Quotes About Culture

women of exotic appearance.

By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are within and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.

Everyone back home in Bamiyan had rifles too. I think just about every man in Afghanistan has a rifle. It

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

Browning: 'Justinian's Pandects only make precise / What simply sparkled in men's eyes before'.

Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumor of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I've met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

Don`t talk to me about Matisse the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio where the nude style woman reclines forever on a sheet of blood. Talk to me instead about the culture generally how the murderers were sustained by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote villages the painters came, and our white-washed mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn't take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries.

There are no brunettes...among Florentine Madonnas.

Eric and I try to analyse this phenomenon and decide it can only be that the Swedes have no sense of humour of their own and have to import it.

He has had more hallucinations recently. He talks about 'When that man was in the kitchen …' and so on. Recently he locked the door in the evening, in case 'those men' got in. He knows by their accents that they are quite cultured, and they are apparently friendly, but it is frightening that they should be so real to him.

No system in history has been more relentless [than capitalism] in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

The feeling of being marginalized, a stranger in one's own land, is part of what makes many ethnics so responsive to any kind of media representation, sometimes even a derogatory one. A starving person will eat foul food.

The notions that fit the prevailing climate of opinion are more likely to be accepted as objective, while those that clash with it are usually seen as lacking in credibility. More often than we realize, we accept or decline an idea, depending on its acceptability within the dominant culture.

Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.

Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food

That anyone should need to write a book advising people to eat food could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.

There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo.

A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country,...

People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.