Multicultural Quotes

“I stole a bit of a chopped vegetable and was about to put it in my mouth when Jae’s long fingers closed over my wrist. “What? You can’t eat this raw?”

“It’s bitter melon. You won’t like it.” He went into the fridge and came out with something that looked halfway familiar. “Here, leftover bao. There’s char siu inside.”

“The red pork stuff? Yeah, I like that. I thought it was Chinese.”

“It is. We also eat hamburgers and spaghetti.”
― Rhys Ford, Dirty Kiss

“We're all the same in the dark.”
― J.J. Murray, Renee and Jay

“It's a success story," said Chanu, exercising his shoulders. "But behind every story of immigration success there lies a deeper tragedy."
Kindly explain this tragedy."
I'm talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I'm talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one's identity and heritage. I'm talking about children who don't know what their identity is. I'm talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I'm talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one's own sanity while striving to achieve the best for one's family. I'm talking--" p. 88”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“to split the very sea into ours and theirs." Border at the Beach

And More White Sheets”
― Eileen Clemens Granfors

“There wasn't a shed of doubt in her mind that he'd fulfill her every sexual fantasy and them some.
But was a brief, hot affair worth losing his friendship?”
― Francis Ray, A Seductive Kiss

“Sinking, sinking, drinking water. When everyone in the village was fasting a long month,when not a grain, not a drop of water passed between the parched lips of any able-bodied man, woman or child over the age of ten, when the sun was hotter than the cooking pot and dusk was just a febrile wish, the hypocrite went down to the pond to duck his head, to dive and sink, to drink and sink a little lower. p. 105”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“The scent of him was subtle, beautifully fresh, and she couldn’t think clearly. No man had ever brought out these intense feelings in her. Chris Augustine was dangerous and she could get lost in his arms.”
― Suzan Battah, Mad About the Boy

“The cry of faith, no longer nettlesome,
sounds as a blind man's pitiful plea of 'blind”
― Robert Graves, Collected Poems

“As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three.
Or to limit the loss of life. There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed”
― Smedley D Butler, War is a Racket

“A very successful method of dragon-fly-catching..is to use a captured female dragon-fly as a decoy. One end of a long thread is fastened to the insect's tail, and the other end of the thread to a flexible rod. By moving the rod in a particular way the female can be kept circling on her wings at the full length of the thread; and a male is soon attracted. As soon as he clings to the female, a slight jerk of the rod will bring both insects into the angler's hand. With a single female for lure, it is easy to capture eight or ten males in succession”
― Lafcadio Hearn, A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There

“Сколько гривенников, столько миросозерцаний”
― Сигизмунд Кржижановский, Воспоминания о будущем. Избранное из неизданного

“A most extraordinary device for catching dragon-flies is used by the children of the province of Kii. They get a long hair, - a woman's hair, - and attach a very small pebble to each end of it, so as to form a miniature "bolas"; and this they sling high into the air. A dragon-fly pounces upon the passing object; but the moment that he seizes it, the hair twists round his body, and the weight of the pebbles brings him to the ground.”
― Lafcadio Hearn, A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There

“He accused me of hiding the letter. He accused me of being too empathetic. And he accused me of not acknowledging the potential danger. But he was wrong, wrong and wrong”
― Missy Michaels, Loyal

“You're right. I do have trust issues. It started when my mom dropped me off at the babysitter's when I was twelve. She didn't come back for three days.”
― Missy Michaels, Loyal

“She stood on that bed and thought about them as she captured another memory. She remembered how she had known most of them since middle school. She remembered how they knew her traits, her interests, her long paragraphs she would put in the group chat, her various laughs, and her love for food. She liked her friends. They were diverse, from different cultures and backgrounds: Nigerian, Somali, Vietnamese, Jamaican, Dominican, Sierra Leonean, Cameroonian, Guinean, and Filipino. She knew it would be hard to replace them when she went to college.”
― E. Ozie, The Beautiful Math of Coral

“..мы имеем дело с шабашем ведьм, который будет повторяться вновь и вновь до тех пор, пока носителям знания и труда не удастся уничтожить в себе и в окружающем мире массовый невроз, называющийся "высокой политикой" и живущий за счёт беспомощности, коренящейся в характере людей”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm

“..по любимому всеми апофатическому принципу - через отрицание осмысленности их бытия - у марионеток может сложиться реальная биография”
― Максим Кантор, Хроника стрижки овец

“As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed”
― Smedley D Butler, War is a Racket

“One suspects that the haste with which some performers and some writers brush aside the traditional-jazz renaissance reflects their understanding of the devastating effect that an insistence on the traditional values would have upon the world of modern jazz to which they belong”
― Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now

“You may give them your love, but not your thoughts,
for they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
for their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow,
which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“Среди русских интеллигентов, как уже многими замечен, есть порядочное количество диковинных людей,..которые сумеют героически, не дрогнув ни одним мускулом, глядеть прямо в лицо смерти, которые способны ради идеи терпеливо переносить невообразимые лишения и страдания, равные пытке, но зато эти люди теряются от высокомерности швейцара, съёживаются от окрика прачки, а в полицейский участок входят с томительной и робкой тоской”
― Aleksandr Kuprin, Yama: The Pit

“Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“The shabbiness, even embarrassment, of Hazel Scott playing 'concert boogie woogie' before thousands of white middle-class music lovers, who all assumed that this music was Miss Scott's invention, is finally no more hideous than the spectacle of an urban, college-trained Negro musician pretending, perhaps in all sincerity, that he has the same field of emotional reference as his great-grandfather. the Mississippi slave”
― LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America

“Multiracial democracy is hard and messy and sometimes rude, but it is preferable to the alternatives”
― Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America

“My mother did not look away and she did not pretend.”
― Sorayya Khan, We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir

“You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation..”
― Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues

“Rainbows and multicultural societies are alike. Diversity makes them beautiful.”
― Vinita Kinra

“When I wanna pen something extremely personal, without actually revealing anything, I just write it in spanish or turkish. If you wanna study the mountain, study the mainstream work - but if you wanna learn about the person, study the turkish and spanish portion of my work.

That's why most of the titles of my works are in turkish or spanish - because I can't write a single word unless I feel the title boiling in my blood - and although English is unofficially the first language of earth, because of its savage imperialist history, it is neither the profoundest nor the most beautiful language on earth.

Does that mean, we should wipe out english from the world altogether? Of course not - that would be yet another boneheaded exercise in bigotry and intolerance. Instead, what's really needed is a genuine humane intention to create a truly magnificent
multilingual society - towards a multicultural world. Learn to look beyond the puny confines of one petty language, because the world is too grand to be wasted in the gutter of one language and one culture. Every culture is my culture, every country is mine - defiant descendants of divided ancestors, hand in hand we shall fly.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“Every culture is my culture, every country is mine - defiant descendants of divided ancestors, hand in hand we shall fly.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“Love Before Language (Sonnet 1227)

أعظم الحقيقة هي الحب ،
أعظم قانون هو الحب.
أعظم إيمان هو الحب ،
أعظم وجود هو الحب.

प्रेमसत्यं ब्रह्मसत्यम्।
प्रेम विना अस्तित्वं नास्ति।।
प्रेमदर्शनं ब्रह्मदर्शनम्।
प्रेम विना ब्रह्माण्डं नास्ति।।

Love happens regardless of facts,
Facts happen regardless of love.
When love and facts come together,
Magic happens in our veins and nerve.

Love before language,
Heart before heritage.
To unify this broken world,
I once took the divine pledge.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect