Quotes About Ritual

In Welsh tradition, a plate was put on the coffin with bread and salt, and a local professional sin eater arrived to eat the salt.

I never knew. I never knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I'd purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.

As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate.

The two of them might have met on that high place deliberately for public celebration of some rite or sacrifice. At first neither said a word. That seemed an age. At last Dr Trelawney took the initiative. Raising his right arm slightly, he spoke in a low clear voice, almost in the accents of one whose very perfect enunciation indicates that English is not his native tongue.

Weddings are notoriously depressing affairs.

95% of everything you do is the result of habit.

Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. It isn't fair, she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

we eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow an then we eat it.

especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since

He nodded. 'We can circumcise a hundred boys an hour.

I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.

I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.

Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the Evening Advocate. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions.

I know that Goddess ritual, insofar as it generates reverence for and celebrates that which is female, which is us, is fiercely empowering, and that her image in our minds—images of ourselves as deity—is necessary as a blueprint for a more authoritative mode of being in the world. The Goddess is a metaphor for our own and all women's creative, healing, transformative powers, a representation of our inner selves.

Reserved for the priest of Dionysus

OEDIPUS: If all such violence goes with honor now Why join the sacred dance.

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

I had a very simple life growing up in the farm country outside of Perugia, and biscotti and warm milk with a tiny bit of coffee were a big part of my morning ritual before walking to school.

I've always thought 'Today' is an iconic staple of morning life.

Coffee has always been a significant part of my life. For me, it's a chance to start my day and gather my thoughts - it's fuel for my creative process.

This is the story everywhere in the wider Muslim world. Students go to the Middle East on generous scholarships and study Salafi or Wahhabi doctrine, and they learn there that jabbering on at top volume about martyrs and violent jihad is a highly effective way of whipping up religious fervor. In the home country, hardline religious schools spring up, like the one I visited in Thailand, and spread their obsession with ritual, code, dress, and other apparent trivia.