Quotes About Community

By the hundreds, from all directions, the Hill Folk had come to Athanarel.

Gossip, I have discovered, is seldom spread about people who find happiness or contentment.

Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every person has a ring of stories around them, a halo almost. People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl squatting in the front dooryard, in mud-caked overalls, digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and talked to me. some I've forgotten, but most I remember. And so my memory goes back before my birth

It's the human condition. We're all more or less looking for a place to hide.

It's like this, when you live in a place you've always lived in, where your family has always lived. You get to see things not only in space but in time too.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

It isn't fair, it isn't right, Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group

Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.

People who are all alone have every right to be friends with one another. (The Honeymoon Of Mrs. Smith - Version 1)

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. It isn't fair, she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

Do you always go where you're not wanted?" Eleanor smiled placidly. "I've never been wanted anywhere," she said.

She was a stranger in a world of strangers and they were strangers she had left behind

whatever planned to be colorful lost its heart quickly in the village.

I sort of thought that maybe people had to talk that way, sort of saying the same things over and over because that way they can get along together without thinking. She stopped and thought. Why I was so worried," she said, "was because if people didn't say those damn things over and over, then they wouldn't talk to each other at all.

An Eleanor, she told herself triumphantly, who belongs, who is talking easily, who is sitting by the fire with her friends.

It was probable that everyone on Pepper Street knew that Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were, oddly, friends, but it is certain that no one was particularly interested in it. Both Miss Fielding and Mr. Donald were so exactly the sort of people who want to hide, that the neighborhood was only thankful to have them hiding together, instead of intruding their modesty on busier people.

A thought of the world swept over her, of people living around her, singing, dancing, laughing; it seemed unexpectedly and joyfully that in all this great world of the city there were a thousand places where she might go and live in deep happiness, among friends who were waiting for her here in the stirring crowds of the city.

especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since

I thought," Eleanor said carefully, "that I might even look around. Old houses are usually cheap, you know, and it's fun to make them over." "Not around here," the girl said. "Then," Eleanor said, "there are no old houses around here? Back in the hills?" "Nope." The man rose, taking change from his pocket, and spoke for the first time. "People leave this town," he said. "They don't come here.

No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that.

Eleanor thought, I am the fourth person in this room; I am one' of them; I belong.

Shirley Jackson

Me imagino que el pueblo estaba lleno de corazones podridos que codiciaban nuestras pilas de monedas de oro, pero eran cobardes y temían a los Blackwood.