Quotes About Rituals

Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying.

Shame cultures therefore do not provide for confessions, even to the gods. They have ceremonies for good luck rather than for expiation.

I grew up kissing books and bread

a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood.

Religion is a term like sports ... To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

Sports is, somehow, a religion.

Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.

You have to know your triggers for stress and then have rituals for combating them.

Indeed, to sacrifice seems as natural to man as to pray; the one indicates what he feels about himself, the other what he feels about God. The one means a felt need of propitiation, the other a felt sense of dependence.

All the same, there were some things they needed to learn. Do not drink milk after a thunderstorm, for it will certainly be sour. Always leave out seed for the birds when the first snow falls. Wash your hair with rosemary. Drink lavender tea when you cannot sleep. Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.

We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world... When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy wall upon instructions of the minim offer not solace and all entreaties to the priests for guidance fail, when the rituals they offer bring no comfort and no consolation, they come to us.

all the same, there were some things they needed to learn: do not drink milk after a thunderstorm, for it will certainly be sour. always leave out seeds for the birds when the first snow falls. wash your hair with rosemary. drink lavender tea when you cannot sleep. know that the only remedy for love is to love more.

Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my

Wayne was certain dogs were as superstitious as humans. More, maybe.

What do we have in life, really? If we're lucky we get to a certain age, and we have each other. We have the food we like. We have our crazy little rituals. And we have each other.

Funerals are important rituals. They don't just recognize that a life has ended; they recognize that a life was lived.

Most secret societies—at least those you can read about in books or on the Internet—are collegiate. Or adult... They are like fraternities, only they don't have houses or public identities. In colleges, their members are usually local, not national, but the adult ones tend to be more serious and on a larger scale. We don't actually know what they do. Because they're secret.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt,

It is always unsafe to detach a custom from its hold on past events, treating it as an isolated fact to be simply disposed of by some plausible explanation.

Bring no more vain oblations.

Homecoming means tradition.