Quotes About Community

One of the joys of true happiness,' trilled the robot, 'is sharing. I brim, I froth, I overflow with . . .

The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

Very nice,' said Arthur. 'Wonderfully nice. I don't know when I've ever been anywhere nicer. I'm happy here. They like me, I make sandwiches for them, and . . . er, well that's it really. They like me and I make sandwiches for them.' 'Sounds, er . . .' 'Idyllic,' said Arthur, firmly. 'It is. It really is. I don't expect you'd like it very much, but for me it's, well, it's perfect.

Deaf people occupy a unique position. They make up the only cultural group where cultural information and language has been predominantly passed down from child to child rather than from adult to child, and the only one in which the native language of the children is different from the language spoken by the parents.

In every society on earth the child is regarded as a member of his parents' groups.

If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.

TERMINAL WANDERLUST: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.

Nearly all of the Nobodies he saw were men. Women, he thought, had so many more ways to connect themselves to the world--children, families, friends.

and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very quickly; all of us have far more in common than we do not have in common.

we lost money at church bingos and ate catfish deep-fried in lard.

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

Most every new man who came into the neighborhood had to be tried.

New York City had a short memory for violence

The good people of Kibbencook, indeed all human beings, want answers, not questions, from their religious leaders. No matter.

Kibbencook was not a hotbed of radicalism, and even antiwar marches were organized with a certain decorum. It was a thoroughly suburban protest.

problem for the whole city.

Queens, by the accent.

The Mole People, by Jennifer Toth (Chicago Review Press, 1993).

Just the whole city watching

The people of Honduras don't have a clear cultural identity. We have to start learning more about our past in order to create a brighter future.

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.