Mother Culture Quotes

The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it'... that manifesto is doubted now, ladies and gentlemen... almost everywhere in our culture, in all walks of life, among the young and the old, but especially among the young, for whom the dream of a glittering future in which life will become ever sweeter and sweeter and sweeter, decade after decade, century after century, has been exploded and is meaningless. Your children know better. They know better in large part because you know better.

Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. They must, as a professional obligation, still affirm and proclaim the manifesto of our revolution. If they want to hold on to their jobs, they assure us with absolute conviction that a glorious future lies just ahead for us - provided that we march forward under the banner of conquest and rule. They assure us of this, and then they wonder, year after year, why fewer and fewer voters go to the poles. ~ Daniel Quinn

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior. ~ Anne Lamott

Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable. ~ Marie-Chantal Claire

Most immigrants agree that at some point, we become permanent foreigners, belonging neither here nor there. Many tomes have been written trying to describe this feeling of floating between worlds but never fully landing. Artists, using every known medium from words to film to Popsicle sticks, have attempted to encapsulate the struggle of trying to hang on to the solid ground of our mother culture and realizing that we are merely in a pond balancing on a lily pad with a big kid about to belly-flop right in. If and when we fall into this pond, will we be singularly American or will we hyphenate? Can we hold on to anything or does our past just end up at the bottom of the pond, waiting to be discovered by future generations? ~ Firoozeh Dumas

If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history
a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils
people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. ' ~ Daniel Quinn

Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you'll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you'll be tempted to say to the people around you, how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is? ~ Daniel Quinn

I interviewed a lot of people in India, and I asked my mother to send me a lot of Bengali books on the tradition of dream interpretation. It's a real way for me to remember how people think about things in my culture. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you're enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today- and promise population control tomorrow. ~ Daniel Quinn

Famine isn't unique to humans. All species are subject to it everywhere in the world. When the population of any species outstrips its food resources, that population declines until it's once again in balance with its resources. Mother Culture says that humans should be exempt from that process, so when she finds a population that has outstripped its resources, she rushes in food from the outside, thus making it a certainty that there will be even more of them to starve in the next generation. Because the population is never allowed to decline to the point at which it can be supported by its own resources, famine becomes a chronic feature of their lives. ~ Daniel Quinn

I fell in love with food because of my mother. So, I will definitely be sharing and expanding more recipes from my culture (as well as many other cultures), and will be sharing recipes that I have experienced from my whole culinary life. ~ Wolfgang Puck

The die is cast in Canada: there are two ethnic and linguistic groups; each is too strong and too deeply rooted in the past, too firmly bound to a mother culture, to be able to swamp the other. But if the two will collaborate inside of a truly pluralist state, Canada could become a privileged place where the federalist form of government, which is the government of tomorrow's world, will be perfected. ~ Pierre Trudeau

In ancient times there was no public education, except that of the forum, the theater, and the street, and the general degree of illiteracy was very high ... the early men of science were left very much to themselves and such a phrase as "the scientific culture of Alexandria in the third century B.C." does not cover any reality. In a sense, this is still true today; the real pioneers are so far ahead of the crowd (even a very literate crowd) that they remain almost alone ... ~ George Sarton

Catherine wished to discover whether her son were really ill or
feigning. But he, worthy son of such a mother, played his part
to perfection. She had wept, he had a fever. ~ Alexandre Dumas

We will never know how much just a simple smile will do. ~ Mother Teresa

You would be surprised at how many corporations "none of your business" applies to! ~ Steven Magee

Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect. ~ John Shelby Spong

Sometimes you tell yourself the things you need to hear ~ Carmen's Mother

It puzzled Maud that her male relatives could not see this. Was it that men could not believe a woman might share their ambitions, their need for power? Eleanor saw herself as more than Henry's queen, mother of his children. First and foremost, she was Duchess of Aquitaine, never doubting that she could have ruled as well as any man and better than most. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

If you were a god, how would you like being called a myth, an old story to explain lightning? What if I told you, Perseus Jackson, that someday people would call you a myth, just created to explain how little boys can get over losing their mothers? ~ Rick Riordan

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes. ~ Jesmyn Ward

My daughter has a mother. She is not and never will be yours. You stay the fuck away from her. And if I ever see you look at her again the way you were earlier, I'll fucking cut your eyes out with a dull spoon. ~ Nicole Jacquelyn

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening. ~ Carmen Agra Deedy

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. ~ Ben Fountain

His mother wanted him closer to home. The funeral had been ~ Carl Hiaasen

When women feel they have learned to forgive their mothers - and men, their fathers - all it usually means is that they've decided to allow themselves the same kind of behavior. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

When your mother dies, it really hurts. But with time, you get used to it. That's nature's way ~ Muhammad Ali

A person who has 'tidied up' has both the words and a tidy area to show for it. It is much harder to find a word that describes the giving-up-things mode of attention a mother is giving to her baby. ~ Naomi Stadlen

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities. ~ Roger Zelazny

I could never marry Mr. Finch, not after he tried to take liberties with me." His head shot up, the old fire rekindled. "He did what?" She almost regretted saying that. "He forced himself upon me." "How?" "He attempted a kiss I neither wanted nor encouraged." "Oh." Father waved a hand. "Is that all?" "That is quite enough. It proves he does not love me, though I can't imagine why he insisted on marrying a woman who despised him." "You would grow to love him." "Like Mother grew to love you?" she snapped. "Precisely." She ~ Christine Johnson

Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature. ~ Harold Coffin

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and 'cathedral-like' structure of the highly educated and articulate personality
a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) there placement of complex inner density with a new kind of self
evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available.' ~ Richard Foreman

My mother hold my exhausted body to her bones. This roar is our first sound of freedom. ~ Terry Farish

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero ... ~ Charlotte Bronte

So don't be sad that you're able to keep on living without your mother being here, it just means she did her job. ~ T.A. Williams

The only thing that I can do is know that I have great confidence in raising children and being a great mother. ~ Cheryl Tiegs

Septimus has been working too hard - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. ~ Virginia Woolf

I guess none of the sides of my hyphen are particularly subtle cultures. But perhaps there is also a sense that these characters are all parentless - every character in this book is feral in some way - without any guidance in their upbringing. They find no choice but to seek refuge in extreme behaviors. ~ Porochista Khakpour

As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, had quite an interesting life, shot through with coincidences. Stanley Ann was some mom
and by 'some mom,' it's meant that she was a globetrotting, oil-rep-marrying, CIA-front-employed, twelve-language-speaking, International Mom of Mystery. ~ Mondo Frazier

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat's Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like:
Player Piano B
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat's Cradle A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June D
Breakfast of Champions C
Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A
Palm Sunday C ~ Kurt Vonnegut

In 2004, when I started recording my first CD, I was coming right out of yeshiva. So I had spent two years completely immersed in the Hasidic culture, disconnected completely from the secular world - movies, music, people. ~ Matisyahu

The world of women fascinates me, probably because my sister and I were always together as children in our mother's salon after school and after ballet classes. We used to talk about what we saw: the different ladies who would come in, all with their distinctive personalities. ~ Monica Cruz

. . . communicate their desires. My book club is discussing a novel this month on this very subject. Fifty Shades of Grey. Would you like to borrow my copy, Matthew?" I take a long drink of water. "No, I'm already familiar with it, thanks." The fact that my dear, sweet mother is familiar with it, however, will definitely be giving me nightmares. ~ Emma Chase

A mother has the best of all smiles; she is a wonderful friend, lover and adviser. ~ Jaachynma N.E. Agu

If we were able to see God's image in our neighbor, do you think weapons and generals would be needed? ~ Mother Teresa

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature. ~ Kenneth Koch

Man overboard!" Then everyone was busy. Some of the sailors hurried aloft to take in the sail; others hurried below to get to the oars; and Rhince, who was on duty on the poop, began to put the helm hard over so as to come round and back to the man who had gone overboard. But by now everyone knew that it wasn't strictly a man. It was Reepicheep.
"Drat that mouse!" said Drinian. "It's more trouble than all the rest of the ship's company put together. If there is any scrape to be got into, in it will get! It ought to be put in irons--keelhauled--marooned--have its whiskers cut off. Can anyone see the little blighter?"
All this didn't mean that Drinian really disliked Reepicheep. On the contrary he liked him very much and was therefore frightened about him, and being frightened put him in a bad temper--just as your mother is much angrier with you for running out into the road in front of a car than a stranger would be. No one, of course, was afraid of Reepicheep's drowning, for he was an excellent swimmer; but the three who knew what was going on below the water were afraid of those long, cruel spears in the hands of the Sea People.
In a few minutes the Dawn Treader had come round and everyone could see the black blob in the water which was Reepicheep. He was chattering with the greatest excitement but as his mouth kept on getting filled with water nobody could understand what he was saying.
"He'll blurt the whole thing out if we don't shut him up," cried Dri ~ C.S. Lewis

Okay? It's okay! Don't worry about it! Just chill out! You don't have to feel like you're suffering just because your life is unfortunate, you don't have to sulk just because your life hasn't been blessed! What's wrong with staying positive in the face of adversity? You know what? What you're going to do after this is go home looking like nothing ever happened! Live the same old life with your father and mother who are out of the hospital now! You'll never be able to reconcile with either of them, I guarantee that! Even if you somehow beat the odds and become happy someday, it's not going to matter, because no matter how happy you are, it's never going to erase your crappy past! You can't pretend it never happened, you're going to be dragging it around with you! No matter what you do, no matter what happens, that misfortune is going to sit in your heart forever! You'll remember it just when you think you forgot, you'll dream about it for the rest of your life! We are going to have nightmares for the rest of our lives! That's how it's going to be-and since there's nothing you can do about it, don't try to look away! Playing a prank on some random passerby, playing streaker in your underwear is just going to take a tiny bit of stress off your mind, in reality it's not going to change a thing! ~ NisiOisiN

My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion. ~ Lincoln Steffens

Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money ... ~ Sylvia Ashton-Warner

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone. Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to ~ Annie Proulx

It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques- all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture ... And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple. ~ Terence McKenna

The best way to show your gratitude to God and people is to accept everything with joy ... We may not be able to give much but we can always give the joy that springs from a heart that is in love with God. All over the world people are hungry and thirsty for God's love. We meet that hunger by spreading joy. Joy is one of the best safeguards against temptation. ~ Mother Teresa

Once I said to my mother: 'You would be happy if I just kept well-dressed and had good manners,' and she said: 'What else is there?' ~ Cy Twombly

And I gave you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loved them and won't buy them for herself. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Blue radiated psychic energy for others, but touch was where she gained hers back. She was always hugging her mother or holding Noah's hand or linking her elbow in Adam's or resting her boots on Ronan's legs as they sat on the sofa. Touching Gansey's neck just between his hair and his collar. This ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I may not be the best mom. I may not even get back to being the average mother I once claimed to be. But I'm here. I'm getting back up. I'm not leaving. And I'm the mom God ordained for these fours souls, and therefore I am their best mom. ~ Gillian Marchenko

Her mother would be appalled, but she wouldn't say anything. She would just telegraph her distress with tightened lips and raised brows. She was good at that. Clemmie's mother's brows were better than sign language, complicated concepts conveyed with the minimum of movement. ~ Lauren Willig