Quotes About Culture

Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

Homosexualidad.] La palabra me desagrada. No me gusta el hecho de que su formación sea irregular, y siempre he considerado que apesta a ciencia y a intelecto. Preferiría una palabra que oliera a vida corriente. (...) Sus raíces pertenecen a dos lenguas distintas: "Homo", que en griego significa "igual" y "sexual" que procesde de la palabra latiana para "sexo". Alguien la acuñó en el esiglo XIX y no logro imaginar en qué estaba pensando.

It's a typical Western bias. You think a tool is more important than a dream because a tool can be measured and a dream cannot.

To cure epilepsy, doctors concocted recipes of dried human heart or made a potion of wine, lily, lavender, and an entire adult brain, which weighed about three pounds. Human fat was used to treat consumption, rheumatism, and gout. Physicians recommended those suffering from hemorrhoids to stroke them with the amputated hand of a dead man—a strangely unpalatable image to ponder.

the thing we call French culture may be due to the fact that French children can play, surrounded by the things of the past, palaces of bygone kings, statues, remembrances of history.

Her reputation as a cook spread without her knowledge- for the soups she brought to the bakery in a lidded tin for her midday meal, for her stews, for the scraps of dough that she turned into what the Russians called pelmeni and the Jews kreplach, dumplings stuffed with chopped meat and onions. She prepared hot borscht with beef in winter, shchi or cold borscht in summer, chicken cooked with prunes or a tsimmes with sweet potatoes, carrots and prunes.

And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.

Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn't think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.

Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.

a woman without love for her origins is lost.

I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.

laborious filters of Italian pronunciation

No había podido callarse la boca, la amistad entre hombres tiene pactos no escritos pero sólidos, no como la amistad entre mujeres.

A universidade não liberta as mulheres, mas aperfeiçoa sua repressão.

We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.

Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce.

Ah, there is no city that gives off so much noise and such a clamor as Naples.

Ma verso Stefano, adesso, non manifestava nessuna esplicita aggressività. Certo, la spiegazione era semplice: avevamo visto i nostri padri picchiare le nostre madri fin dall'infanzia. Eravamo cresciute pensando che un estraneo non ci doveva nemmeno sfiorare, ma che il genitore, il fidanzato e il marito potevano prenderci a schiaffi quando volevano, per amore, per educarci, per rieducarci.

The world, I remember feeling rather than thinking, is the same everywhere: families sleeping and eating under one roof, speaking in different languages but about more or less the same things.

History is the hidden map of who, where and how we are today.