Quotes About Tradition

You cannot help it, chérie." Mirabelle's small greenish eyes fixed themselves kindly on Elizabeth. She nodded and shrugged. "You cannot help acting from what you were taught in childhood, even though you don't want to. Above all this is true for a woman.

Food, as one academic has noted, defined how Russians endured the present, imagined the future, and connected to their past.

Mom and I argued about every other dish on the menu. But on this we agreed: without kulebiaka, there could be no proper Silver Age Moscow repast.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt the shtetl nipping at my heels.

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment.

But mostly I learned to cook from my mother. There weren't any blintz-style lessons. I absorbed her preferences and prejudices over the years the way that I absorbed her gestures and her speech pattern, until ultimately my cooking tastes slightly but unmistakably like hers.

95% of everything you do is the result of habit.

Good art cannot be defined. There is only great art that creates new ideas and then there are imitations of varying degrees. There is no best way or only way. We learn from the past, in order to understand the present. The past is our foundation, the springboard into the future. Tradition and past ideas are important bases to begin with, but can be traps if misunderstood.

Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.

In these latter days, knighthood was an honor few Englishmen escaped.

Read it up – you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.

Montrose tasted the coffee. No bitterness, a blend of several beans--some of which had been grown precisely the same way for over a thousand years--and just the right temperature. If pressed, he could name the chemical makeup of the coffee and the reaction of the human body to the brew. Yet there was still an almost mystical sense of well-being that few things imparted just by smell, taste, and warmth, and coffee was one.

It's like this, when you live in a place you've always lived in, where your family has always lived. You get to see things not only in space but in time too.

Ah, yes, tea. Our family's first line of defense when meeting a disaster.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.

It isn't fair, it isn't right, Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. It isn't fair, she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

whatever planned to be colorful lost its heart quickly in the village.

The sun is over the yardarm

especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since

Todas las mujeres de la familia Blackwood habían recogido la comida que daba la tierra y la habían conservado, y los tarros de intensos colores con embutidos y verduras y mermeladas granate, ámbar y verde oscuro estaban uno al lado de los otros y allí se quedarían para siempre, como un poema compuesto por las mujeres de la familia Blackwood.

Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world.

I don't stay after I set out dinner," Mrs. Dudley went on. "Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes.