Ritual Quotes - Page 13

• I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches? The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice... Your children are acting out Satanic rituals and participating in it, and don't even realize it.

  Pat Robertson

  Children, Halloween, Sacrifice

  "The 700 Club". TV Series, www.imdb.com.

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• People are losing jobs, people need to be entertained, and I want to make movies that parents and children can look forward to seeing, that can become a kind of family ritual.

  Nicolas Cage

  Jobs, Children, People

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• No other work has more often been blamed for more heinous crimes by the perpetrators of such crimes. The Bible has been named as the instigating or justifying factor for many individual and mass crimes, ranging from the religious wars, inquisitions, witch burnings, and pogroms of earlier eras to systematic child abuse and ritual murders today.

  Nadine Strossen

  Religious, Children, War

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• Jewish cantors employ a peculiar art and method of singing in their delivery. They are unexcelled in the art of covering the voice, picking up a new key, in the treatment of the ritual chant, and overcoming vocal difficulties that lie in the words rather than in the music.

  Enrico Caruso

  Art, Lying, Keys

  Enrico Caruso, Andrew Farkas (1997). “Enrico Caruso: My Father and My Family”, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• I don't like to say that my kitchen is a religious place, but I would say that if I were a voodoo priestess, I would conduct my rituals there.

  Pearl Bailey

  Religious, Food, Cooking

  Pearl Bailey (1973). “Pearl's Kitchen: An Extraordinary Cookbook”, Harcourt

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• These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.

  Joan D. Vinge

  Eye, Age, Comfort

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• The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

  Jonathan Haidt

  Atheist, Practice, Faces

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• Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

  William Gaddis

  Heart, Drawing, Hands

  William Gaddis (1955). “The Recognitions: A Novel”

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• Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy?

  Elaine Pagels

  Christian, Religious, Issues

  Elaine Pagels (2004). “The Gnostic Gospels”, p.199, Random House

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• I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Writing, Special, Trying

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• Little wonder that we. . .find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Space, Littles

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• Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Father, People, Grandparent

  "The Namesake". Book by Jhumpa Lahiri, 2003.

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• Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

  Alice Munro

  Children, Awkward, Only Child

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• In Japan, I took part in a tea ceremony. You go into a small room, tea is served, and that's it really, except that everything is done with so much ritual and ceremony that a banal daily event is transformed into a moment of communion with the universe.

  Okakura Kakuzo

  Japan, Small Rooms, Perfection

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• The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.

  Dallas Willard

  Prayer, Ideas, Mind

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• Every day my mother had tea. My dad has his ritual cigar. They had their evening cocktail. Those rituals were done nicely, with flair and feeling.

  John Travolta

  Mother, Dad, Feelings

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• A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.

  Marina Warner

  Heart, Journey, Humanity

  Marina Warner (2001). “The Leto bundle”, Vintage

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• Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Males, Western Culture

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos-a cult of two with fallible gods.

  Diane Ackerman

  Inspirational, Couple, Jigsaw Puzzles

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Terrorism drives out all normal human activity before it, defining life in its own sick terms, if it can. So, a baseball game on a sultry Texas night before a huge crowd, with everyone feeling perfectly safe, is exactly what terrorists hate. Which is why it is so important to resume such athletic rituals - which symbolize stability, confidence and order - as soon as is reasonably possible.

  Thomas Boswell

  Sports, Baseball, Hate

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• Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Glasses, Meals, Aftermath

  Jhumpa Lahiri (2004). “The Namesake: A Novel”, p.134, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Football is the last sacred ritual of our time.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Football, Sacred, Lasts

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• The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

  Bell Hooks

  Self Esteem, Successful, Men

  bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• Santa Claus has nothing to do with it," the latke said. "Christmas and Hanukah are completely different things." "But different things can often blend together," said the pine tree. "Let me tell you a funny story about pagan rituals.

  Daniel Handler

  Tree, Together, Different

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• Alice doesn't seem to mind because she's laughing too, and biting her lip, all doe-eyed, and tossing her freshly washed hair, and Norton tosses his lovely, glossy hair back, and she tosses her hair in return, and he tosses his, and she tosses hers, and it;s like some mating ritual on a wildlife program.

  David Nicholls

  Hair, Laughing, Lovely

  David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.363, Villard

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