Quotes About Culture

You have reminded me of how alien I found the concept of acquaintances splitting the bill when I first arrived in your country. I had been raised to favour mutual generosity over mathematical precision in such matters; given time both work equally well to even a score.

In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.

Glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously...

like Pakistan, America is, after all, a former English colony...

Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

I tried not to dwell on the comparison; it was one thing to accept that New York was more wealthy than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well.

He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone.

Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.

If you don't pray," he said, lowering his voice, "why do you wear it?" They were sitting at a table for two by a window, overlooking snarled traffic on the street below. Their phones rested screens-down between them, like the weapons of desperadoes at a parley. She smiled. Took a sip. And spoke, the lower half of her face obscured by her cup. "So men don't fuck with me," she said.

But then around her she saw all these people of all these different colors in all these different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed and a new time was here.

How odd it would be to call Homer's Iliad or Rumi's Masnavi "the Great Eastern Mediterranean Poem.

Armed college students were telling women to cover their heads.

In America, the murky, unknown places of the world are blank screens:

I love it when you talk about where you come from," she said, slipping her arm through mine, "you become so alive.

Nishi's sister, who was sixteen years old, had gone for a holiday in Sylhet and returned six months later with a husband and a swelling belly. Nishi, strong on forward-planning skills, was taking evasive action: she was going on a holiday of her own and she would return when she was twenty-five. At that ancient age the danger of marriage was over.

All books are investments (p.134)

Very suitable," said Yasmin, which in the Ghorami household was high praise indeed.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.

As conversation with men is wonderfully helpful, so is a visit to foreign lands...to whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them upon those of others.--Montaigne

Watashi no hob?kurafuto wa unagi de ippai desu

Said to Mitch Album in Tuesday's with Morrie: The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things and you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it! CREATE YOUR OWN!

There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

One reason for this is that the media are designed in such a way that thinking seems unnecessary (albeit superficial).

Chronos is the Greek word for time, topos