Quotes About Culture

I marvel at how out of place simple, humble Jesus would be in today's American churches.

Atlanta, Georgia—a city where little girls in $50 smocked dresses romp around on filthy playgrounds. Where every freshly birthed Southern baby gets two names and women wear pastel pantsuits to lunch. These ladies instinctively understand closed-toed shoes and slips and no-white-after-Labor-Day-unless-it-is-winter-white.

A shared table is the supreme expression of hospitality in every culture on earth. When your worn-out kitchen table hosts good people and good conversation, when it provides a safe place to break bread and share wine, your house becomes a sanctuary, holy as a cathedral. I've left a friend's table as sanctified and renewed as any church service. If you have a porch, then you have an altar to gather around.

Excess has impaired perspective in America.

I still believe in the Holy Trinity, except now it's Target, Trader Joe's, and IKEA.

Italy was the only place I'd visited where people described kitchen implements as having souls of their own.

classes, glasses, and a beret.

Our environment shapes everything from our drinking habits to our financial situations to our physical appearance, and the longer we immerse ourselves in certain surroundings, the more they influence us.

Kinder, Kirche, Küche: children, church, kitchen; this is what all German girls hope for;

They call him a wicasa wakan, Charles says. A divine man. A blessed man. Sure, somebody whose soul is eroded more quickly that other people's especially if he uses his talents to help them. Because he can see things others can't, and that's a psychic burden. Still. It's not stigmatized like it is in our culture. It's viewed as it should be, with respect.

My mom's a secret Rastafarian.

In the 1990s, reports began to roll in from New Caledonia, a small island in the South Pacific, of crows that fashion their own tools in the wild and appear to transmit local styles of toolmaking from one generation to the next—a feat reminiscent of human culture and proof that sophisticated tool skills do not require a primate brain.

For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.

He is very good to her," Juliana said. She lifted one of the teacups from the tray, admiring its fineness. Ainsley had been sweet to give them the set. Mahindar looked surprised. "But that is only natural, memsahib," he said. "After all

Why were all the idioms about being strong male-related?

The count said in careful English, "That was perhaps not, as you English say, very sporting." "Games are played to win," Cameron said. "And we're Scottish.

It has been said, "History is written by the victors." I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history.

There is nothing unusual in the activities outside marriage, or otherwise, of women. It is our privilege. But men are required to be faithful. An Indian man discovered in the arms of another woman can be put to death on the order of his wife.

This is why I paint," he says. "To get black men into museums.

To know Paris, Bruno began, pulling on his cigarette, you need to relax, have a glass of wine, and enjoy life.

Visiting Florence was like attending a surprise party every day.

Vampires have credit cards?" "We're undead, not Amish.

Look, Mother, I am never going to be thin. I'm Norwegian. If you wanted a thin daughter, you should not have married a man whose female ancestors carried cows home from the pasture

You've lived in America for twenty years. Eat badly, damn it.