"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

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"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."

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"Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you."

Thomas Mann, German Writer

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"A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand."

Samuel Butler, British Poet

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"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

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"Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German Poet

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

Erich Fromm, American Psychologist

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"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

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"Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second."

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"A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy."

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"It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed "Wisdom." And then I know exactly what is going to follow: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.""

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"There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola."

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Explore more quotes by John McGahern

"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

"Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church."

Gratitude

"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

"When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not."

Reflection

"I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story."

Time

"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

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

Time

"The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese."

Being

"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 think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."

Difference