traditions Quotes

“Islamabad was totally different from Swat. It was as different for us as Islamabad is to New York. Shiza introduced us to women who were lawyers and doctors and also activists, which showed us that women could do important jobs yet still keep their culture and traditions. We saw women in the streets without purdah, their heads completely uncovered. I stopped wearing my shawl over my head in some of the meetings, thinking I had become a modern girl.”

“But merely being tradition does not make something worthy, Kadash. We can’t just assume that because something is old it is right.”

“Not the blood, sir. But all of a man’s water, ultimately, belongs to his people—to his tribe. It’s a necessity when you live near the Great Flat. All water’s precious there, and the human body is composed of some seventy percent water by weight. A dead man, surely, no longer requires that water”

“Sir, I honor and respect the personal dignity of any man who respects my dignity. I am indeed indebted to you. And I always pay my debts. If it is your custom that this knife remain sheathed here, then it is so ordered—by me. And if there is any other way we may honor the man who died in our service, you have but to name it.”

“We have come to realize in modern times that the ‘melting pot’ need not mean the end of particular ethnic identities or traditions.”

“Having spoken plainly so far, Okoye said the next half a dozen sentences in proverbs. Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally.”

“These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me.”

″‘With all your customs,’ Eragon risked saying, ‘it seems as though you’ve only made it easier to offend people.‘”

“Geisha never marry. Or at least those who do no longer continue as geisha.”

“Do as you’re told; don’t be too much trouble; and you might begin learning the arts of a geisha two or three months from now.”

“Beginning my training meant going to a school in another section of Gion to take lessons in things like music, dance, and tea ceremony. ”

″ So much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded. ”

“No one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. ”

“Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon. ”

Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold.

″‘This house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill. So you can never get ahead. You are always rolling backward.‘”

“But even if I had known I was getting such a bad husband, I had no choice, now or later. That was how backward families in the country were. We were always the last to give up stupid old-fashioned customs. In other cities already, a man could choose his own wife, with his parents’ permission of course. But we were cut off from this type of new thought. You never heard if ideas were better in another city, only if they were worse.”

“We rode here in their minds, and we took root.”

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”

“In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.”

You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions.

“I’ve been thinking . . . all this time, while I was sitting in my chair. Those white doctors haven’t helped you at all. Maybe we had better send for someone else.”

“A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars.”

“If a person wanted to get to the moon, there was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions—exactly which way to go and what to do to get there; it depended on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone.”

“The girls put their names in a bag and each guy pulls out a name. The guy who picks the blank is the emcee. He takes the girls out into the forest, hides them, and ties them to a chair. Their eyes and mouths are covered. The guys then have to go out and find their partner, untie her, and carry her back to the bus. The last couple back loses the Game, and they must face the consequences.”

“A stone had been dropped into the well, the well was my youthful soul. And for a very long time this matter of Cain, the fratricide, and the ‘mark’ formed the point of departure for all my attempts at comprehension, my doubts and my criticism.”

“Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything?”

“He has no traditions to bind him or guide him; and his impulse is to break away from the occupation his father has followed, and make a new way for himself.”

“Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.”

“If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents.”

“The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive.”

“Haven’t you ever been to the races? You’ve got to wear something loud. It’s traditional.”

“This is a birthday present from my Uncle Ry,” Stillwater said. “He always gives presents on his birthday, to celebrate the day he was born.”

“She smoothed the silver hairs of her beautiful wedding parka, then carefully took it off and rolled it up. Placing it and her fur pants in a bag made of whale bladder, she tied it securely so that no moisture would dampen her clothes while she left. This she had learned in childhood, and it was one of the old Eskimo ways that she liked, perhaps the only one. She had never violated it even in the warm, gas-heated house in Barrow, for damp clothes could mean death in the Arctic.”

“Some of those old phrases stuck in my head came from like...‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home; Your house is on fire, your children are gone!”

“Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court?”

“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”

“All that is left to us by tradition is mere words. it is up to us to find out what they mean.”

“If Albert was right and they were only schoolgirls about the same age as his sisters in England, how was it they were allowed to set out alone, at the end of a summer afternoon? He reminded himself that he was in Australia now: Australia, where anything might happen. In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again.”

Once in Tibet, they meet the Lama Amachi who rules the Buddhist monastery in Dong Pe. He had set out on a journey, as was tradition, to find the Tulku, or the riencarnated spirit of the late Dalai Lama.

″Lord of the Sun! That I should have a grandson herding sheep! I, who have been such a warrior as men speak of round the fire for a hundred winters!”

“Even if words are lost, tradition should be handed down.”

“Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it’s still being made all over the place, all the time.”