Quotes About Culture

We live in a culture of secrecy, where hiding and lying are accepted as natural, even though we don't like it. We want honesty, transparency, and authenticity in our loved ones, our groups and organizations, and in our own self so we can reach the heights of our capacity. By clinging to the opaque reality we stall our evolution.

In the instant that it took her to realize what the book was, she knew he was doing what she once had—preparing for the day by spending time with God. She wondered what the words he was singing meant. Were they in Gaelic or Cherokee? It really didn't matter. What mattered was that they were words of praise and probably thankfulness. What mattered was that he was the kind of man who spent time with his Creator.

Hvis Lone kom fra et hjem med klaver og jeg fra et hjem med kinopiano, er Marianne fra et hjem med munnharpe.

A proverb is an ornament to language.

I'm crazy about my father, he's an amazing man, a real adventurer. He took us with him to travel all over the world. We were in places that were so remote, that white people hardly ever reach them.

Nothing looks more foolish than tradition to those who have none.

Notions of absolute truth and ultimate authority are fiercely attacked, and the Bible itself is no longer accorded unconditional respect in Western societies.

I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters

How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one?

I thought I was American, but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what you were, you answered with a nationality other than your own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a group called "Irish.

Everywhere, men and women changed their names and embraced strange gods in order to live.

I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution.

In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

I use the pay phone to call my friend Noel. The last time I was here he took me up a mountainside in Connemara with a seventy-eight-year-old poteen-maker who'd learned his craft as a teenager from his father. We spent the day watching him double-distill brown bog water in two oil drums over a turf fire into something that tasted like the finest malt. Noel acted as interpreter, as the old man spoke no English. Perhaps he'll have another adventure in store for me this time.

Immediately across the road is a ruined abbey and cemetery. As I haven't visited one since late yesterday afternoon, I decide to take a look. On the whole, it's fair to say that, if you're travelling round the west of Ireland, an interest in ruined abbeys, however slight, will stand you in better stead than a passion for rollerblading, say or a penchant for showbiz gossip.

Maybe Americans have found it easier to latch on to new traditions because we are uprooted people, and have few deep roots.

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.

Forty years ago, I was riding on a train in India travelling from Delhi to Calcutta.

We live in an emotionally impoverished culture, and those who stick with a long term recovery process

So, interpretation must proceed wholly by fitting those authors into their social and historical environments. Anything else is alleged to be a denial of history or a denial of humanity.

Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.

London goes beyond any boundary or convention.It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.