Quotes About Culture

It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.

It's just a passing thing,' Vishnu had told me about his girlfriend's beliefs. 'It's like their way of assimilating into the West. It's like a social club. One more generation, it'll be over.

1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.

Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as The Gentlemen Who Like To Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythyms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with 'Ass-N-Titties' by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre

She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.

We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.

Cereal is food, sort of. It tastes grainy, easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness. It tastes the way America feels.

There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction.

I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. Why was I so scared of everything? I ask my mother nearly forty years later. Because you were born a Jewish person, she says.

Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.

It's so difficult to go to a strange town, even in America. I went to Dayton once, when I was in a basketball camp...

Needless to say, she grew up with the parents Senderovsky could only dream of, the kind that did not watch the state television of their adopted land with its screaming chyrons and grim blond hosts and unimaginative, murderous lies. Masha loved her parents, loved the language of her parents, and wanted Natasha to know the "gift" of her country's culture. But Senderovsky, despite his Petrogradsky affectations, was still the man from Elektrosila.

You have to realize that, compared with the Korean brand of Confucianism, Christianity is a walk in the park. Compared with what came before, Protestantism is almost a freaking liberation theology.

What's that Russian saying about incompetent people trying to pass the blame?" Senderovsky laughed. " 'A bad dancer is bothered by his balls.

cheder, their eyes still glossy with scripture now

Why do you know so much old rap? Because I'm white.

How hard was it to be happy in this fucking country?

It was clear to him, suddenly, that she was educated in an international school, and Luis probably went to a prep school in the States. Old money. Laughing at new money.

I wanted to save them from themselves, from the idiotic consumer culture that was bleeding them softly. I

If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.

Jack [Kerouac] was, in a sense, a twentieth-century American mythographer. And that's why maybe those novels will stand up, because they will be one of the best statements of the myth of the twentieth century.

the unconscious cannot be civilized.

None will ever be true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows...

Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, "Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.