Quotes About Tradition

Our stories must be passed to our sons and daughters, for with but one generation, history and truth are lost forever.

On a small planet where minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year, where tradition marches on with a deafening orderly beat-sometimes the order is disturbed by a dreamer, and artist, a scribbler-sometimes the beat is changed by one person at a time.

A long, scandalous kiss. I felt the colour rush through my cheeks. If this was the custom, I liked it.

One of the first things which Comfort remembered being told was that she had been named for her Aunt Comfort, who had given her a gold ring and a gold dollar for her name. Comfort could not understand why. It always seemed to her that her aunt, and not she, had given the name, and that she should have given the ring and the dollar; but that was what her mother had told her. "Your Aunt Comfort gave you this beautiful gold ring and this gold dollar for your name," said she.

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

Europeans condemned Chinese foot binding, but any society that had invented the corset had a lot to answer for.

Heresy is just philosophy that the establishment doesn't approve of

Taboo comes from a Polynesian word that means "sacred or holy" rather than simply "prohibited.

Never, ever ask a former clergyman to say the blessing over a holiday dinner. Not if you like your dinner warm, anyway.

I smoothed my grandmother's starched white damask cloth over the battered pine harvest table in the dining room, and with my fingertips, traced the tiny patches where she'd so painstakingly mended it. If I looked closely, and I did, I could see the faintest ghost outlines of stains from family dinners long ago.

The only place where housework comes before needlework is in the dictionary.

My Great Grandmother Morrison fixed a book-rest to her spinning wheel so that she could read while she was spinning, or so the story goes. And one Saturday evening she became so absorbed in her book that when she looked up she found that it was half-past midnight and she had spun for half an hour on the Sabbath Day. Back then, that counted as a major sin.

Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.

For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.

Homily would renew it at intervals when it became available upstairs, but since Aunt Sophy

Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.

They were proud of their nationality, which had existed nearly as long as from Columbus to our own day. They gloried in their splendid background of great deeds and their long line of heroes reaching back to Rurik.

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

Liquor for men and tears for women," he would say. "What would we do without them?

It is sad, is it not, that no one today displays an interest in the art of shrunken heads. Men, women, and children walk on the streets, they cross fields and enter forests, they run along the edges of oceans, but none of them, to the best of my knowledge, are thinking about shrunken heads.

I know this is kind of corny, but we thought about renewing our vows again because I think my mom would really love it if we did that in Arkansas, where I came from.

People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.

It's not the impression you make, it's the impression you leave. -A Tennessee woman remembering her Old Southern grandmother

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.