Quotes About Culture

Ivan pushed his paper cup in various directions, as if it were a king under check. He said that in Hungary people were more honest. If they thought you were doing something stupid, they let you know right away. Americans were polite and remote, as if there were bubbles separating everyone. "You can't tell if someone really likes you," he said. "You can't get close. There are all these blocks." "Blocks," I echoed.

Juli's mother, a beautician, was very thin, with unusually bright eyes. 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.

The Other," I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. "That's

I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from "being" Turkish—one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation

But I was in Russia because I had looked at the literatures of the world and made a choice.

To imagine the world without gods and religion is reasonable enough; to imagine mankind without them is an entirely different matter.

Culture preaches monogamy while Nature repeats it—over and over again.

On language—from the mother tongue came our father's sins.

If culture were clothing, it would be more like negligee than a parka. That's why it's so sexy.

So many dream of travel without having an idea of its reality: a language sounds exotic only when you don't understand it, and a culture appears better than your own only when you aren't in it.

Art is aesthetic communication of the soul—in fact, it's the best of that communication—and taken in its entirety has formed a body of work to stand alongside Science and Religion as one of the three great constructs of culture to aid the individual in his or her struggle to survive in Nature.

Our most cultural state is one of total certainty—which is the reason those of us who are most certain are those who are most out of touch with nature (i.e., reality).

Humanity is as horrified and repulsed by real nature as it is by real death. Thus, we strike back against this formidable opponent with our sharpest weapon: our imagination. From this noble tool—born of necessity and elevated to beauty—culture was born, and the war against nature begun.

Skin color or the shape of one's nose cannot be the criteria upon which individuals are judged. Black is not beautiful; it's racist. Being African-American, conscious of your culture, fascinated by your history, this is beautiful—and really has nothing to do with putting a color chart next to your face.

Books do furnish a room.

Chinese migrants had learned from long experience to expect little of governments, and to rely much on the networks of kinship, culture, and trust.

The more balanced power equation between women and men Below the Winds encouraged serial monogamy and easy divorce for both parties… Hybridity was therefore the norm for these cities, up to the point when communication with the homeland became so well established that its prejudices were imported.…. Southeast Asian women were therefore the pioneers of cultural interaction with outsiders, a creative role appreciated by neither nationalist nor imperialist authors.

Arabic also has a far greater facility to communicate sarcasm, and it can be employed precisely, or with pitch-perfect irony.

Like my grandmother, I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one.

We have lost the splendors our ancestors created, and we go elsewhere. People are reminded of that every day here, where an older world, still visible on every corner, fails to hide its superior ways.

The Middle East that had fascinated, preoccupied, and saddened me for decades was gone.

The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.

the more secular, materialistic, and compulsively extraverted our civilization became, the greater the unhappiness, 'senselessness and aimlessness' of our lives.

This may bear witness to the bulldozing effect of Western dominance, which tends to destroy every indigenous aspect of the cultures with which it comes into contact, but it is not a good argument for the superiority of European music. American popular music has swept the world; but few musicians consider it better than the varieties of music which it has displaced.