Quotes About Culture

serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission.

Even if I wasn't a Japanophile, I would still use chopsticks all the time, for all kinds of cuisine. Especially salads, which can be unwieldy on a fork. The cultural difference between selecting your food and stabbing it is symbolic of the quiet simplicity of the East versus the blunt directness of the West.

The cultural difference between selecting your food and stabbing it is symbolic of the quiet simplicity of the East versus the blunt directness of the West. Chopsticks are a little tricky to master at first, but once you do, it can eventually seem a bit crude that you used to poke and prod at your meal with forks and knives.

After the fire, when I'd tried to express my gratitude for their kindness to our customers, they'd been awkward, uncomfortable. My father had had to explain to me that giving thanks is not a common practice in India. 'Then how do you know if people appreciated what you did?' I'd asked. 'Do you really need to know?' my father had asked back.

Like many Indian children, I grew up on the vast, varied, and fascinating tales of the Mahabharat.

What I am leaving behind—I cannot articulate what it is, but I know I will not find it, ever, in America.

fashion wasn't as important to me as to Urmila. There would be time enough to wear my mother's saris. And in any case Ram's eyes were on me all the time, too.

My fault my fault. A refrain so many women the world over have been taught to sing.

My fault my fault. A refrain so many women the world over have been taught to sing. 'Why do you say that, beti?

In India, when grandchildren are sick, some grandmothers will sweep the child with a broom or with the branch of a tree. If the child asked the grandmother what she was doing, she will reply that she was "removing bad spirits". It is reported that in many cases, the children would get well.

This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.

The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.

I didn't leave Africa, I left Nigeria, and for political reasons. But ... I've never, never left Africa, and I certainly never left what it means to be Ibo. That is something you carry with you.

If you want to know about Africa, read our literature -- and not just "Things Fall Apart," because that would be like saying, "I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America."

A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching—a market response to inefficient distribution.

In America, life is introverted, self-absorbed - and so is their music.

Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English...?

your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.

We never tasted tea in my village, even though they grow it in the east of my country, where the land rises up into the clouds and the trees grow long soft beards of moss from the wet air. There in the east, the plantations stretch up the green hillsides and vanish into the mist. The tea they grow, that vanishes too. I think all of it is exported. Myself I never tasted tea until I was exported with it.

I do not think I have left my country. I think it has traveled with me

Death, finally, was British; life chaotic and foreign. The

This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can't. Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works.

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