Quotes About Culture

Oye, gordito, ¿eres el pintor más grande de México o del mundo? —Del mundo, Lupe, del mundo. —¿Hasta de Chinajapón? —Hasta de China y de Japón. —¿Chinajapón no es un solo país? —No. —¿Entonces por qué cantan eso de «chino, chino, japonés, come caca y no me des»? —¿Es eso lo que sabes de geografía, Lupe?

Me sentiré muchísimo menos extranjera contigo que en cualquier otra tierra.

Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.

There are no distinctions at all any more, as far as entertainments are concerned, it's big and beautiful everywhere where we are. It would be a great help to us, if we could be everywhere at the same time. And here it is already, your entertainment!

Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

People who cannot find their way out of history are lost, and so are their nations.

A modern man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish

Europe was so small. It seemed weird that people took it so seriously.

How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?

For dinner she made a soup called "boy-catching soup" and a cake called "mother-in-law cake." These two dishes seemed to sum up a whole worldview of entrapment and placation.

I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.

Andrea had brought kifli: crescent-shaped rolls first baked by Hungarians to commemorate the Turks' defeat in Vienna, and later introduced by Marie Antoinette in Paris, where they became known as croissants.

At the first such gathering, I politely sat with them for half an hour, drank some vodka, and even recited a toast about how great it was that Gulya had such great friends. This proved to be a tactical error, since afterward Gulya wanted me to drink vodka and recite toasts with them every night, which was not compatible with my program of study of the great Uzbek language.

The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn't name didn't exist.

What was the relationship between leaving the country and an aesthetic life? What was it about America in particular that seemed to make one's life unaesthetic?

I know that's the cliché about America: 'Oh, it's so impersonal! Oh, I feel like a number!' That's not what I mean. I'm not saying the Hungarian way is better. In general, I think isolation is a good thing. With most people I'm so thankful not to be really close to them. In Hungary they would immediately start to tell you all this shit.

There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mi?, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.

In the end I signed up for a different Spanish film seminar, taught in Spanish, by an adjunct instructor. The adjunct instructor also said stupid things, but they were in Spanish, so you learned more.