Quotes About Culture

Whenever you're interviewed, think British, act Yiddish

Punctuality is an obsession with the Japanese

If you were given two lives, you'd spend one of them in Italy.

The English are the biggest snobs on earth, and most of the time without reason. The lesser the talent, the bigger the snob, in my experience. It's the only way the so

when mothers stop kissing their children, and young men start kissing their mothers?

Whatever the cause, the United States is privately rich but socially poor. It caters to the pursuit of wealth but pays scant attention to those left behind. And though American culture emphasizes individualism and the pursuit of individual wealth perhaps more than any other society, that focus does not lead to greater happiness. Of

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

German wasn't good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn't interrupt.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

That's how people live, by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? "Tell me a story." That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.

My goal in life is to become an adjective, Leonard said. People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.

Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.

Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having no alternative, followed.

My grandfather's short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any Stephanides has ever worked in the automotive industry. Instead of cars, we could become manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanakopita and grilled cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana cream pie. Our assembly line was the grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain.

Madeline began hearing people saying Derrida. She heard them saying Lyotard and Foucault and Deleuze and Baudrillard. That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols- made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm.

Martinis in a can, Callie. We live in an age of wonders.

If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being in love was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny

I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies, those German flounders - you don't see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch, on Siberian feet.

One's country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.

Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was - already an American, in other words.