Quotes About Community

Don't say anything against indies. They're very sensitive. One hint of elitism and they'll be organizing a twitcott.

I couldn't do this on my own. And like D.H. Lawrence said, We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

To write a story about New York that only deals with people in your age and socioeconomic bracket, that feels dishonest to me. So much of New York comes from everyone bumping into each other.

God gives us tears so other know when we need help." from the book Gods in Alabama

He'd been doing crap like this for me since we were both five, the outsiders at a milk-white elementary school in a so-white-it-was-practically-Wonder-Bread county. I was the only half-a-Jew for miles, and Walcott was the sperm-donated product of a pair of lesbians who left Atlanta to grow organic veggies and run a mountain bed-and-breakfast

A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone called Ducktown, and they were all cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tell who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I'd had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I'd left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out. OMG

No one here talks like me or gets my references or knows the songs I know. I don't look like any of them. Even my bond with Joya was based on not belonging here.

The world was dangerous and broken. But people had to feel safe anyway, to get on with the business of living.

God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.

The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.

Mögen Fremde über uns alle urteilen!: "May we all be judged by strangers!

Same church, different assumptions.

This lack of social capital puts enormous strain on working-class and poverty-stricken parents because they not only don't know where to turn for help but also can't afford it when they do.

In Phoenix, they were called illegal aliens and pegged as criminals. They were alternately viewed as American, Mexican, or neither. Now, for a moment, they were simply teenagers at a robotics competition by the ocean.

He ended up shuttered in his house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering whether he should kill himself just as his father had. "My life was total hell," he says. Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a hug and told him he wasn't alone. "That's when life really began for me," he says. He says he's been sober ever since.

The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.

Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society. That doesn't mean I have anything against other people. Envy them?

Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks, man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial, Betsy, before Facebook.

Sure, the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother.

No, forget it. You people took the village and drove away all our business, it's you who must submit to Shariah.

He asked me to prepare semolina for forty people, saying that they were workers at his farm," his mother remembered. "In fact they were Islamists, but I could not refuse them.

God's purpose for the Christian's involvement in the church was radically different from my gas-station approach. The church wasn't merely a place to swing by for a fill-up. The journey of the Christian faith was supposed to be made with other believers. The church isn't a gas station, I realized. It's the bus I'm supposed to be traveling on.

If Jesus loves the church, you and I should, too. We can't use the excuse that the church has messed up too many times or that we're disillusioned. Jesus is the only person who has the right to disown and give up on the church. But He never has. And He never will.

There comes a time in the development of every ego when it must love its neighbors or become a twisted and stunted personality.