Cultural Distance Quotes

Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

I mean, I didn't ever watch 'Gilligan's Island' and think, 'Those people are actors.' I lived in West Virginia. Hollywood just felt like this total other universe.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

I know, logically, about the fact that there are fans of my work in America, but it's hard for that feeling to sink in.

The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.

Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.

I get much more information about the rest of the world from people who are not Americans. You get a distance from America that is useful for a journalist; useful for my perspective on the world.

To view an object in the proper light we must stand away from it. The study of the classical literatures gives the aloofness which cultivates insight. In learning to live with peoples and civilizations that have long ceased to be alive, we gain a vantage point, acquire an enlargement and elevation of thought, which enable us to study with a more impartial and liberal mind the condition of the society around us.

I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

Australia, to the rest of the world, is just far away, and Australia in the Thirties was the faraway of the faraway.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.

It is hard for me to understand I am on television and people around the world watch me every week in a country I have never even been to.

In her previous novels, Maggie O'Farrell has often measured the distance between intimates and the unexpected intimacy of distance - geographic, temporal, cultural. In 'The Hand That First Held Mine' and 'The Distance Between Us,' characters separated by many miles or many years turn out to be joined in ways they never anticipated.

In Italy, where I live now, I have put some distance between myself and the world that has formed me.

It's amazing to me in retrospect that I wrote as much as I did with full-time jobs. Each city gave me a new distance from - and a new way of looking at - India. I'm grateful for the movement. I feel as if I've crammed several lives into one.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject.... [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual.

I spent some time in India and thought I might write about Hinduism. But it's so far removed from my experience I couldn't even get my mind around it to write about it.

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences.

It's only interesting when you're from somewhere else, like America or Japan. The further away the more interesting it is.

When you're a foreigner, at the beginning you are far away from the culture. Then, little by little, you start to interact with people, have friends, have a life, and then you feel more comfortable.