Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
I think that's something that we as black people in this country have been robbed of. I compare it to my brother's wife, who is Hispanic. She was born in America but her parents are from Honduras. She speaks Spanish. She knows the culture. But most black people, we were robbed of that. We don't know our heritage.
My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with - the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries - is lost, and is not mourned enough.
What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.
I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.
One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.
Today, nobody cares about European culture. We have a tradition, a vision, a culture of the past, we have legacy, but we don't have a present culture and we don't have a future.
[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.
I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.
Some of the beliefs and legends bequethed to us by Antquity are so universally and firmly established that we have become accustomed to consider them as being almost as ancient as humanity itself. Nevertheless we are tempted to inquire how far the fact that some of these beliefs and legends have so many features in common is due to chance, and wether the similarity between them may not point to the exestience of an ancient, totally unknown and unsuspected civilization of which all other traces have disappeared.
I feel like I'm living in the dead weeds of hip-hop. I live in the graveyard of what went wrong with hip-hop.
[It is possible] that the race of red men ... will, before many generations, be remembered only as a strange, weird, dream-like specter, which has passed once before the eyes of men, but had departed forever.
Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
The Bradshaws suggests an extraordinary civilisation that existed long before modern man reached the British Isles.
I used to speak Algerian, but I'd lost nearly everything.
