Quotes About Tradition

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock

Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father's plantation

Before marriage, young girls must be, above all other things, sweet, gentle, beautiful and ornamental, but, after marriage, they were expected to manage households that numbered a hundred people or more, white and black, and they were trained with that in view.

He reaches over a goat that's come between us and grabs my hand. Don't let go! he orders. Harper's hand is dry and soothing, while mine is sweaty with fear. We've never held hands before. I think about what it means in the village when boys and girls only a few years older then Harper and me wander around with their hands clasped together. They're always peering dreamily into each other's eyes, sneaking sky kisses...and soon after, there's a wedding.

Je ne luttais plus contre les coutumes à la fois vénérables et vaines ; tout ce qui met en lumière l'effort de l'homme, ne fût-ce que pour la durée d'un jour, me semblait salutaire en présence d'un monde si prompt à l'oubli.

Pero los judíos, además, son conocidos por la forma en que estimulan los logros intelectuales en sus hijos.

We don't have anything like that here. War masks and so on.

She thought, if we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table and me, I don't know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we're here he'll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones.

from HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson: There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number and all the same.

Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.

Che cosa ho da lasciarti se non le rovine di un antico coraggio, e la tradizione di antiche prodezze e speranze? Ebbene, come ho già detto, ormai è tutto quanto ridotto a un tizzone, e sicuramente un giorno il Signore vi aliterà sopra facendolo fiammeggiare di nuovo.

So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensationalism.

So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensational.

In those days there was a lot of pride involved in the way a woman's wash looked, especially the white things.

me! I'll just say—what am I going to say? The house will smell like

A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.

Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

Aarne-Thompson-Uther index

Michael could never remember his father ever having uttered a word about death, as if the Don respected death too much to philosophize about it.

In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.

For the Sicilian believes that vengeance is the only true justice, and that it is always merciless.

Don Croce immediately led him into the garden, for like all Sicilians he ate his meals out of doors when he could.

At one of these shrines, Michael saw a woman on her knees praying, her husband sitting in their donkey-drawn cart guzzling a bottle of wine. The donkey's head dropped like a martyr's.

Any profession was worthy of respect to men who for centuries earned bread by the sweat of their brows.