Quotes About Tradition

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses around a bright red cave), and addressed themselves the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.

Here have lived for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths have left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing have left this. -Viginia Woolf

We think back through our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women.

and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer

What passes for cookery in England is an abomination.

women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers – a woman's always proud of her father.

Chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons.

and thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow. No sentence had been shaped, by long labor, to express the experience of women.

Y denota estrechez de miras por parte de sus semejantes más privilegiados el decir que deberían limitarse a hacer postres y hacer calcetines, a tocar el piano y bordar bolsos. Es necio condenarlas o burlarse de ellas cuando tratan de hacer algo más o aprender más cosas de las que la costumbre ha declarado necesarias para su sexo.

Bond Street la fascinaba; Bond Street muy de mañana en plena temporada; sus banderas ondeando; sus tiendas; sin excesos; sin resplandor; un rollo de tweed en la tienda donde su padre se había comprado los trajes durante cincuenta años; unas cuantas perlas; el salmón encima de un taco de hielo.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine.

A környezetváltozás olyan hagyományos téveszme, melybe tönkrement szerelemek és tüdÅ'k vetik bizalmukat.

The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.

That's what the holidays are for - for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?

I think the institution of marriage is a great idea, but for me it's just an idea.

Another idiotic tradition, Regina thought. To eat and drink in memory of the departed. There was something gross about it. As if they were taunting the dead person. Hey, you're dead and gone, but life goes on, and look how well we're all eating.

I want to be firm that the idea of the traditional itself is highly constructed and highly ideological. This version is one among many. There is no original, only endless multiple trails that point into the past. We can never grasp that past. These stories are always about the present.

Why does everybody stand up and sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when they're already there?