Quotes About Culture

Why can't bilingualism be seen as an extra resource? Is it because kids who can think in two languages are smarter? (from the book Attitude, 2002)

Newspapers will ultimately engross all literature.

I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

One of these days," Ming mutters, "Jerry's going to take a trip to China. He'll get a whiff of the real breadth and depth of Chinese cooking, legendary dishes. That chicken wrapped in lotus leaves he's read about. Authentic peppers from Sichuan, fresh as hell. Then he'll leave the U.S. for good, retire to Asia, and Dad's going to have to cough up real money for a lawyer.

In Mississippi, you don't admit that you're gay. It's just an awkward thing down South, which is sad.

Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.

It is the duty of the younger Negro artist… to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!"

Ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any.

This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

I'm afraid to answer that. I've heard that when I speak, it makes American women wish to strike me with umbrellas.

Lord, you're Irish," said Will. "Can you make things that don't have potatoes in them? We had an Irish cook once when I was a boy. Potato pie, potato custard, potatoes with potato sauce...

When I was growing up in Mississippi - it was good Southern food... but I also grew up with a Greek family when other kids were eating fried okra, we were eating steamed artichokes. So I think it played a big part in my healthy cooking.

The South Side of Chicago is my oyster.

I've studied various schools of thought... I acknowledge that some Muslims consider music prohibited, but I've found a lot of evidence from the life of the Prophet to show that he allowed certainly, but even encouraged, music at certain times.

I said honestly. "You can only be formed by your society." I came up with a quote I had heard once: " 'Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.'

To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is.

In a policy shift which the historian Guy de la Bedoyere has compared with Western Imperialism, the Romans converted militant Britons to their way of life with consumer entincements, introducing them to the urbane pleasures of hot spas and fine dining, encouraging them to wear togas and speak Latin.

It is not the way of a Comanche to beat his woman," he rasped. "Just as it is not his way to let her go away from him.

You are my woman!" He swept his hand toward the door. "I have spoken it before my people. You must walk always in my footsteps. That is the way of it. A woman does not leave her husband. It is forbidden." Loretta lifted her chin. "According to your ways!" "My ways are your ways. My people are your people. I am your husband!

Blue Eyes, if you do not know the tosi tivo way, we must do it the Comanche way.

This Comanche cannot change his face." "And I can't change mine.

You belong to this Comanche.