Quotes About Culture

Was this just what relationships were like these days? Whatever you felt like with whoever was there?

La idea de no tener una lengua materna me preocupa. ¿Es como sentirte un nómada dentro de tu propia cabeza? no me puedo imaginar no tener palabras en las que refugiarme. Ser huérfana de lengua.

This was New York, where famous people drank from the same trough you did,...

All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family.

The Kadetskys were atheists—"lowercase a," her father always said, afraid that deification could slip into a nuance of typography.

I still feel like teenage girls are not taken seriously by the culture at large, especially not their darker or more complicated feelings—of aggression, desire, ambition. To me, these feelings and drives are so fundamental to girlhood and to womanhood, and I love exploring them. And trying to give voice to them as best I can. I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop.

What is your definition of skank?' I ask. 'A skank fucks skeezas she barely knows.

I'm in crisis. I'm about to bump with a five-foot chino-chicano.

these are the regions where populations of artists and radicals in the 1930s and 1940s morphed into heavily Latino populations in the 1950s and 1960s.

As a woman who chooses to be childless, I generally have just one problem: other adults. Living in a culture where women are assumed to prioritize motherhood above all else and where a woman's personal choices are often considered matters of public discussion means everyone thinks they have the right to discuss my body and my choices, so anyone who is curious about my lack of spawn feels the right to march right on over and ask me about it.

I think: it's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.

the body is a site of social encounter, not a vessel for American hyperindividualism.

One does not have to be Christian to see that [John] Donne was right. To be ill is to recognize this interconnectedness -- to understand how much we are "a part of the main." But to be ill in America today is to be brought up against the pathology of a culture that denies this fact. In the worst moments of my illness, I was alone because of the ways that we have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than the community, must do all the healing.

our culture tends to psychologize diseases it doesn't yet understand

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

every Chinese person is familiar with Kongzi, or 'Master Kong', as Confucius is known in Chinese.

A country is not developed by constructing bridges, houses or roads but it is developed only if the brains of the people living in that country are developed, only if their level of culture is raised and only if an infinite importance is given to the science and to the knowledge!

A good library at home is a giant empire inside the house.

A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks!

Do not admire the warriors; do not admire the fighters; condemn the fist! Get rid of this low culture of wildness! Admire the nonviolent; applaud the peaceful; despise the brute force!

Love the horses, but don't ride on them! Riding the horses is a culture, a wrong culture!

Man is a culture, nothing but a culture! Question your culture! Just like monkeys picking lice from their skin, get rid of the stupidities in your culture!

The beliefs of your country mostly become your own beliefs! Not the reason but the empty tales shape you!

The more you stand aloof from the sword, from the arrow, from the lance and from the fist, the more you become civilised!