Quotes About Culture

What are you called? Georgette. How are you called? Jacob. That's a Flemish name. American too. You're not Flamand? No, American. Good, I detest Flamands.

She was a Canadian and had all their easy social graces.

A range of different types of consciousness is available to human beings. It's a kind of anomaly that postmodern Western culture has narrowed the range of that what we are encouraged to have. Maybe it's not so much a transformation we are speaking of, but an opening. It's a reclaiming.32

irony is that, while secular leadership has become blatantly spiritual, Christian leadership has become blatantly (and blandly) secular.

If there is a city that personifies the artisan soul, one could make a strong argument that Paris is it. Paris is what a city looks like when artists create it. I feel more artistic when I am in Paris. After

for believers in persecuted countries. We champion their sacrifice and willingness to stand for Christ, even at the cost of their own lives. Yet we consider laying aside our traditions and cultural preferences as an unreasonable expectation.

Los hombres tienen las leyes, Alix. Las mujeres, sus vestidos.»

Domestic Eroticism is wrapped in a veil of appropriateness

The swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.

Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans.

When people live on top of each other, there is no isolation to transcend, and they are far less interested in embracing western, middle-class ideals of intimacy. Their lives are entwined enough as it is.

Ours is a culture that reveres the ethos of absolute frankness and elevates truth-telling to moral perfection. Other cultures believe that when everything is out in the open and ambiguity is done away with, it may not increase intimacy, but compromise it.

We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we're unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.

But in a culture that mandates individual fulfillment and lures us with the promise of being happier, never have we been more tempted to stray. Perhaps this is why we condemn infidelity more than ever even as we practice it more than ever.

In the immortal words of Marge Simpson, "Passion is for teenagers and foreigners.

Erotic intimacy invites us into a state of unboundedness where we experience a sweet freedom. We get a temporary break from ourselves—the legacies of our childhood, the habits of our relationship, and the constraints of our respective cultures.

the theater is the living consciousness of the world.

The Parade is not diplomacy," Chris pointed out. "It's celebration.

Because our culture so highly values an illusion of self-control and control of circumstance, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be. — Judi McGruder

Looking at ourselves through the eyes of those living in places where human tragedy is still embedded in complex religious and cultural narratives, we get a glimpse of our modern selves as a deeply insecure and fearful people. We are investing our great wealth in researching and treating this disorder because we have rather suddenly lost other belief systems that once gave meaning and context to our suffering.

Henry James said there isn't any difference between the English novel and the American novel since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

Says Robert Roth in Story and Reality: "For the Greeks . . . words were definitions. . . . For the Hebrews, on the contrary, words were descriptions." 14

What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? 'Tell me a story.' That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. [179]