14 Quotes by Suzy Hansen

We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we would’ve been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We.

Americans are surprised by the direct relationship between their country and foreign ones because we don’t acknowledge that America is an empire; it is impossible to understand a relationship if you are not aware you are in one.

Anti-Americanism is not some bitter mental disorder inflamed by conspiracy theories and misplaced furies and envy. It is a broken heart, a defensive crouch, a hundred-year-old relationship, bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you.

There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America’s “funny sense of time,” as if “with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.

There’s an America that exists inside the borders of the United States, which is a very different entity from the America that projects its force outside the United States.