Quotes About Culture

When I first moved to Minnesota, most folks didn't say they were white. They proclaimed their heritage. Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, French. Strange, I thought. When did they become white? Maybe winter changes people into colors. I waited to see.

Before America, I was not Black. I was not adrift in a sea of White that I constantly had to come to terms with, against which my very humanity is measured--by Whites, Blacks, the world, and even myself. Black exists only because America is White.

The culture of Minnesota Nice has meant that the face of discrimination has almost always been much more subtle here. But the kind of subtlety that underlies Minnesota Nice—extreme and highly nuanced—only makes racism harder to fight.

I longed for the Confederate flags of the South, because at least the South had clear lines of demarcation and warning. In Minnesota, there were only smiling faces, open classroom doors, and a stinging persistent coldness that let me know that I was in a new, different place that wasn't really welcoming—and that this place was resistant to me calling it home.

Black exists only because America is White.

Since femininity in all respects is a matter of containment, a woman whose hair exceeds the esthetic limits of her culture probably will employ some depilatory procedure to bring her body into line.

Depending on what was available in a given climate, a variety of porous fibers were used (and still are used in most countries) to stanch the monthly blood: makeshift paddings of roots and husks, homemade tampons of wadded paper, cotton or wool, and reusable diapers fashioned from folded lengths of heavy cloth, the shameful, bulky menstrual rags of my grandmother's generation that were furtively scrubbed in cold water and left to dry in a secret place.

While chasing birds, he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable. Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoa fruit bat colonies. But when asked to name the least likable place he'd seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: Walnut Creek, no question.

On the voyage from England, beer was their everything. Beer was their fruit and their vegetables in a diet that otherwise consisted of bread, cheese, and meat. Beer was their yogurt with its healing enzymes, and beer was their medicinal spirit. Beer was their water, and beer was their, well, beer.

Twenty-first-century American writers do not drink much.

Drinking, as Eric Burns writes, was our first national pastime—long before baseball was invented.

The Pilgrims believed beer was an unalloyed good, a 'good creature of God.' People who did not drink were suspect and 'crank-brained.

Upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church," wrote the British captain Thomas Walduck in 1708. "The first thing the Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing the English do, be it in the most remote part of the world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking house.

When they established a college—Harvard, in 1636—they equipped it with its own brewery.

I was obsessed with 'Reality Bites' and 'My So-Called Life.'

My husband John's and my breaks are often very culture heavy. He cannot pass a museum without venturing inside, so we tend to see a lot of architecture and so-called places of interest.

Those who know me well will tell you that I love a market, and when I say market, I mean food market. No matter where in the world, they allow me to soak up the culture, to hear the rhythmic chattering of the local people and traders, and take in the all-important smells, pungent and intoxicating.

I have Italian heritage, so I'm keen to go over for a few months with the girls and soak up the culture and the food. I'd like us all to learn Italian together as a family - it's something I've been saying for years.

The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.

In the '90s, I kind of put aside all those things I loved in the '80s and I got really into watching foreign films and art films and stuff like that, and sort of soaking those up.

Years ago, there was one Asian person in a soap and the entire Asian acting community was going for that role. Now, you can find a few different Asian people, and their character isn't entirely based on their religion or culture: they just happen to be in a soap.

My mom was a soap opera queen in Mexico and Latin America. I started acting because of her.

I think if you study people in the street today, you do sometimes feel that they have taken their behavior and their language from things that they have seen rather than read - from soap operas and movies and so on.

If I knew how to operate a DVR, you'd find episodes of 'The Tavis Smiley Show,' 'Democracy Now!' and lots of stuff from TV Land. What you can find now on my Hulu account are Korean soap operas, 'Grey's Anatomy' and films from the Criterion collection.