Quotes About Culture

Young womens no good these days, he say. Got they legs open to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Tashi knows she is learning a way of life she will never live.

Health is our culture; anything that interferes with it is our bondage.

We recall that to the Cherokee, as to other people who have noticed how long it sometimes takes for humans to develop fully, adulthood comes--if it is coming at all--at the age of fifty-two.

if you are from Africa you recognize Medusa's wings as the wings of Egypt, and you recognize the head of Medusa as the head of Africa; and what you realize you are seeing is the Western world's memorialization of that period in prehistory when the white male world of Greece decapitated and destroyed the black female Goddess/Mother tradition and culture of Africa.

That she had seen the magazines we receive from home and that it was very clear to her that black people did not truly admire blackskinned black people like herself, and especially did not admire blackskinned black women. They bleach their faces, she said. They fry their hair. They try to look naked.

They tried to explain to the missionaries that it was they who put Adam and Eve out of the village because they was naked. Their word for naked is white. But since they are covered by color they are not naked. They said anybody looking at a white person can tell naked, but black people can not be naked because they can not be white.

Our women are respected here said the father. We would never let them tramp the world as American women do. There is always someone to look after the Olinka woman. A father. An uncle. A brother or nephew. Do not be offended, sister Nettie, but our people pity women such as you who are cast out, we know not from where, into a world unknown to you, where you must the struggle all alone, for yourself.

The Olinka do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.

They had the look of people deliberately distancing themselves from the center of things, as their own cultures defined it. Seeking the edge, the fringe. But also, paradoxically, the heart.

tribal cloth, the magic of which is that as long as it is woven, the tribe exists; as long as you know how to weave it, so do you.

The white missionary before you would not let us have this ceremony, said Joseph. But the Olinka like it very much. We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?

Why can't Tashi come to school? she asked me. When I told her the Olinka don't believe in educating girls she said, quick as a flash, They're like white people at home who don't want colored people to learn.

so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That's why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb's wool. Lamb's wool is not straight, Celie. It isn't even curly.

They'd been attacked by lions, stampeded by elephants, flooded out by rains, made war on by "natives." The tales they told were simply incredible. There they sat on a heavily antimacassared horsehair sofa, two prim and proper ladies in ruffles and lace, telling these stupendous stories over tea.

Why aren't you happy in America, if everyone there drives motorcars?

Shug say, Wellsah, and I thought it was only whitefolks do freakish things like that.

Although only 7 percent of Americans have passports—a shocking realization since we seem to be everywhere—99 percent of us have television or the Internet.

We still cling as a culture to the myth of the single writer succeeding on their own as fiercely as we cling to the myth of the self-made billionaire. But that isn't what a disabled poetics and practice has to be.

For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as 'the library' might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it.

In Canada, Coca-Cola, Turtle Man explains as he fills my glass. In Iran, Pipi Zam Zam.

When Karen speaks in Farsi, which she does even with her children, the tone of her Southern drawl colours the language in a strange an inimitable way. I listen for several minutes and decide that Farsi is, by nature, a language of deep greens and browns, and that Karen speaks it in bright red swaths.

The age of the troubadours ended in the early thirteenth century with the vicious persecution of the Cathar heretics in what became known as the Albigensian Crusade. Culminating in the holocaust at Montségur, this left southern France so devastated that its native culture, which had flourished under the auspices of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her forebears, was effectively suppressed and, in many cases, irrevocably lost. Duke

conversation – about the weather, as that is what you like to talk about in England, other subjects being, er, forbidden, eh?