Quotes About Culture

What is a nation without a mother tongue?

On Easter or Christmas Day, my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites.

My mother would tell me that the shortest cut to purification after the unholy touch was to cancel the touch by touching any Mussalman passing by.

The Italian comes to his table with the same open heart with which a child falls into his mother's arms, with the same easy feeling of being in the right place.

I also want to go to an Italian island and do cuisine properly with some famous Italian chef and, like, his mother.

Being married to a daughter of India is a natural complement of my being in this country for 30 years. My roots are very much in this country, even though I remain a Westerner.

You want a lesson? I'll give you a lesson. How about a geography lesson? My father's from Puerto Rico. My mother's from El Salvador. And neither one of those is Mexico.

The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my mother's angels and djinns.

You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she's still going to expect a passel of grandkids.

If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.

The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.

My mother was very agnostic. She would never set foot in the synagogue, she couldn't be doing with it.

[My mother tongue is] Albanian. But, I am equally fluent in Bengali (language of Calcutta) and English.

I'm sure mothers are important across every culture, but particularly in Korean society, the role of the mother is of great importance.

Whenever I get married, it will be a Bengali wedding. If I won't have a Bengali wedding, my mother won't come. She has warned me. So, I am going to have a Bengali wedding for sure.

My father is Swedish and my mother is French.

I think that people assumed I was white because of my last name. My father is Caucasian, my mother is Hispanic. But English was my second language, believe it or not.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

The Indian was a religious man from his mother's womb.

I have my mother who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.

My father was the Formica King of Long Island, and my mother was the daughter of a Bengal Lancer in India.

The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.

As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body.

France, mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws (Les Regrets)