The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Culture is public, because meaning is

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving.

Your dreams are a poetic reflection of your soul's wishes. Be courageous enough to follow them.

There is no such thing as a great man of God, only weak, pitiful, faithless men of a great and merciful God.

I've always felt alienated. I realized that I've been terrified my entire life. So I can identify that fear which drives so many of the people that I write about.

Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?

I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.

Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.

For a long time - and this particular time with greater force than usual - summer has been a season that gives me a sense of emptiness and absence, and takes me back to the past.

You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely.

It's true that PC culture has created very little honest dialogue.