Quotes About Community

What an idiot she had been to try and make Le Paradis wholly her own. It was of the essence of home that it should hold out its arms to diverse personalities and gather them together into a harmonious whole. A house stamped with one personality only was surely more like the cell of a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement than a home.

Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation; a very difficult word. . . .that tries to describe something that can't be described but is the only thing worth having.

It was always a cheerful street, for the people who lived in it were the happiest sort of people: not too poor, the joy of life ground out of them by poverty, and not too rich, feeling burdened by possessions; and the dead had left some of their happiness behind them in the homes they had made, and the living were daily adding to it out of their own good cheer.

It was a big deal when a new record came out; you'd buy it then find one of your mates who had a stereo and everyone would come over to listen to it together for the first time.

As I sat alone on another summer night, I realized something had to change. I had to get out there and make new friends who didn't cling to each other so much that they didn't let anyone else in. I needed someone new in my life. Anyone new and willing to be a friend for awhile or a long while.

Dessert doesn't count if you're sharing someone else's.

Everyone is going to want to come and look at my garden.' 'Give them seeds or cuttings and send them off,' Shift said. 'Tell them the Little God of the Marshlands says they should grow their own gardens.' 'That's good,' Addy said. 'People here respect gods.

We're all bozos on the bus, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. —WAVY GRAVY

He said that in order to save the world you must serve the people in your life. "You gradually struggle less and less for an idea," Merton wrote, "and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

I recall how upset Josie was. Ready to gouge and fight that-there time over at Bethel Church.' 'A man's that got it in head to own a place… got get-up in his hide… Beyond that under their shirts they're all just alike. In the dark you couldn't know one from the next.

People knowing her, having her in their thoughts, saying things to her, coupling her acts with their acts – 'Take the calves in as soon as Ellen gets through.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Many of the names on the gravestones are also the names of town roads, which reminded me of my long-ago childhood, when these roads were essentially long unpaved driveways named for the people whose farms were at the ends of them.

No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.

Librarians lose reason when it comes to the regulars, the good people, the readers.

They found a body in the Salford cemetery, but aboveground and alive.

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie in the arms of anyone who asked.

This town is infested with squirrels, have you noticed?" "I'd rather say it's rich with squirrels.

The sharing of simple meals and discussing the day's events, of waking up together with plans for the future, things that feel practically bacchanalian when you're used to being on your own.

But what about the horses? Have they always had horses here?" "Probably. Colonial words usually have horses; they're cheap local transportation,self-replicating.

After all, I'd never met anyone who would just start praying over a glass of iced tea.

What keeps you confident in a healthy way is knowing that everyone else around you is going to support you and teach you and you're going to learn from them. I just feel open to learning from people.

Anyone could be in the orchestra, or sports team, or arts club at my school. It was precisely the kind of inclusivity that now meets with a sort of scorn and derision as a prizes-for-all culture that generates only mediocrity. There's something so insulting about the idea that including lots of people means mediocrity.

Friends are the glue that keep us all here. Without them, who would drive you to school or skip class with you when you need to pick up a new pair of sneaks because you stepped in dog crap on the way onto campus? Boy or girl, underclassman or upperclassman, we all need our friends--just like the cheesy songs tell us.