Quotes About Culture

It is a traveler's fallacy that one should shop for clothing while abroad. Those white linen tunics, so elegant in Greece, emerge from the suitcase as mere hippie rags; the beautiful striped shirts of Rome are confined to the closet; and the delicate hand batiks of Bali are first cruise wear, then curtains, then signs of impending madness. And then there is Paris.

Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

something called Schwiegertochter gesucht, about country people looking to play matchmaker for their children, until the young man falls asleep with his body wrapped tight around Less's, his nose docked in Less's ear.

Ninety years old and chatttering, chattering away as if the cure for his inability to speak Japanese were the application of more Japanese.

he had no idea what to do about death. Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing.

He goes to the Musée Carnavalet and admires the decor of crumbled palaces restored, room by room

Why did he always assume Mexico City would be like Phoenix on a smoggy day? Why did no one tell him it would be Madrid

I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.

The difficulty of learning spoken English for a person profoundly deaf from an early age has been likened to a hearing American trying to learn spoken Japanese while locked within a soundproof glass cubicle.

Some opponents of (cochlear) implants have proposed that people make their own choice when they turn eighteen. Even putting aside the neural issues that make this impractical, it is a flawed proposition. At eighteen, you are choosing not simply between being deaf and being hearing, but between the culture you have known and the life you have not.

Very few institutions thrive when they are left solely to "professionals," people who have made it their life's work to master a given domain of culture.

The risk in thinking "worldviewishly" is that we will start to think that the best way to change culture is to analyze it. We will start worldview academies, host worldview seminars, write worldview books. These may have some real value if they help us understand the horizons that our culture shapes, but they cannot substitute for the creation of real cultural

Nothing is gained and much is lost when a life spirals into idolatry—no matter how much creative image bearing may also be preserved by the mysterious workings of common grace. Had Jobs been able to turn from his more extreme forms of god playing, his life might have yielded much more, not less, lasting cultural fruit.

If culture is to change, it will be because some new tangible (or audible or visible or olfactory) thing is presented to a wide enough public that it begins to reshape their world.

At its worst, privilege is blindness: Amid the vast literature on race and privilege, one especially useful book from a Christian perspective for those from the dominant culture is Paula Harris and Doug Schaupp, Being White: Finding Our Place in a Multiethnic World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

Most people in America think Art is a man's name.

It's the movies that have been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

The world fascinates me.

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. Andy Warhol

I never read. I just look at pictures.

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest

Everything's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

country in southern Asia occupying the greater part of the Indian subcontinent; pop. 1,045,845,226 (est. 2002); official languages, Hindi and English (fourteen other languages are recognized as official in certain regions; of these, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu have most first-language speakers); capital, New Delhi. Hindi name BHARAT.

If we are going to persuade victims to come forward, we must rethink how manhood and womanhood are defined and how both definitions create unrealistic and unsafe demands on our behavior, starting when we're children.