Quotes About Community

I'm just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks.

half the town would claim they'd seen it coming, just because they thrived on downfalls of any sort.

Well, why were they dumb enough to vote for Leah anyway, is what I asked Nelson. If they knew it was going to get Tata Kuvudundu so riled up? Nelson said some of them that voted for her were put out with Tata Ndu, and some were put out with Father, so everybody ended up getting what they didn't want, and now had to go along with it. Nobody even cares that much one way or another about Leah, is what Nelson said. Oh, well, I told him. That is what we call Democracy.

Your people will appreciate you all the same. On the other hand, if you poundcake someone or push them too far in the shame or shock direction, you will run into their people at Hardee's or the Dollar General parking lot, in all probability within the day.

To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn't that, it's nothing.

Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it's losing yourself in a crowd.

The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of "insider" vs. "outsider." When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not "What do you do?" but rather, "Who are your people?

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

We probably started painting our nails Immoral Coral after everybody sensible had already gone on to pink, but heck, at least we were all behind the times together.

But Dovey was one of those people who traveled in a medium-size pod of tardiness on which others came to rely.

Overjoyed, null and void, mongoloid. I still have a fellow feeling for that almond-tasting word. Oh, but it did unsettle the matrons of Bethlehem to see the poor thing boosted into a class ahead of their own children, there to become dazzlingly slick-quick at mathematics.

Most families would sooner forgive you for going to prison than for moving out of Lee County.

You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It's a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much—so much of what counts—to its children. More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own.

on the weekends. He'd mentioned a place called Sweet Briar where he met other scientists. She felt the trailer's absence

eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body.

One other person can go a long way towards making your world right," she said, "but the support has to run both ways.

people's complaints about their siblings only as a primal form of bragging. They had a tribe. They belonged.

Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.

In this town, white politicians and black ministers seemed to go together like tears and tissues. At election time, the pols got religion and came looking for the blessings of black ministers as a way to get black votes without providing the kinds of services to black communities that they at least promised to East Boston and Charlestown and the other mostly white Boston neighborhoods.

It's right funny, when yer think about it. First Polly died, then me mam, and now Mrs Fairley. All in just a few months of each other.' Cook returned Emma's concentrated stare. 'It's said, in these parts, that everything goes in threes.

The clock in the church tower

the Jews scattered throughout the world over the centuries. To Spain, Germany, Russia, Poland, and many other countries. I myself come from Kiev, in Russia. Most of the Jews in Leeds also come from Russia, or from Poland. We came here to escape the terror and harassment of the pogroms directed against us. I had my baptism of fire in my own country and so, as difficult as things here can be sometimes, they are not as terrible as they were in Russia.

Sovereignty cannot be a shield for tyrants to commit wanton murder, or an excuse for the international community to turn a blind eye to slaughter.