Quotes About Culture

On a tendance à se reconnaître d'ailleurs dans son appartenance la plus attaquée.

La proverbiale alchimie levantine n'opère manifestement

Esfahan, nesf-é jahan! is what the Persians of today say. 'Isfahan, half of the world!

Je ne manquai pas de rappeler que notre "paradis" avait pour origine un vieux mot persan, "paradaeza", qui veut dire "jardin

Cette méfiance profonde entre les adeptes des religions monothéistes, solidement installée dans les esprits et constamment alimentée par l'actualité quotidienne, rend difficile tout échange fécond entre les populations, et toute osmose harmonieuse entre les cultures.

If the Persians live in the past it is because the past is their homeland and the present is a foreign country where nothing belongs to them.

Nous conservons pieusement la légende selon laquelle la transmission se fait « verticalement », d'une génération à la suivante, au sein des familles, des clans, des nations et des communautés de croyants ; alors que la vraie transmission est de plus en plus « horizontale », entre contemporains, qu'ils se connaissent ou pas, qu'ils s'aiment ou se détestent.

do not know what the books say, but I was born here sixty years ago and only foreigners have ever spoken to me of the city of Isfahan. I have never seen it.

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don't understand either.

Yes Sierra Leone to me was both utterly familiar and ineffably alien: I knew it but I could not claim to understand it.

My name is Attila.' ah-til-ha. 'That's an unusual name,' Jean said. 'to whom?' replied Attila cheerfully. 'Well . . . everyone,' said Jean. 'not to the Hungarians or the Turks,' said Attila. 'your parents named you after Attila the Hun?' Attila smiled. 'Some people,' he said, 'name their baby girls Victoria.

Having read all of whitie's books, I wanted to be an authority on them. Having been taught that art was "what white men do," I almost became one, to have a go at it.

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.

The Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.

The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world.

This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.

All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.

Internationalism' is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership.

Class was what formed you, but didn't travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He'd learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.

A smart city is an intelligent town that provides enormous possibilities for human growth through art, culture, social, architectural, economic, political, environmental, and scientific flowering with the optimal mix of nature, technology, humanity, and arts.

There is no other alternative, Huzoor. It is the mandate of Mother Chandi that a married woman only can become a Bhairabi, and three days after marriage, a Bhairabi cannot touch her husband anymore. So it has become a practice to arrange for a poor man from a distant place to marry a girl, before she is installed as a Bhairabi, and the man leaves after three days with enough money as reward. No one would see him ever again." Jibananda laughed. "What are you talking

There is no other alternative, Huzoor. It is the mandate of Mother Chandi that a married woman only can become a Bhairabi, and three days after marriage, a Bhairabi cannot touch her husband anymore. So it has become a practice to arrange for a poor man from a distant place to marry a girl, before she is installed as a Bhairabi, and the man leaves after three days with enough money as reward. No one would see him ever again." Jibananda laughed. "What are you talking about

For the benefit of those half-dozen people who will see a name like Gwillim and put this book down in order to go look it up to see where it comes from — it is the Welsh version of William