Quotes About Community

she is in the company of women who have given what help they could.

Ghetto living is more than just a feeling of confinement; it is a sense of suffocation too.

I doubt that anyone in town belongs to the Klan, or even its more respectable cousin, the White Citizens' Council. They'd simply prefer to leave the past unexamined, cover it with honeysuckle, and go back to their bourbon. It's the kind of response that ensures no one will reflect on the ways that past seeps into present.

You may never learn the names of any of the people you talk to in a dog park, even after many, many hours spent there with them, and many hours of conversation. But if - knock on wood - anything should ever happen to your dog, these nameless non-strangers will rally, sympathize, offer to help, and hold your hand. I know this from experience.

Libraries were a solace in the Depression. They were warm and dry and useful and free; they provided a place for people to be together in a desolate time. You could feel prosperous at the library. There was so much there, such an abundance, when everything else felt scant and ravaged, and you could take any of it home for free. Or you could just sit at a reading table and take it all in.

They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.

The next morning, close to two thousand people showed up at the library.

In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books.

They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string.

Szabo reckoned that the future of libraries was a combination of a people's university, a community hub, and an information base, happily partnered with the Internet rather than in competition with it. In practical terms, Szabo felt the library should begin offering classes and voter registration and literacy programs and story times and speaker series and homeless outreach and business services and computer access and movie rentals and e-book loans and a nice gift shop. Also, books.

The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them.

times of trouble, libraries are sanctuaries. They become town squares and community centers—even blood-draw locations.

librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve.

The public can come and go, but librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve. All libraries can do is try their best to manage it.

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does - I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

On April 29, 1986, the day the library burned

At last count, in 2017, there were almost sixty thousand homeless people in Los Angeles.

we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family.

A Nigerian librarian told me that her library offers art and entrepreneurship training classes

Every problem that society has, the library has, too, because the boundary between society and the library is porous; nothing good is kept out of the library, and nothing bad... The public can come and go, but librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day.