"Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity."

Cultural, English, Identity, Ireland

38

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity."

Exlpore more Cultural quotes

"When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture."

Doug Coupland, Canadian Author

Cultural, Culture, Future

"Most of the monsters... are based on some sort of mythology. Every culture and even some geographical areas have monsters and mythology that is their own."

Laurell K. Hamilton, American Writer

Cultural, Culture, Mythology

"Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay."

Aldous Huxley, English Novelist

Cultural, Culture, Leisure, World

"Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth."

Ayn Rand, Russian Writer

Cultural, Culture, Ethics, Needs, Rebirth

"What other culture could have produced someone like Hemmingway and not seen the joke?"

Gore Vidal, American Novelist

Cultural, Culture

"Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris."

Mason Cooley, American Writer

Cultural, Paris

"Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers."

Simone Weil, French Philosopher

Cultural, Culture, Teachers, Will

"The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving."

Johan Huizinga, Dutch Historian

Cultural, Culture

"Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture."

Erich Fromm, American Psychologist

Cultural, Culture, Man, Weakness

"The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture."

Joseph Addison, English Writer

Cultural, Culture, Day, Lies, Mind

Explore more quotes by John McGahern

"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other."

Reading

"Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century."

Society

"We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places."

Religion

"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."

Time

"Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners."

People

"I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years."

Time

"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."

Language

"The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book."

Church

"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television."

Advice

"My father was very outwardly religious."

Family