Quotes About Tradition

For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.

He briefly wondered why the marriage ceremony bothered to contain the wife's promise to obey her husband—he hadn't met a woman yet who followed it.

There is nothing unusual in the activities outside marriage, or otherwise, of women. It is our privilege. But men are required to be faithful. An Indian man discovered in the arms of another woman can be put to death on the order of his wife.

Surely they would divorce you for it." "No, why? It would be to lose everything for the man while his wife would lose nothing. In any case, it is not possible. Divorce is a thing of women.

harlots by the religious fathers in their black robes while the Indian men who refrain from women are called upright and extremely moral! They don't understand that a man is expected to be able to ignore the promptings of his male needs while a woman has the right to satisfy her curiosity about men, even the one she will marry, before she is wedded for life. Our marriages are much happier than those of the French.

The world is never ready for any innovation," he grumbled. "The vast majority of people stubbornly cling to the past until people possessing foresight and a sense of adventure break a trail and bring them into the future.

She smells of her cooking and the perfume Eau d'Hadrien. My mother wore it, too. She used to cook, like Lili. Our house smelled of garlic and thyme instead of sadness.

If it is true that this is the first portrait of an artist at work, it could be because she came from the northern tradition which specialized in depictions of St Luke painting the Virgin, and she had the wit to adapt this example of a working artist for herself.

My grandmother always taught me, 'If you don't have a home, family, and church, you don't have anything.'

I think what you wear on Halloween is important. It says something about you--who you are and what you want to be. There's got to be a reason so many girls go around dressed as princesses and witches.

Right." ... "No feminism at the dinner table.

Your grandfather was a piece of work," I told Xander. He picked up a fourth scone. "I agree. In his honor, I eat this scone." He did just that.

I this was what it meant to be a Hawthorne.

Everything is something in Hawthorne House.

This was what it meant to be a Hawthorne. This should probably be in a museum, but my brothers and I like to hit things with it instead.

And, as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy.

It's as if we have lamps but won't plug them in because our ancestors believed electricity was spirit-made. Having lost belief in spirits, we sit in the dark. There's no need. We have holidays and rituals, crafted like tungsten and glass for glowing. We have poems that buzz with electric charge. Let's plug them in.

Professional chefs aren't the only ones who get to wear an apron to work. There are welders and farriers and fishmongers and printers and grocery clerks and artists and florists and bakers and housekeepers and lab technicians and carpenters, to name a few who call an apron their uniform, and lucky them. How nice to be able to shift gears from leisure to work and back again with the tug of an apron string.

Aprons don't hold us back-- they take us back

When dinner was just about ready, [Mother] would go freshen up, changing clothes and putting on makeup. When one of my sisters once asked her how come she got ready and changed clothes right before dinner, Mom smiled and said, Because my husband is coming home. [Dick Amman]

Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

In the midst of these fine gentlemen with their great names and their ancient traditions of respectability, the two women sat face to face, exchanging tender glances, triumphant and supreme in the tranquil abuse of their sex, and their open contempt for the male. And the gentlemen applauded them.

Like a stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians, thinkers, or savants.