Quotes About Culture

That is the magical thing about books. You can listen to all the greatest people who have ever lived, anywhere in the world, in any civilization. You can see what is completely different about them, things you never imagined.

The more we think we are sophisticated sometimes the sillier we get—and certainly the more idle people there are with nothing to fill their minds except making moral rules for everyone else, the more hypocrisy there is as to who keeps them and who doesn't.

When you live in another land, Mr. Pitt, no matter how strange it may seem at first, it is a very short time until its people become your own, and their grief and their laughter touches you as deeply. All the differences on earth are a shadow, compared with the sameness.

Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.

Traditions are seldom lies; traditions reflect people's deepest beliefs and customs. They have their own truth

I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.

A large American automobile came crawling close to us, and we could hear from behind its thick windows the deep bass of the radio, and the nasty words of a hateful song.It seemed like so much of modern music, a din to drive human beings mad.

The British, they always have information. They drag their damned Indian tea and their London Times with them wherever they go.

give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed. But

Ah, yes, beautiful English bones.

Rome swallowed things and made them Roman.

Elements we might call Asian or Chinese proliferate in these artifacts, and then there

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed. ? Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

Andrássy Út

What tribe on earth has not had elders? How much of our art and our knowledge comes from those who've lived into old age? You sound like Lestat when you say such things, speaking of his Savage Garden. The world has never seemed a hopelessly savage place to me.

It was what Trinity was all about: training you to be British and then insisting instead that you be Southern.

Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food--to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people's lives. Couldn't you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attitude toward food?

Is still ridiculous," Pyotr said. "Is so American, subtracting foods! Other countries, when they want healthiness they add foods in. Americans subtract them.

Why Americans always begin inch by inch with what they say?

He must have some Tartar in him, don't you think?" "I have no idea," Kate said. "Or is it 'Tatar.

She had no patience with foreign accents.

A Japanese man festooned with cameras, a nun, a young girl in braids.

Next fall I'm taking his honors course in linguistic anthropology." "You think they don't teach foreign languages in San Diego?" he asked.

The houses here had a distinctly Pennsylvanian air, Maggie thought. They were mostly tall stone rectangles, flat-faced, set close to the road, with a meager supply of narrow windows.