Quotes About Community

We had an injured wolf brought in a couple weeks ago. Clipped by a car. Matt saved it. We've gotten a lot of hits on the pictures there, and the column Tansy wrote for it.

you stepped back, you squared your shoulders, and you showed you were willing to face what life had dealt you. That takes courage, Margo—much more—than leaping into the void. I had people to turn to. So do we all. It's only fools and egotists who think no one will be there to lend a hand. And bigger food and bigger egotists who don't reach out.

I may not know precisely how this sort of thing functions, but I understand perfectly well your family's opinion of me will be important." "My mother and sisters already like you." "They may tend in that direction, until I rudely attend the barbecue without a covered dish.

gathered. And

Sing, something we all know the words to. Make a goddamn joyful noise.

T]he social canons and methods by which people build up instinct controls in their communal life are not brought into being deliberately; they evolve over long periods, blindly and without plan. Irregularities and contradictions in drive-controls, huge fluctuations in their severity or leniency, are therefore among the recurrent structural features of the civilizing process.

The city of Florence stood in the centre of the squalls and sun-shafts of late medieval Italy. Nurtured on the wool of its beautiful Apennine contado, it grew in the thirteenth century into a thriving community of perhaps 100,000 turbulent souls. Its gold coin, the florin, became standard currency far beyond Italy.

A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.

We serve the world as one beggar telling other beggars where we found bread.

By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. It's the same true story, even when it isn't.

There was a time in our very recent history when it was "interesting" to be a Star Wars fan. It was sort of like admitting you masturbate twice a day or that your favorite band was They Might Be Giants. Star Wars was something everyone of a certain age secretly loved but never openly recognized

Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.

In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.

What you find out fairly quickly in Hollywood," Tarantino told the BBC in 1994, "is that this is a community where hardly anybody trusts their own opinion. People want people to tell them what is good. What to like, what not to like. But here I come. I'm a film geek. My opinion is everything. You can all disagree with me. I don't care.

As of the writing of this particular book, I have 43 "close friends,"* 196 "good friends,"** and 2,200 "affable acquaintances."*** *These are people I would phone immediately if I was diagnosed with lung cancer. ** These are people whose death from lung cancer would make me profoundly sad. *** These are people I would generally hope would recover from lung cancer.

This is a very common paradigm held in small towns. If somebody who grew up in your community wins a Nobel Prize, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board; if someone from your town grows up and becomes America's most depraved serial rapist, you cut out the newspaper story and put it on the bulletin board. It's just nice to see someone doing anything.

Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known.

Skin, bones, blood and organs transplant from person to person. Even what's inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you'd die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.

Suicide is very contagious.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

Honey, times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.

That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO

Churches in the outside world, my brother told me, were just the local stores that sold people lies made up in the distant factories of giant religions.