Quotes About Community

she'd learned that the more people there were, the lonelier she felt.

The flower display continued through the town. Window boxes adorned the shop fronts, hanging baskets hung from patent black lampposts, trees grew tall in the main street. Each building was painted a different refreshing color and the main street, the only street, was a rainbow of mint greens, salmon pinks, lilacs, lemons, and blues. The pavements were litter free and gleaming as soon as you averted your gaze above the gray slate roofs you found yourself surrounded by majestic green mountains.

She understood how it felt being surrounded by crowds of people every day, never physically being alone but all the time feeling it.

They say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with

But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they're not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this.

When something happens, it triggers something inside us that connects us to a situation, connects us to other people, lighting us up and linking us like little lights on a Christmas tree, twisted and turned but still connected on a wire. Some go out, others flicker, others burn strong and bright, yet we're all on the same line.

Menschen sind nicht grausam. [...] Aber sie haben einen starken Selbsterhaltungstrieb und mischen sich, solange sie nicht direkt betroffen sind lieber nicht ein, wenn es Probleme gibt.

that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

If we're all alone, then we're all together in that too.

Sabotai smiled. "You know the Yasa—if your clan needed you you could have refused to come.

A helping hand can come from the most unlikely of places

If anyone ever says to you that people in the United States don't have kindness in their hearts anymore, don't believe them. I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for the unselfish help and trust of so many people who reached out to me. In this country, those two beautiful ladies in San Diego were the very first, but they wouldn't be the last.

The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others.

Kim sÄ… ci ludzie?- powtarza Herc Szemec. - To ?ydki. Å»ydki, które coÅ› knujÄ…. Wiem, ?e to tautologia.

We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto.

If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble.

Many people feel they are in possession of a great gift when they are young. But one does not always give in to a gift. One does with a life what is precious not only to one's own self but to one's own people.

The two extremes of secular life. Stoic acceptance and gay defiance in the face of—nothing; in the face of indifference, boiling violence, inexorable chaos; in the face of—the Other Side. Two hundred years of this. Enough. Jews must return to Torah. The world must return to God. There must be a center to human life or, God forbid, there will be no human life left on this planet. A man may not live alone.

Life connects us, Benjamin, not artifice.

The practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together. Reflective solidarity is crafted by an interaction involving three persons: 'I ask you to stand by me over and against a third.

The constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go. (1998: 319)

Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write it on the sticker, and then have m press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.

You never really said anything about what you Koreans believe in she said. Staying out of trouble, I said.

The question, then, is whether being an "individual" makes a difference anymore. That it can matter at all. And if not, whether we in fact care.