Quotes About Culture

Anonymous young men with all-American bone structures.

Mi árbol favorito era el sauce llorón. Yo pensé que debían de haberlo traído del Japón. En Japón entendían las cosas del espíritu

I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue - which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn't have the same idioms as our idioms - and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. it mightn't make me any happier, but would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

My favourite tree was the Weeping Scholar Tree. I thought it must come from Japan. They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.

Mrs. Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first fingerbowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.

Modern innovations in Benidorm have not disturbed the rhythm of native customs.

My mind may be American but my heart is British.

Without Christianity we might, of course, merely sink into an apathetic decline

It [tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German. (Eliot's translation)

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch

Culture is not enough, even though nothing is enough without culture.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

The general ethos of the people they have to govern determines the behaviour of politicians.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

A poesia de um povo deriva sua vida da fala do povo e, por sua vez, dá-lhe uma vida; e representa o seu ponto mais elevado de consciência, o seu maior poder e a sua mais delicada sensibilidade.

Even today, after all that has happened, I keep this scarf wrapped around my hair because of men's interest in me. It is not because of faith any more; I still believe in Allah, don't misunderstand me, but I do not think Allah is a fashion designer. He observes people's hearts, not their clothes.

Burning a book's like burning a human being. Once yer start burning books, yer end up burning the entire world, every damn human being in it!

evidently Europeans cannot stop themselves from giving new names to people and places. I guess it must be hard to stop after all those centuries of renaming stuff in the colonies.

and everywhere books, books, books

Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does.

It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.