Quotes About Culture

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness

This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them.

one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life "OK " as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.

As a rule, almost all of them are Midwesterners...This area of the country, what are we to say of this area of the country, Ms. Beadsman?...Both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity. Corn, a steady waning complex of heavy industry, and sports. What are we to say? We feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn't know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually. What are we to say about it?

Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you'll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.

This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

wondered why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed.

The Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy.

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

The anaerobic saprophyte Clostridium botulinum is simple to culture, requiring only

Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement.

The thing that I think a lot of us forget is that part of the fault is the books . . . you get this sort of cycle that as they become less important commercially they begin protecting their egos by talking more and more to each other and establishing themselves as this kind of tight cloistered world that doesn't really have anything to do with regular readers.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change.

One, one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life "OK " as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock.

we don't take it seriously enough as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan's lame F.C.C. chairman Mark Fowler professed to see it in 1981, as "just another appliance, a toaster with pictures.

Popular culture is the symbolic representation of what people already believe .

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language.

It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.