Cultural Isolation Quotes

The great wall of China was built just as much to keep the Chinese in as to keep the barbarians out.

Germans are not tainted by intermarriage with any other nations.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

Racial harmony does not mean racial mixing.

When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.

I always felt like the rug could be pulled out from under me at anytime. And coming from a racially mixed background, I always felt like I didn't really fit in anywhere.

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

Isolation means a lack of growth. I grew up in China at a time when the country was completely isolated. That era is over.

When I was growing up, I didn't know there was a world outside of California.

I grew up in a very white, privileged, old-fashioned society in South Africa and went to a boarding school run by nuns.

Koreans stuck to their traditional way of life without knowing what was going on outside the country. We were like frogs in a well.

I think being Jewish has been covered really well but almost nothing about being fundamentalist Protestant. For years, I've had a movie in my mind called 'Total Immersion' that looks to my life as a kid where you're immersed in this different worldview from almost everybody around you.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that's all I ever was associated with.

I remember my first day at grammar school, being the only person who was me. Everybody else was like everybody else, and there I was, tanned, in a freezing cold playground in the middle of Middlesbrough, wondering what on earth I was doing there.

'Chinese Democracy' wasn't trying to tell China to have a democracy or anything like that. I don't have an opinion on what kind of government they should have. My thing is, I went to stay there for about three months, and everywhere I went, the people are so shielded from what's going on in the world.

When I was a teenager, I never knew anything about art. I think in South Africa at that stage, no one was really exposed to it. There were no museums that had great artists in them.

For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.

France used to have the ability to inspire princes and kings, send her philosophers to the courts of Europe whose elites spoke our language… now no one listens to her anymore and the universe turns without her …

When you say to Israelis, 'European boycott,' they think it means that this year they won't get Camembert cheese on time... That is not the case.

The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.

My childhood wasn't very happy. It's a long, grim story about being a Jew in a small southern town.

I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.