Quotes About Tradition

Would it always be like this? Endless days of needlework, painting, house chores and skills, teas, Papa and Dominic coming home? What did other people do? They married and raised children, ran houses. Of course the poor worked, and society went to parties, rode in the park or in coaches, and presumably had families as well?

Nothing was anything until someone defined it. Nothing was inevitable. Nothing was inviolate. Everything existed, perhaps, by the act of faith, and we were always in the midst of creating our world, complete with the trappings of tradition that was nothing more than an invention like all the rest.

The British, they always have information. They drag their damned Indian tea and their London Times with them wherever they go.

Ah, yes, beautiful English bones.

as the steps of the ancient always do, with

One thing we can give each other is our history.

The family was not just the family to them; it was the clan; the nation; the religion; the obsession. I

Lorraine McQueen is her name, and everyone hereabouts calls her Miss Queen or Aunt Queen.

What tribe on earth has not had elders? How much of our art and our knowledge comes from those who've lived into old age? You sound like Lestat when you say such things, speaking of his Savage Garden. The world has never seemed a hopelessly savage place to me.

It was what Trinity was all about: training you to be British and then insisting instead that you be Southern.

After all, if spinster chaperons required their own spinster chaperons there simply wouldn't be enough to go around.

Didn't anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven's sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was "cool" ("I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger," she had said), did she not realize that "cool" had been used in Abby's time, too, not to mention long before?

Ah, God, it's barbaric, however you look at it,' he told Ruth. 'What, cremation?' she asked. 'Death.

Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!

He must have some Tartar in him, don't you think?" "I have no idea," Kate said. "Or is it 'Tatar.

because a longtime family joke was how Pauline put so much stock in marking occasions with gifts. Pauline made a shooing gesture with one hand (people tended to exaggerate her character, she felt), and Karen went on. "Mom, Dad, this is from all of us. We wanted to give you something to remind you of these past thirty years." And she took the package from George

Amanda said, "Isn't it interesting: people never seem to bring liquor when somebody dies, have you noticed? Why not a case of beer? Or a bottle of really good wine? Just these everlasting casseroles, and who eats casseroles nowadays?

Founder's Chic: Our Reverence for the Founding Fathers Has Gotten out of Hand, Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2003.

Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on.

You don't need some whitefella's permission to adapt your own culture." "But what if it's not mine?" Darcy stared at her plate. "I eat meat. I don't pray. It feels weird, erasing a god and using him as a mortal.

Ireland had clung to her youth, indeed to her childhood, longer and more tenaciously than any other country in Europe, resisting Change, Alteration, Reconstruction to the very last.

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.

Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past Dried hollyhock. The objects used during the Display of Dolls. To find a piece of deep violet or grape-colored material that has been pressed between the pages of a notebook. It is a rainy day and one is feeling bored. To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers. And then one comes across the letters of a man one used to love. Last year's paper fan. A night with a clear moon.

Por lo que veo —dijo Michiko, bajando la vista hacia su plato—, en Occidente tampoco sienten mucha simpatía por los zurdos.