Quotes About Culture

When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the room, her grandmother reproached her. Not that water. Give her the boiled water. She's not made to survive here.

For as grateful as she feels for the company of the Nandis and Dr. Gupta, these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby's birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true.

Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky.

In my case there is another distance, another schism. I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to read it, or even write it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language, too. As

I hope you don't mind my asking," Douglas said, "but I noticed the statue outside, and are you guys Christian? I thought you were Indian.

I believe that reading in a foreign language is the most intimate way of reading.

Cammino sulla superficie, la parte accesibile. Ma so, da scrittrice, che una lingua esiste nelle ossa, nel midollo. Che la vera vita della lingua, la sostanza è lì.

A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.

American book jackets reflect the spirit of country - little homogeneity, lots of diversity.

Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents don't suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager.

Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

I'm scared that the pencil sides might disappear, just as a drawing can be rubbed out by an eraser. Bengali will be taken away when my parents are no longer there. It's a language that they personify, that they embody. When they die, it will no longer be fundamental to my life.

She calculates the Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight.

No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family.

This was the woman Narasimhan had married, as opposed to whatever girl from Madras his family wanted for him. Subhash wondered how his family reacted to her. He wondered if she'd ever been to India. If she had, he wondered whether she'd liked it or hated it. He could not guess from looking at her

Als je zonder je eigen taal leeft, voel je je gewichtloos en tegelijkertijd overbeladen. Je ademt een andere lucht in, op een andere hoogte. Je bent je altijd bewust van het verschil.

Mi aspetta un luogo in cui conta solo l'italiano. Un riparo da cui si sprigiona una nuova realtà.

Wanneer je als mens sterk geworteld bent, zoals mijn ouders dat waren, kan migratie werken als een zaag en een levenslang trauma veroorzaken. Ik ben meer als de waterplanten in het moerasland, het lowland dat ik in mijn boek beschrijf. Mijn wortels hebben geleerd in het water te dwarrelen, beweeglijk te zijn. Migratie betekent voor mij geen ontworteling meer.

Se fosse possibile colmare la distanza tra me e l'italiano, smetterei di scrivere in questa lingua.

Ci sono tantissime cose che continuano a confondermi in italiano. Le preposizioni, per esempio.

But it was another to be authoritative; Bengali had never been a language in which she felt like an adult.

How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn't mine? That I don't know? Maybe because I'm a writer who doesn't belong completely to any language.

At restaurants and bars, they sometimes slip Bengali phrases into their conversation in order to comment with impunity on another diner's unfortunate hair or shoes.

In American, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language.