Quotes About Culture

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Me di cuenta de que ser un escritor latinoamericano significaba fundamentalmente que había que ser un latinoamericano escritor: había que invertir los términos y la condición de latinoamericano, con todo lo que comportaba de responsabilidad y deber, había que ponerla también en el trabajo literario.

Qué raro, verdad, que una mujer no pueda olerse como la huele el hombre.

París es una enorme metáfora.

En konkreto, Abila Sanhes fue ombre de pensamiento y aksión, de moral i de kultura. Esto son las partidas de su aber.

al jazz como un modesto ejercicio de liberación

Cada vez somos más los que creemos menos en la utilización del humanismo para el nirvana estereofónico de mandarines y de estetas.

How could I be sure of these teeangers' national origin? Was I using names of origin to give them a place instead, when it was clear that they were moving toward a new language?

It is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle

The hands of the latest aristocrats seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepter.

Jokingly, I once said that beside 'Evolians' [...] we now also have 'Evolomaniacs'. Similar phenomena are inevitable. Interview 6 - 1972

The acceleration that characterizes all falling bodies causes the phase of individualism and rationalism to be overcome and to be followed by the emergence of irrational and elemental forces characterized by mystical overtones. It is here that we encounter further developments in the well-known process of regression. In the domain of culture this regression is accompanied by an upheaval that has been characterized with the expression "treason of the clerics.

We, in Africa, have no more need of being 'converted' to socialism than we have of being 'taught' democracy. Both are rooted in our past -- in the traditional society which produced us.

A nation which refuses to learn from foreign culture is nothing but a nation of idiots and lunatics... But to learn from other cultures does not mean we should abandon our own.

For a woman who lived in the dark it was enough if she had a faint, white face —a full body was unnecessary.

Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness

The arts are the rain forests of society. They produce the oxygen of freedom, and they are the early warning system when freedom is in danger.

Entitled 'My Country and Its Appeal', she commented on China's cultural icon Confucius: 'His grossest mistake was the failure to regard womankind with due respect. We learn from observation that no nation can rise to distinction unless her women are educated and considered as man's equal morally, socially, and intellectually … China's progress must come largely through her educated women.

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

I came to New York because I was fleeing from the double-wide baby stroller, from the culture of respectability of the bourgeois suburban middle class. And my dream is that the elements of New York that are vital—the elements that are artistic, that are alternative, that resist capital, that are humane—not only endure but thrive, and maybe they do some sort of aikido reversal. They take [diversity-killing trends] and fucking slam them on their heads.

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I'm from the Dominican Republic. They're the reason I exist at all. To these roots I owe everything.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.