Quotes About Community

Something like that is as bad or as good as a telephone ringing in the night: either way, you're not as alone as you think.

Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women.

Waar het om gaat is dat als je het hebt over identiteit, je dat niet zomaar uit mensen kunt wegredeneren. Het verdwijnt niet door de minachting van buitenstaanders, het wordt er juist door verhevigd.

White men tell us: Vote, bantu! They tell us: You do not all have to agree, ce n'est pas nécessaire! If two men vote yes and one says no, the matter is finished. Á bu, even a child can see how that will end. It takes three stones in the fire to hold up the pot. Take one away, leave the other two, and what? The pot will spill into the fire.

cradling the soup terrine that she set

apron back on, and I washed all the dishes while she sat on her wooden stool and watched. I told her just sit, I've got this. Miss Betsy acted like she'd never seen a man clean up a kitchen before, which maybe she hadn't. I wanted to keep her talking about Angus, so I asked

the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.

It's football. Take that out of high school, it's church with no Jesus. Who would even go?

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can't stop talking about them. It gets to be

A thousand fishes make the school, but they always move together: one great, bright, brittle altogetherness.

Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren't even selling for money, mainly just for neighborly enjoyment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people's feelings about taxes and guns. (land economy vs. Money economy) -p. 523

Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.

Every mud puddle is surrounded by a prayer group of small blue butterflies.

In Lee County they say you have to look hard for a face you've not seen before, which surely was true for Mom, who'd directed anybody that could walk to where the Solo cups are kept on Aisle 19.

To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you haven't heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.

today and I thought of those movies in which a town is wiped clean of its

The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.

Here, if any terrorists came flying over, they'd look down on trashed-out mine craters and blown-up mountains and say, "Keep going. This place already got taken out." It was hard to see how September 11 was my fight. As far as doing good for my fellow man, my better option was football.

His only advice was to be careful in Unicoi because there were folks down there mean enough to hang an elephant. I said okay, thinking it was an expression his people had. But no. They gave the death penalty to an elephant there one time.

the most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good; yet

Maybe it's true what they say, that as long as you're nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you'll turn your back on others in the same boat. You'll want to believe the fix they're in is their own damn fault.

I took Mom's word on that because you hear of such things, folks so godly as to pass around snakes, also passing around black eyes. If this is a new one on you, maybe you also think a dry county is a place where there's no liquor to be found.

know how that sounds. But you get twenty people in a big circle talking and chugging, and the effect is pretty good.

was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice.