Quotes About Culture

If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn't date.

who two thousand years hence will still be throwing triumphantly off the yoke of Latin culture and intelligence of which they were never in any great permanent danger to begin with.

Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't. (William Faulkner)

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.

Girls are born weaned and boys don't ever get weaned.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

To my Western eyes, they were paragons of graceful competence and imagined wholeness. Sina's

The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France.

do you know why the French are so honest? because there are so few words in their language they're forced to be.

said, —Monasteries are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets.

People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian.

are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets.

If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture.

That's what money will buy you, in America," Brown had said, firmly. "People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?" "Why?" asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown's part. "Because they have better stuff," Brown had replied. "No other reason.

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.

the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.

They'd run all these tests on him and decided he wasn't racist. He wasn't, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn't see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn't be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we'd all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.

Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the Web. There is something profoundly postnational about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the postmodern world, whether we want to be or not.

THEY ATE LUNCH in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.

unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal

People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?" "Why?" asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown's part. "Because they have better stuff," Brown had replied. "No other reason.

No,' [Angie] said, 'not like mine. Do you know anything about Africa religions, Porphyre?' He smirked, 'I'm not African.' 'But when you were a child...' 'When I was a child,' Porphyre said, 'I was white.

But perhaps, she thinks, this isn't a Russian meal. Perhaps it's a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.