Quotes About Customs

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

I mean the truth is, I've always been interested in the whole setup of the old world.

In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.

Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.

I am so romantic about Gypsies. They're not allowed to do anything until they get married. So they all get married really young, at sixteen.

Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.

Nothing, however, bemused the Indians more than the European habit of blowing their noses into a fine handkerchief, folding it carefully, and placing it back in their pockets as if it were a treasured memento.

Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.

The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn't they just?) It's sgriob.

and I still have to quell an impulse to go up to strangers in pubs and restaurants and say, "Excuse me, can I give you a tip that'll help stop those peas bouncing all over the table?" Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun

The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye

when a person says to you, "How do you do?" he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, "How do I do what?" The complexities of the English language are

Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.

In Anglo-Saxon times, according to Crippen, it was customary for someone offering a drink to say, "Wassail!" and for the recipient to respond "Drinkhail!" and for the participants to repeat the exercise until comfortably horizontal.

Where the British will say howjado for "how do you do," an American will say jeetjet for "have you taken sustenance recently?" and lesskweet for "in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment.

Goossens, the man who started it all, likewise failed to see his dream realized. In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life's small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.

the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don't ask me why).

In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life's small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.

The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice.

I spiral back to me, sitting here, swimming, drowning, sick with longing. I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disasterous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.

Armand was just dumbfounded by the almost universal habit in U.S. academic circles of signing exchanges with "Best." "Who is best?" he asked us. "Why are they best?")

The idea that medieval people rarely washed is a nineteenth-century fallacy. Every courtesy book stressed the need to wash one's hands and face daily and it was also customary to wash the hands before eating: guests might be offered water scented with garden herbs or flowers or even, in the wealthiest households, with perfume imported from the east.

Messieurs les douaniers, assez de conneries, ouvrez d'une bonne fois le colis, nom de Dieu, merde alors

the method of drinking tea at this stage was primitive in the extreme. The leaves were steamed, crushed in a mortar, made into a cake, and boiled together with rice, ginger, salt, orange peel, spices, milk, and sometimes with onions!