Cultural Imagination Quotes

A civilization is as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamt by artists.

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

You cannot build a cultural identity without the images and sounds of your culture. Most countries in the third world - poor countries - they've lost their memories. Because everyday, films and cultural artifacts disappear. Film is also a memory - of the character and imagination of a culture.

I grew up as an only child with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

I remember being so homesick and realizing that where I came from was not something that existed in the cultural imagination outside the city. People used to think Miami was just partying in South Beach all the time.

If there is one thing I long for above all else, it's that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.

My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.

History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and history - the presents under the tree, the archives - but none have really seen them.

The idea of making music from an imaginary culture was to give ourselves a set of restrictions and parameters within which to work. Otherwise, we might have just gone on all kinds of creative detours, some of which might have been interesting. But better we confine ourselves to something.

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.

Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.

Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.