Cultural Confinement Quotes

The ethnic enclave’s warm embrace becomes an economic stranglehold.

When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?

Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

You're a product of our language, and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you. Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can't imagine any way to escape. There's no way you can get out.The world is your cradle and your trap.

Switzerland felt incredibly narrow, growing up. It was good, in a way. There were so many museums. But it was always a no-brainer that I would have to leave, and I'm grateful for that.

The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.... The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emenate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.