Geographic Divide Quotes

I'm telling you, the disconnect is big, and the gap of understanding between the people in Washington, in news media, the New York/Boston/Washington corridor and the rest of the country, that gap is widening.

I don't know what's going on in America. I know what people in New York and Beverly Hills think about Whole Foods, but I don't know what people anywhere else think.

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.

We are not, in some fundamental ways, a single country. The map of that vast red swatch of states and rural counties that voted for Trump, and the blue coastal edges and scattered urban centers where Clinton won, are a pictograph of mutual contempt.

The democrats are a coastal party.

It's jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse. And I've suspected that this optimism blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country. So I decided to move home to Ohio.

There must be something between us, even if it's only an ocean.

Big cities like New York are thriving, economically, culturally, in terms of real estate values, and by a slew of other measures. Yet, at the same time, much of the country has been utterly hollowed out. In California, where I live, affluent coastal cities such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley hubs have lower than national average unemployment, higher wages, higher tax bases. Meanwhile, there are inland counties in California where there's still nearly 20 percent unemployment.

In the States, it takes you a lifetime just to get from Chicago's South Side to the West Side.

In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

New York and Los Angeles are really one city, and the rest of the country is America.

If you look at sort of how politics has divided itself here in this country, the big divide right now is between urban areas, which have become increasingly Democratic, and rural or exurban areas that feel as if they're being ignored.

I mean, 'Girls': I love 'Girls,' I watch 'Girls.' But it's a show that's very coastal. People in New York and people in L.A. and people in San Francisco will watch it. But I think in Middle America, for the most part, it probably isn't watched as much.

I'm so southern Ohio. And Cleveland is a different world, you know?

Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.

Israel of the coastal plain, where eight out of ten Israeli Jews live far removed from the occupied territories, from the fiery Jerusalem, from the religious and nationalistic conflicts, is unknown to the outside world, almost unknown to itself.