Compare And Contrast Anna Quindlen And Langston Hughes

Watching the news, you will see many stories of people being attacked, threatened, or even killed because of something that sets them apart from society--whether it is their race, sexuality, gender, religion, or almost anything else about the person. As you watched those news stories, have you ever wondered how this could happen, yet we still have the guts to call ourselves a united country? Anna Quindlen and Langston Hughes did. In Quindlen's "A Quilt of a Country: Out of Many One?" and Hughes's "We're All in the Telephone Book", the two writers shared similar ideas about America, such as unity despite our differences, how our differences may not even exist, and how America is full of people from all across the globe.
Quindlen and Hughes’s …show more content…
In “We’re All in the Telephone Book,” Hughes’s says, “We’re all in the telephone book, there’s no priority—a millionaire like Rockefeller is likely to be behind me.” What he means by this is that it doesn’t matter how wealthy you are, or how famous you are. We’re all in the telephone book, going by alphabetical order based on our names. That means that in the end, it doesn’t matter who you are, or what you have done in life. We’re all the same in the end. In, “A Quilt of a Country,” Quindlen states, ““The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stories are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European any more. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin America. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They’re making it. Sound familiar?”” What Quindlen means in this is that we all started out as the immigrants that America hates so much. We all started off with our families—or our ancestors—moving to America from another part of the world. Maybe we’re not so different after all. To add to this, Quindlen and Hughes both expressed that America is composed of people all across the …show more content…
In “A Quilt of a Country,” Quindlen states, “When photographs of the faces of those who died in the World Trade Center destruction are assembled in one place, it will be possible to trace in the skin color, the shape of the eyes and the noses, and texture of the hair, a map of the world.” This is saying that the bad things to happen in America, didn’t just happen to one culture. The ones who think they’re better than everyone else weren’t the only ones who were victimized. The attack on the World Trade Center was an attack on parts of the whole world. In “We’re All in the Telephone Book,” Hughes’s states, “We’re all in the telephone book, folks from everywhere on earth—Anderson to Zabowski, it’s a record of America’s worth.” This is saying that America is made up of people from everywhere on earth—from every culture and every background. Both of these writers mentioned all of these ideas about America and its