Quotes About Tradition

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality. (198)

I stood in the doorway of one room, lost in a meditation of the house's recurring habits. People had made love here, sweated through pregnancy, gave birth, looked after children, became ill, died, the fire always burning in the kitchen. In this room, the next generation had done the same, the fire still burning. And the next generation, for thousand years.

Or, said another way, Native Americans, unlike the people of more modern cultures, don't believe talking is the same thing as thinking.

Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day. It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken.

For me starting the day without a pot of tea would be a day forever out of kilter.

I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament and that sacrament should extend... to that legal entity of a union between what traditionally in our Western values has been defined as between a man and a woman.

Women priests. Great, great. Now there's priests of both sexes I don't listen to.

I was over in Australia during Easter, which was really interesting. You know, they celebrate Easter the exact same way we do, commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus by telling our children that a giant bunny rabbit … left chocolate eggs in the night. Now … I wonder why we're fucked up as a race. I've read the Bible. I can't find the word "bunny" or "chocolate" anywhere in the fucking book.

One of the great rules of life is that we all establish 'policies', although we call them habits or preferences or beliefs or techniques, which are useful to us, but which we continue to use after the reason for them has evaporated. We have a hard time seeing things as they are because we can never get what they were out of our heads.

Don't be so sure that your version of reality is better because it's newer.

They're good at this. Don't be so sure that your version of reality is better because it's newer.

Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world. You meet people at festivals and renew acquaintances year after year.

the ancient Church of St Mary Axe. The church was originally called St Mary, St Ursula and her 11,000 Virgins, a reference to an entourage including St Ursula and her handmaidens who were beheaded with axes in 451 AD. Some thought the church itself was that old; others thought it was built a few hundred years later.

My father asserted that there was no better place to bring up a family than in a rural environment.... There's something about getting up at 5 a.m., feeding the stock and chickens, and milking a couple of cows before breakfast that gives you a lifelong respect for the price of butter and eggs.

Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn't changed

That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on a ball.

Come on, Forney.' Novalee, it's a parasite.' But it's a tradition.' It's a parasite! And you expect people to stand under it and kiss?' Yes! it's what people do with mistletoe.

Home gives you something no other place can...your history...home is where your history begins.

The truth about the Costa del Sol is that what endures, what is worthwhile, is what is Spanish.

The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation's interests and enforcing its laws - all of them, not just selective ones - in a manner worthy of the department's name.

In their day, no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it. George Washington was asked to serve. Decades later, his successors were also expected to sit by the phone.

I was raised in a Catholic school, and I would always go to church on Sunday, and I would hear the same music over and over and over and over again, same gospels, hymns, everything.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.