Quotes About Tradition

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit

I don't know what this great weight of hair is for. Our Lady would hardly approve it," she said as she passed on to the next girl.

a mammy's boy who never married and who keeps a shotgun in case of trespassers, but loves his trees, loves his woodland, and honors a covenant set down by his great-uncle, which was that no tree should ever be wantonly cut down.

Marriage between cousins was common in the planter families—rather, it was expected.

The names of families are the front doors of history.

Family memory flows more completely through women. It is the women who learn much of the lore and who convey it to the young. Men forget the past in all its fleshiness and select which parts best fit into their lives.

June, Nebraska

The Bootmakers of Toronto, copyright © 2006 by Edward D. Hoch.

According to their national custom, the Barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors.

A Locrian who proposed any new law stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.

But my mother wanted her children to be educated by nuns and priests all dressed in black, the way it had been done down through the generations with her people. Taught by people who had a firm grasp of how big and awful the world could be.

All through her childhood, Sarah had known what food she would eat. Friday was chicken. Wednesday lamb chops. That was the meat. Tuesdays meant fish, and Thursdays egg salad and potato latkes. Only Monday was unpredictable.

se describen. Al seguir la historia de estas familias

Puesto que la familia había vivido siempre junto al cartel del Toro, a menudo se los conocía simplemente como la familia Bull.

Iglesia anglicana.

observe everything . . . ?trust nobody . . . ?despise your mother . . . ?effort is vulgar . . . ?things were better in the eighteenth century.

Nevertheless, she treasured the idea that the Fauberts were connected to the earth in some wholesome way that the rest of us had forgotten.

To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.

Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgements are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

For my wife, Mozelle, who, honeysuckle-fairytale downhome girl that she is, was, as the old folks used to say, born knowing.

Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.