Quotes About Community

If clergymen knew their congregations as well as physicians do, the sermons would be often more closely related to the parish needs.

What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households.

A community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled paper.

When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

This is a very small world; we are all within hail of each other. I dare say when we get to Heaven there will not be a stranger to make friends with.

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.

I wonder how it is that we are all connected despite our tremendous differences.

If more women knew more jokes, there would be more justice in the world.

One of the organizing principles of gentrified thinking is to assess everyone based on what they can do for you, and then treat them accordingly.

People who are being punished for doing nothing, for having normative conflict, or for resisting unjustified situations, need the help of other people.

Paying for your lover's funeral is the gay version of a bar mitzvah. It is how you know that you have become a man.

Do most gay women love each other?" Doc asked. "A lot of them love closeted movie stars.

But the cared for don't realize that on their daily path of neighbors, workmates, and faces on the streets there are those...who sit quietly looking out the window at other people's holiday lights, listening to other people's laughter, and finding the makings of other people's eggnog waiting in the morning trash.

An apartment in New York City tells many truths. It shows where you really stand, relationally. It shows when you came, how much you had, and what kind of people you knew. Her apartment was lonely.

Right now, when I think of all my AIDS dead, one of the things they all have in common is about forty conversations just like the one Dave and I had, where each guy talked about death in his own way. Later, they get sick and die in very predictable patterns. Lets face it, this death itself is no longer extraordinary, emotionally, to me.

Thats why we'll never get rid of homophobia in this country. The brothers and sisters of homosexuals have too much at stake.

The problem is that most people are average. This includes people who run universities, publishing companies, and the rewards system in the arts. Most people look at something that is not familiar and think it is wrong. Very few people are able to look at an authentic discovery and be grateful. For that context to exist there has to be a true avant-garde, a large, vibrant community of people willing to think, fuck, love, live, and create oppositionally.

I have to agree with Artforum publisher Charles Guarino: "It's the place where I found the most kindred spirits—enough oddball, overeducated, anachronistic, anarchic people to make me happy." Finally,

The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?" (pp.281-82)

clochards—homeless people who have been living on the same streets for so long that no one can remember a time when they weren't there.

concept that to me is totally foreign: looking scruffy is selfish. Not only do you look like a slob but you let down the whole city.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.

Dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.

I'm taking you out, to meet my friends. I'm taking you,' she put a hand to my cheek, 'to my club.