Quotes About Tradition

When tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a pointer to that which is beyond tradition: the sacred. Then it functions not as a prison but as a lens.

I love Thanksgiving because it's a holiday that is centered around food and family, two things that are of utmost importance to me.

Mormor did. My father had brought our frying pan from home

So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain, ... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, 'They taught us to believe in dragons.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

There were poets before Homer.

I like young people. I think it is time my country does what the Indians of Kingcome are doing. We must return to our own roots, our own safety and integrity, and I think this is the beginning to occur. Our lives depend upon it.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Here in the Black Country they call good food 'bostin' fittle'. Fittle means vittles. Good vittles, bostin' fittle. They have their own language here. It hasn't been knocked out of them yet.

Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn't offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn't eat it, although they wouldn't, but because meat doesn't produce dripping any more. The meat isn't real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it's something else.

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

They had a saying: An Arab loves in the order of: his son, his camel, and his wife - but there were times when one was allowed to take precedence over the other!

The facts of life are conservative.

The truths of the Judaic-Christian tradition, are infinitely precious, not only, as I believe, because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace, in the true meaning of the word, for which we all long. . . . There is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women in democratic societies cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves.

Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.

In Athol Fugard's play, The Island, an African eats an orange whole; at the play's opening night in London, the audience sat coolly through the nude scenes on stage, but there were gasps of horror at the sight of a man enjoying a whole unpeeled orange.

Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking today as they were in the past. Sometimes meat is added: for the early Indians that meat would often have been puppy.

My grandmothers were strong. They followed plows and bent to toil. They moved through fields sowing seed. They touched the earth and grain grew. They were full of sturdiness and singing. My grandmothers were strong. My grandmothers were full of memories Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay With veins rolling roughly over quick hands They have many clean words to say. My grandmothers were strong. Why am I not as they?

Grandmother Hannah comes to me at Pesach and when I am lighting the sabbath candles. The sweet wine in the cup has her breath.... a little winter no spring can melt.

I realized Grant would not say kaddish for her, so I did, for the next year. As I was reciting the words, which were nonsense to me, day after day, just rhythmic syllables, I began to realize I needed to learn Hebrew. It was maddening and embarrassing that I had no idea at all what I was saying every day, facing east and thinking of my mother whose face I would never see again except in dreams -- in dreams again and again.

she had ordered a turkey from the Garfinkles, who raised them.

A courteous samurai, his father said, would wash his hair before battle so if his head was taken it would smell sweet for his enemy.