Quotes About Culture

Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it's only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body's a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions.

No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension.

Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.

Not too much call for knowing the American gene spread on the snowball.

Humans have historically used the arts in integrative ways, particularly within the contexts of enactment, ceremony, performance, and ritual.

Do you know that an Irishman always respond to a question with another?" And the Irish guy replies "Who told you that?

My mother is a typical Jewish mother. They sent her home from jury duty, she insisted she was guilty.

Anderson's The Long Tail

these games as a way to study model societies and social interactions.

Miller University of California, Riverside, Professor and Chair, Media & Cultural Studies Christopher Newfield University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor, English Department, Innovation Working Group, Center for

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don't exist.

In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.

As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief. At some point, they expect you to get over it.

Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet.

The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem.

I didn't study the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña because I needed a sample of the "Chicano experience" like a vitamin supplement. I studied these writers and artists because they were the most interesting thinkers.

Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother?

Like the stutterer who pronounces their words flawlessly through song, the immigrant writes their English beautifully through poetry.

My uncle said he used to start and end all his sentences with "motherfucker" because he learned his English from his black customers when he was a clothing wholesaler in New York.

A Jewish friend told me he never went to a Jewish therapist because it's too easy to assume everything dysfunctional about your family is cultural. Sometimes you need to explain your experiences in order to understand them yourself.

It's as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good.

identity politics

If the work of art circulates, it circulates for profit, which has been grossly reaped by white authorship. Speaking on this subject, Amiri Baraka offers an invaluable quote: "All cultures learn from each other. The problem is that if the Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie, I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi.