Quotes About Community

Home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory.

Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.

Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left, just separate houses with separate televisions and separate televisions and less and less dropping by.

Two months surrounded by country women who loved mean had changed her. The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping. They didn't waste their time or the patient's with sympathy and they met the tears of the suffering with resigned contempt.

There had been two or three girls who had helped him enter the fifties (lovely, lovely). Nothing to worry Margaret had she known. Merely life preservers in the post-fifty ocean, helping him make it to shore.

It was as though he no longer needed to drink to forget whatever it was he could not remember. Now he could not remember that he had ever forgotten anything. Perhaps that was why for the first time after that old day in France he was beginning to miss the presence of other people. Shadrack had improved enough to feel lonely. If he was lonely before, he didn't know because the noise he kept up, the roaring, the busyness protected him from knowing it.

Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game. God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby.

Together the old man and the boy sat on the grass and shared the heart of the watermelon. The nasty-sweet guts of the earth.

All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her.

populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day

To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power. [...] Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.

Every nigger I know wants to be cool. There's nothing wrong with controlling yourself, but can't can't nobody control other people.

I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more.

Hi." "Hi." "Waiting for your sister?" "Uh-huh." "Which way do you go home?" "Down Twenty-first Street to Broadway." "Why don't you go down Twenty-second Street?" "'Cause I live on Twenty-first Street." "Oh. I can walk that way, I guess. Partly, anyway." "Free country.

By the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens. He is through with his song. He laughs. A rippling sound like Sethe's sons make when they tumble in hay or splash in rainwater. His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs. Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, Seven-O! Seven-O!

How can they hold it together, he wondered, this hard-won heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange? Who will protect them from their leaders?

A feeling of welcome washes over me. I walk toward her, right up to the fence that separates my place from the neighbor's

I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more.

Yet here, not twenty miles away from a quiet, orderly community, there were women like none he knew or ever heard tell of.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our Innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair.

between the schoolhouse and Holy Redeemer