Quotes About Culture

To use folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed.

What solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to Cardinal's "possession" as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been... in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.

Both of those conditions (my own awareness of being a native of a country and an alien in it) are of interest to me as a writer, and I'd like to talk about that expected and perhaps inevitable sense of separatedeness from the culture that pervades the country I live in.

Long ago, before I met her, she twisted her blond hair into dreadlocks and, pretty as she is, the locks add an allure she wouldn't otherwise have.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song - all of it cooked together in the color of my skin.

To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

White but European which was not as bad as white and American;

Our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

clarity about who one is and what one's work is, is inextricably bound up with one's place in a tribe—or a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

When one assumes that you can substitute license for freedom, when one assumes that you can use another's deficiency for one's own generosity, when one assumes that you can use another person's misery and nightmares in order to clarify your own dreams. When all of those things are done and completed, then the surrender and the betrayal of one's culture is also complete.

I don't foresee, or want, a color-blind, race-neutral environment. The nineteenth century was the time for that. It's too late, now. Our race-inflected culture not only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it thrives as a virus or a bountiful harvest of possibilities.

Yet here, not twenty miles away from a quiet, orderly community, there were women like none he knew or ever heard tell of.

La construcción del canon es la construcción de un imperio.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

We live in a culture that has switched the tags on greatness. It has put a lot of value on the flashy lifestyle while putting only $99 on character. Our culture has put a lot of value on cars and careers but only ten cents on integrity, family, and impact.

The problem with race in America is not fundamentally a problem of skin. It is a problem of sin. It is a problem in that people have not been willing to address the sin that has led to a division among skin as we hold tenaciously to our cultures. Our backgrounds and preferences are legitimate, but when they overrule God, that's when Jesus says, "You are wrong.

Jewish-Southern culture had also bred the ultimate in fusion food: Gershon Weinberg's pork and ribs barbecue restaurant in Alabama.

Myth is more important than history. History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetuate.

Lebanese, like chain smokers and heavy drinkers, are always trying to thrust their vice on others.

Lolling on the narrow pier, surrounded by these mocha-colored youths, I became aware of my own pallid body in an unaccustomed way. "Like cats," George Biddle, an American painter, wrote of islanders in the 1920s, "they fall naturally into harmonious poses.