Quotes About Culture

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

there was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead. Its genius was synthesis.

The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all kinds. This is why they have bidets.

Also she went in for culture, which gave her a certain moral authority. It wouldn't now; but people believed, then, that culture could make you better - a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.

I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve?...Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women?

I don't give a glance to what's still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a story of a certain kind. The myths of a culture are those stories it takes seriously—the ones that are thought to be a key to its identity.

At our school, pink was for spring and summer, plum was for fall and winter, white was for special days: Sundays and celebrations. Arms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed.

people believed, then, that Culture could make you better – a better person. They believed it could uplift you, or the women believed it. They hadn't yet seen Hitler at the opera house.

How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble.

A momentary psychotic break," I'd said. "The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect.

It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

Su madre aprovechó para decir que el problema con las personas de otra cultura era que nunca sabía uno si estaban locos o no, porque sus pautas de comportamiento eran muy distintas. Los agentes se mostraron de acuerdo con ella, con deferencia pero también con condescendencia, como si fuese una completa imbécil a quien había que complacer.

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one. It isn't what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said.

Florida's not the hick town you keep saying it is," says Reynolds. "Times have changed; they've got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!

Fifteen years in prison! That's eternity for an Arapaho.

I'd rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore.

thinking of themselves as members of a "nation," sharing such characteristics as culture, language, history, religion, customs and, on the edge where racial theories flourished, biology.

Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression.

Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.