Quotes About Culture

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.

Take two Afghans who've never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they'll figure out how they're related.

Even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls

Where I come from, one wrong look, one improper word, and blood is spilled. Where I come from, a woman's face is her husband's business only.

shoes: that putting them on a bed invited death into the family, that a quarrel would follow if one put on the left shoe first.

The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980s: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules.

Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they're just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.

if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without proper home or a legimate identity.

He said I would appreciate later the gift he was giving me. He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

That's the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That's the Afghanistan I know. You? You've always been a tourist here, you just didn't know it

Los afganos cuidan y protegen las costumbres, pero aborrecen las reglas.

El niño hindú aprendería muy pronto lo que los británicos descubrieron a principios de siglo y los rusos a finales de la década de los ochenta: que los afganos son un pueblo independiente.

9- I watch the kids shooting marbles on sidewalks that melt into muddy gutters, the old women sitting in doorways, the street vendors in dhotis squatting on their mats, scrapping coconuts, hawking marigold garlands.

Aku dan Hassan memandang. Menahan tawa. Anak India itu akan segera mengetahui satu hal yang dipelajari oleh orang Inggris di awal abad lalu, yang akhirnya dipelajari oleh orang Rusia di akhir 1980-an: bahwa penduduk Afganistan adalah orang-orang merdeka. Penduduk Afganistan menyukai tradisi namun membenci aturan. Begitu pula dengan adu layang-layang. Aturannya sederhana: Tidak ada aturan. Terbangkan saja layang-layangmu. Putuskan benang lawanmu. Mudah-mudahan kamu beruntung.

He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

At the time, I must have been in my late twenties, a young man at the prime of his desires for a woman's company. Unlike many of the men I grew up with in my village- young men who had never seen the bare thigh of a grown woman and married, in part, for the license to at least cast their gaze upon such a sight- I did have some experience.

women and men were equal in every way and there was no reason women should cover if men didn't.

The Chinese say it's better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one." Mariam gave a half smile. "It's a good saying.

The poems of Khalili, Pajwak, Ansari, Haji Dehqan, Ashraqi, Beytaab, Hafez, Jami, Nizami, Rumi, Khayyám, Beydel, and more went up in smoke.

Eres un hombre honorable, Amir agha. Un verdadero afgano. —Me encogí interiormente—. Me siento orgulloso de hospedarte esta noche en mi casa —dijo Wahid.

Nul ne pourrais compter les lunes qui luisent sur ses toits Ni les mille soleils splendides qui se cachent derrière ses murs.

soon after we arrived in the U.S., Baba started grumbling about American flies. He'd sit at the kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies darting from wall to wall, buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed. In this country, even flies are pressed for time, he'd groan.