Culture Quotes - Page 38

• I think London is made up of tiny little pockets and villages, and lots of little sub-cultures. So, especially for an actor, it's a brilliant place to live because you've got inspiration all the time, wherever you are. You can turn a corner and you'll be in mansion houses with beautiful gardens and Ferraris, and you'll turn back on yourself and it'll be ghetto land. But I think that's brilliant.

  Scarlett Alice Johnson

  Beautiful, Inspiration, Ghetto

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Being hapa, or more specifically, half-Japanese half-Euro mutt (English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, French, Welsh, German. . .in case you were wondering), has definitely helped shape who I am. It's very cool to get to identify and learn about all these unique cultures and I think it's helped put the world in perspective.

  Kina Grannis

  Unique, Thinking, Who I Am

  "Rising Star: Kina Grannis". Interview, www.seventeen.com. July 14, 2010.

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• Since I don't feel like I belong solely to any one of them I find that it makes me even more interested and open to other cultures as well. It's also fun looking ethnically ambiguous because no one can quite put a finger on what I am and it's very entertaining to me!

  Kina Grannis

  Fun, Other Cultures, Fingers

  "Rising Star: Kina Grannis". Interview, www.seventeen.com. July 14, 2010.

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• I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page.

  Kiese Laymon

  Real, Book, Inspiration

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry.

  Gregory Orr

  Song, Emo, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

  Jess Row

  People, Black, Difficult

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

  Jess Row

  Art, Impact, Appreciate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

  Jess Row

  Steps

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

  Jess Row

  Attitude, Men, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Nostalgia for people, cultures, everything. There's an ability to use these marks to note things that are erased, deleted. Traces are a species of history, of evidence. It's a way for the way the narrator to construct a semblance of self, even though all of this creates a deception, a way to think of one's traces as a real way to define oneself. The trace is fallible, impermanent. It's one of the motives I had in mind throughout the text.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Real, Thinking, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

  Jess Row

  Men, Position Of Power, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

  Jess Row

  Memories, Squares, Government

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Rooms, Fierce, Bigs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.

  Damian Barr

  Writing, Mean, Challenges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Scotland has always been independent. We have our own legal system, our own culture; I don't see the issue. We are different and I think we should celebrate those differences within the union. I can see what would be lost, but don't necessarily see what would be gained by breaking away. What does upset me is that I can't vote in Scotland.

  Damian Barr

  Independent, Thinking, Scotland

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's been a struggling school for many, many years, and [that's] not surprising since it's serving some of the most disadvantaged kids in the city. It wasn't the only one by any means, but it was among those. It shows that things like good, steady, stable leadership makes a huge difference; focusing on the culture of the schools as a place where kids feel supported and want to be; supporting the teachers, so they want to stay and work hard.

  Pedro Noguera

  Teacher, Struggle, Mean

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• You don't see a positive culture, stability among teachers, or leadership. We don't focus enough in our policies on creating conditions to educating kids with the greatest needs. There is no state that does that.

  Pedro Noguera

  Teacher, Kids, Creating

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• All kids are different, even when they come from you and theoretically have the same culture. Some of my kids had been more outgoing and had an easy time at school. Others were more shy and needed more support. As a parent you are very aware of these differences and are not treating them all the same, given who they are as people.

  Pedro Noguera

  School, Kids, Differences

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• There was not an awareness of pop culture in the household. There was a lot of respect for working hard, and for intellectual and professional achievement.

  Sheila Heti

  Achievement, Intellectual, Awareness

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these people." I might argue with them and I think that some of them might have misconceptions - that they might be infected by the intellectual laziness that is the foundation of American popular culture, and of capitalism, if you wish. But part of my job as a teacher is to work with that - against that.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Teacher, Jobs, Stupid

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture's violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically tortures and punishes her guardian rapist, or picks up a gun and fights back in ways that make her not pretty, or aggressively rejects her role as the object of desire, or even when she waddles off into the woods to squat and have a baby without the safety and expertise of hospitals and doctors, these are the kinds of violences and stories we can learn from.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Baby, Character, Fighting

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Growing Up, Book, Native American

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In the sense that Watchmen references movies, comic books, pop culture in general. It knows it's a movie. I really do like movies that ride that fine line, the razor's edge between parody and supporting the fake movie part of the movie.

  Zack Snyder

  Book, Fake, Razors

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I appear topless as a way of holding on to my Nilotic culture, and I also do it to taunt those Africans who are ashamed of our original cultural beliefs.

  Kola Boof

  Way, Belief, Holding On

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• I don't see a huge difference between the African condition and the black American condition. The only real difference is that black Americans live in the richest country on Earth surrounded by a majority white population and are almost entirely disconnected from their original culture and their God-given identity.

  Kola Boof

  Country, Real, White

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