of the moon and other experiments that are made from east to west, and the elevation of the North Star from north to south.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

Letter to the Sovereigns (1498)

“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Speech to the Democratic National Convention (1936)
Context: It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

“The East will be seen to rush to the West and the South to the North in confusion round and about the universe, with great noise and trembling or fury.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

"In the East wind which rushes to the West"
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

“I would not have you believe for one minute tonight that there are not white persons of good will in the South. I am absolutely convinced that there are hundred and thousands, nay millions of white people of good will in the South, but most of them are silent today because of fear — fear of political, social and economic reprisal. God grant that the people of good will will rise up with courage, take over the leadership, and open channels of communication between races, for I think that one of the tragedies of our whole struggle is that the South is still trying to live in monologue, rather than dialogue, and I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because that don’t know each other and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other. And God grant that something will happen to open channels of communication, that something will happen because men of good will will rise to the level of leadership.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)

“The paralysis you feel right now – the impotent helplessness that washes over you as news of another mass slaughter scrolls across the television screen – isn’t real. It's a fiction created and methodically cultivated by the gun lobby, designed to assure that no laws are passed to make America safer, because those laws would cut into their profits…As my colleagues go to sleep tonight, they need to think about whether the political support of the gun industry is worth the blood that flows endlessly onto the floors of American churches, elementary schools, movie theaters, and city streets. Ask yourself – how can you claim that you respect human life while choosing fealty to weapons-makers over support for measures favored by the vast majority of your constituents?”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

Statement on the shootings in Sutherland Springs, TX http://www.businessinsider.com/chris-murphy-texas-church-shooting-sutherland-springs-2017-11 (November 5, 2017)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Elizabeth Hardwick 14

Related quotes

Related topics