Quotes About Culture

here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight

It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games—"Mother May I?," "Hide and Seek"—and his: "Find Food," "Recognize Poisonwood," "Build a House.

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

I see books as windows out of a little life into the great world. Writing fiction is a dance. It's controlled lunacy. Hearing voices in your head — they give people drugs for that. Humans have always needed story. Fiction isn't entertainment, it's a cultural nutrient. We need it, and we will always need it. (from her talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia on 11/10/12)

Obviously other ones did exist such as basketball, but not in Lee County. Any sport that's not football around here is like vanilla. Why even eat that, if they've invented flavors.

All the richest men in Mexico were once lifted from the cradle by servants. But they all drink from the same water jar that fills the master's glass, and they use the same chamber pot, still warm from the piss of the patrón. In Mexico nobody ever thought to keep those streams flowing separately.

At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them.

Denied outlets for their creative talents in literature and the fine arts, women poured their hidden frustration and suppressed need for expression into the spheres delegated to them by the dominant male society. Needlework has been, in most cultures, a traditional female occupation. Spinning and weaving, sewing and embroidery…" Rachel

Here is one reason I think we always need new tarot decks being created. I think of tarot decks as similar to myths and so I think this quote applies: Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Head nodding has its origins in bowing to appear subordinate.

I've often wondered why condoms are called French letters.

Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour. The

People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group. But

Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;

My mother would have wanted me to say a prayer, crossing myself at its conclusion, and had this been her grave, I would have done so. But such a western ritual would have been an insult to my father in his life, and why would I do something to offend him now? I smiled. It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking. My father was dead. Still, I offered no prayer.

A friend who loves Paris once told me, 'There aren't many things we humans need to do. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need to make love. And the French attitude is, okay, we should do those things very well.

Jean-Louis Murat, Patricia Kaas

America has always needed such transcendental notions to bind together its citizens, who have come from different cultures all over the world. And Americans are then driven to prove the universality of these ideas, and so their validity, by aggressively converting other cultures. In a religious context, this behavior would be recognized as missionary in its origins and effect.

Her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

She wondered what it was about men that wed them more to a way of doing things than to achieving their ostensible goals.

People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.

There aren't many things we humans need to do. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need to make love. And the French attitude is, okay, we should do those things very well.

May I join you?" she asked. Her English was lightly accented with something warm, maybe Spanish or Portuguese. "Please," I said, standing and pulling back a chair for her. "Is English all right?" "Of course," she said, looking at me closely. "You… you're American?" I nodded. "My parents are Japanese, but I grew up in America. I'm more comfortable in English.