Quotes About Culture

My thinking is this: Her original mother, she did what she must. I, her in-between mother, I did what I must. That Japanese couple, they also did what they must. One day, this little girl will grow up, and she will be doing what she must. So you see, we all do what we must

How funny to see the foreigner in a farmer's work hat, like a fish that has put on clothes. Around

never make the cost of saving face so high that a man must go elsewhere to show how generous he is.

old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

The women cannot go out except to go to church or to the bullfight, and even that is unusual. I consider it a very ugly custom, and if I couldn't go out as I wished, I would leave this country [Spain], if only because of that one custom of the inhabitants.

To say that the artist is not serving humanity is monstrous. He has been the eyes, the ears, the voice of humanity. He was always the transcendentalist who x-rayed our true states of being. His role in European culture is clear enough. Here he is given an inferior status, because he is not obviously and directly useful. His usefulness cannot be measured. The artist cannot serve directly.

Discovering a new street in Paris, or a new café, is much more interesting to me than visiting an old château or cathedral in some godforsaken hamlet.

She says she is Irish—Nell O'Connor, but she was born in Latvia and talks like a Greek.

It will be a she, too. I am tired of that "I," the weak I, the over-audacious I, the aggressive I, the timid I, the I of the Chinese language signs. I swallowing all my letters. Swallowing some of the notes.

Most diverse clientele—chiefly negroid: trap drummers, dancers, ham actors, pimps, whores, gamblers, fairies. Like Harlem almost. The conversations are rich. Unimaginable! I find all this so much more appetizing than cháteaus and churches. Human beings! Not relics.

The Spaniard does not give his mind and soul to the woman! The Spaniard is the man who associates with man only in the building of a world.

All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless.

Those who think of their house as only a 'machine to live in' should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology.

We 'preserve' folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.

Let us tell them the painful truth, that most of these works of art are about God, whom we never mention in polite society.

The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American.

the invention of celebrity, a concept made possible by new technologies for the cheap dissemination of images.

Tribune gossiped the following morning. "Joan of Arc, complete with solid silver mail; Christopher Columbus; Louis XVI; Queen Elizabeth I in a bright red wig; the goddess Diana; Daniel Boone. By 11:30 a bouillabaisse of kings, queens, fairies, toreadors, and gypsies blocked Fifth Avenue.

The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn't involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It's just a matter of saying, 'This is feminist because we say it is.

Songez que, dans nos sociétés, dans nos moeurs, tout prédestine un sexe à l'autre; tout enseigne l'hétérosexualité, tout y invite, tout y provoque, théâtre, livre, journal, exemple affiché des aînés, parade des salons, de la rue. Si l'on ne devient pas amoureux avec tout ça, c'est qu'on a été mal élevé

An art book is a museum without walls.

An exile's only country is his country's literature.

FranÈ›a nu mai era pentru mine o simpl? colecÈ›ie de curiozit??i, ci o f?ptur? sensibil? È™i consistent?, din care, într-o zi, o f?râm? fusese grefat? în mine.