Quotes About Culture

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

But what I liked in Aberdeen was what I liked generally in Britain: the bread, the fish, the cheese, the flower gardens, the apples. the clouds, the newspapers, the beer, the wollen cloth, the radio programmes, the parks, the Indian restaurants and amateur dramatics, the postal service, the fresh vegetables, the trains, and the modesty and truthfulness of people.

If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.

I cannot think of any writer of stature in English who has not shown a knowledge of the Bible.

Even the smoke of our motherland is sweet and pleasant to us.")

You travel all over, the woman said. Do you write about your travels? I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books, she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why.

Less frightening, but no less disgusting, is the Iranian taste for jam made out of carrots.

Read to live better.

Tak, ludo?ercy i misjonarze s? dla siebie stworzeni.

So Walmart bribed Mexican officials to redraw the map in its favor, the map was published, and the big-box horror store was built, its obscene size swelling over the pyramids. But this was not the end.

keeps Mexico ticking over

This is getting depressing," Julieta said. "Let's go to the Casa Azul." The Blue House, in Coyoacán, a short walk from the restaurant, was where Frida Kahlo had been born, grew up, and lived with Diego Rivera.

glittering mortuary masks, items harvested from ruins and tombs all over Mexico.

I attended one of the many Mexican weddings that weekend, as an uninvited, eavesdropping celebrant.

That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome.

this land has relied on masquerade for millennia

Montaigne discussed the hypocrisy of seeing strangers as savage: "every man calls barbarous the thing he is not accustomed to.

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

The Chinese word for yak meant 'hairy cow'. It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.

sweeper with his handcart was a feature of every border town I visited

On November 2, 1492, in Cuba, Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European's first glimpse of smoking.

The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar.

I was now deeper into Mexico than I had driven so far.

I speak my language fluently, but my children aren't interested," she said