Quotes About Tradition

Shh, let me finish," Mama said, and banged her elbow into my ribs. "Remember, now. Neither small nor tight. A roomy waist and a pleat. For God's sake, a pleat.

Do you know what it's like to marry off a daughter? You don't? Then you're better off! I know very well what it's like, even though it was someone else's daughter.

Come to think of it—what are we going to do with our old cantor? We just got a new one, you know. We needed him like a hole in the head.

we'll start right in on the knishes, or the kreplach, or the knaidlach, or the varnishkes, or the pirogen, or the blintzes.

Once the custom was for a bankrupt to leave town, but that's no longer in vogue. It's not even called bankruptcy any more. The expression is, "I'm in arrears." In plain language that means, "Kiss my rear.

licked his lips like a cat about to get a taste of the Pesach goosefat.

We helped ourselves to a drop of vishniak, had some more marmalade, and made small talk. What about? Don't ask me.

As my mother, God bless her, would say, "Bring the bread and I'll find the cutting knife …

Once, matches were made behind a child's back; you came home from shaking hands with your in-laws, you wished the bride or groom a mazel tov, and that was that.

It's an old Jewish custom to pick up and go elsewhere at the first mention of a pogrom.

When the cow goes to pasture," says my mother, "it forgets to say good-bye.

It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true 'female' art. For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in making - and certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could discover what it was.

Old money's motto was, If you have it, hide it. New money's motto was, If you have it, flaunt it.

Afterward they would go to the guild hall, which stood near Hofvin Hospice; there they would drink for five days.

Paul told him everything about quilting, things he would never remember, but he savored each word as if they were lost verses of Scripture.

Philosophers have a long tradition of marrying stupid women, from Socrates on. They think it clever.

Scotland's all heather and haggis and men in skirts.

But we have to try the local food. It's a window into the culture. We learn so much about a people from what and how they eat. I actually quite enjoy the strange food. It's never too awful and it gifts a good tale.

He nodded. 'We can circumcise a hundred boys an hour.

Their lesson was simple: our lives are nothing without our past, without our history, without our culture, without our culture and old stones. It all matters, because it gives meaning.

a wonderful young honey-voiced woman called Batsola Andrianjaka, who explained why Madagascans do not fear death the way we do in the West. 'This is a country where death is more important than life,' she had told me. 'Death is the chance for a humble human to become a powerful ancestor, someone respected and consulted by the living.

The avant-garde is now an arrière-garde.

Chinese wrote messages on fine silk, which was then scrunched into a tiny ball and covered in wax. The messenger would then swallow the ball of wax.

Perhaps we should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that "In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.