Quotes About Tradition

She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we'd never seen.

We should keep the dead before our eyes, and honor them as though still living

A man without a mustache is a man without a soul.

The Jitong chapter of the Book of Rites says, "There are three ways of caring for one's parents: when they are alive, look after them; when they are deceased, tend to the death rites; when the death rites have been completed, offer them sacrifice.

Our own thesis was sketched in the Introduction: the classical written Chinese language—the language in which the Analects was composed—is unique, being sharply distinct not only from all non-Sinitic languages but from spoken Chinese as well (ancient and modern), and that the differences between the two Chinese languages are of greater linguistic and philosophical significance than has been generally noticed.

Grandmother. Agnes had not said anything like "grandmother." The word hadn't even existed until the eighteenth century

It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight...

The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.

Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.

They produced tobacco and papers and passed them to him not ceremoniously but with that deprecatory gesture of humility which country people confer in a look, a lift of the hand.

These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldnt even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you'd of told em it was their own grandchildren?

Out of their anterior lives they had arrived at the same understanding as their fathers before them. That movement itself is a form of property.

Was that my work? I've no such talent. I cant answer your questions. The tradition of trolls or demons standing sentinel against inquiry must be as old as language. Still

I was a born classicist and my heroes were never saints but killers.

The house was built in 1872. Seventy-seven years later his grandfather was the first to die in it. What others had lain in state in that hallway had been carried there on a gate or wrapped in a wagonsheet or delivered crated up in a raw pineboard box with a teamster standing at the door with a bill of lading. The ones that came at all. For the most part they were dead by rumor. A yellowed scrap of newsprint. A letter. A telegram.

Suttree reached across the little space and took his uncle's willowing hands and composed them. I dont blame you, he said. I just want to tell you how some people are. I know how people are. I should know. Why should you? You think my father and his kind are a race apart. You can laugh at their pretensions, but you never question their right to the way of life they maintain.

Most people don't ever see anyone die. It used to be if you grew up in a family you saw everybody die. They died in their bed at home with everyone gathered around. Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.

Those notions of freedom, courage and joy would probably be the three fundamental motifs in my work, and I think that they are probably best enacted in the best of the black musical tradition.

A wedding, a daughter in payment, and a white dress to hide all the bloody battlefields.

Selbst meine Gro?mutter muss das Goldene Garn respektieren. Aber sie wollte sein Kleid so sehr.

Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us.

It's only pre-marital sex if you plan on getting married.

Mary and Joseph, then, would have been the guests of family or friends, but their home would have been so overcrowded that the baby was placed in a feeding trough."36 One apocryphal tradition even speaks of Jesus being born in a cave (Protevangelium of James 18-19).

It was expected that men would marry, and it was assumed something was wrong if they didn't. Later rabbis often quoted the saying, "He who has no wife dwells without good, without help, without joy, without blessing, and without atonement" (Gen. Rab. 17.2)!