Quotes About Culture

Happiness, as a word, has become sort of equated with these smiling images on television, selling some nice cream or food product or something. It's seen a bit as being a stupid consumer.

I know now that I began writing in a country where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary - that much the culture conceded - but they were oil and water and could not be mixed.

In our house we say 'adolescence' is a western word. We don't believe in it.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

Two of the saddest words in the English language are, 'What party?' And L.A. is the 'What party?' capital of the world.

I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.

Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

I want my words to survive translation.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

I am happy that I could contribute my bit and enable the use of colloquial Telugu words in mainstream films and literature.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

Rob Thomas, the Action Bronson and the Riff Raff. Both the musicians, they know who I am and they know I come from oldest country in the world and if I want my words like the music. I forever love them like the Frank Sinatra.

In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men living under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by their past.

What does 'home' really mean? Is it merely geography, where you were born? Could it include straddling two continents and cultures? Or perhaps it's a place with a spiritual magnetism - a feeling toward a culture or people - that's tough to put into words?

English is full of Scandinavian words. Margate, Ramsgate, Billingsgate, any town with a 'gate' on it takes their suffix from the Danish word 'gade' which simply means 'street.'

My grandmother was whip smart as well as an incredible athlete. She played tennis in her sari, cheered on the Indian team in cricket matches, and tried to convince us that her made-up words were real so she could win a Scrabble game.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.

I always felt really alone because no one wanted to talk about the things that I enjoyed, and that was really rap music and hip-hop as a culture. You know, having the shoes, using the words, buying the magazines, seeing the videos. And I had nobody to share it with, so I feel like I lived a lot online.

In Bulgaria, they use the Cyrillic alphabet, which is completely different from ours. You can't sound the words out, so you can't read street signs or packages in the grocery store! You have to rely on pictures and guesses.

I had no words for these feelings. And then people started using the word Ms. Suddenly, there was this handle with which I could identify myself and understand why I felt so out of whack with the culture around me.