Quotes About Culture

but the first rule about a black woman's hair is you don't talk about a black woman's hair. And the second rule is you don't ever touch a black woman's hair without getting written permission first.

Vanessa made a strange inarticulate sound common to Germans who've figured out how to start a sentence but don't know how it ends.

You can't die of jazz," said Dr. Walid. "Can you?" I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age. "You know," I said, "I think you'll find you can." Jazz

African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

the Ikea bed with an incomprehensible name,

studying dead languages and

we might have been Welsh, in my dad's eyes a fate worse than Scottish.

His mum was Filipino

As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and built walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born.

Always look after your people," he said as I noted down the order. "The way you treat them sets an example for the way they treat others.

Also a Friday night, which meant crowds of young people being horribly drunk and loud in two dozen languages.

There is no document of civilization," he wrote, "which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." That line is on his tombstone now.

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

New York will always seem more real than anything Britain has to offer. It is strange that, although the majority of British people have never seen a skate-boarding body-popper, an exploding fire-hydrant, or anybody dunk a doughnut, these things seem infinitely more immediate and happening images than that jar of Horlicks which has stood in the cupboard for 40 years

Let me just say, we call Iraq the abnormal normal, 'cause over there the weirdest stuff is just everyday life.

The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It's about our beliefs and expectations. It's about the cultural meaning of a treatment.

What matters is that she becomes an engaged lifelong learner and an adaptable thinker who can thrive in any environment and is comfortable dealing with other cultures.

I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

the more thoroughly I liberate myself from prevailing cultural assumptions—around education, wealth, ambition, and success, to name but a few—the more choice I actually have. The more freedom I have.

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.

I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

What sort of attractions do you think lured our coreligionists out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of European culture? Was it the wit of Molière, or the ingenious stage mechanisms of Pixérécourt? Or was it simply the opportunity to cast an eye, without shame, upon the living, unclad human form?

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.