Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Anderson

A love letter to a landscape, written through clenched teeth at the people who live in it. Margaret Anderson’s line works because it refuses the polite travel-writer lie that culture and country come as a matched set. She splits France into two objects: the physical nation as aesthetic seduction, and “the French” as social irritation. The blunt symmetry - repelled/attracted - makes the sentence snap shut like a case file. No hedging, no nuance-performing. Just appetite and aversion in the same breath.

As an editor who spent her life scouting for modernism’s next provocation, Anderson is also signaling a temperament: allergic to salons, sensitive to atmospheres. “Repelled” isn’t mere xenophobia; it’s a reaction to a felt system - manners as gatekeeping, rhetoric as performance, the old-world confidence that can read to an American outsider as smugness or theatrics. Yet she can’t deny the magnetism of the setting: the light, the streets, the density of history, the sensual promise of “their country” as an idea you can inhabit even when the locals make you itch.

The subtext is editorial, too. Anderson helped build a transatlantic cultural pipeline: American avant-garde looking to Europe for legitimacy while resenting the price of admission. Her sentence captures that modernist ambivalence: Europe as resource, Europe as obstacle. It’s the immigrant-to-the-metropolis mood without the immigrant plot - attraction to the capital, suspicion of its curators.