Quotes About Community

We meet from time to talk and argue…about what we as artists can do, how we can express the anguish for the moral situation we find in this country, but not as civil rights pleaders.

Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

In no company had I ever felt so much an outsider. Yet I liked the company, and wished that it would like me.

We all know what birds of a feather do. And it may be safely surmised that if a bird of any particular feather has been for a long while unable to see other birds of its kind, it will flock with them all the more assiduously when they happen to alight in its vicinity.

The power of people, when they focus on something positive, never fails to amaze me.

Fear and Bigotry are bred fom isolation and ignorance. -Shekinah

A sense of belonging is not physical. We cant find it by changing where we live or what we do. We have to carry it within us

This ignorance of the lives of others is what allows gentrification to happen. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts points out in her book Harlem Is Nowhere that whenever a neighborhood gentrifies, you hear white people and the media using phrases such as "People are starting to move to that neighborhood," or "No one used to go there, but that's changing." The implication is that before these places gentrified, no one lived there, or at least no one of importance.

The one silver lining of our sad political reality in 2018 is that we're learning to rely less on the powers that be and more on ourselves to make change.

Just another proof, of course, of what I often say - it takes all sorts to make a world.

I'm bound to say that New York's a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I'm a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.

Henry lived in a boarding-house in Guildford Street.

Oily started, and a hot flush suffused his forehead. His professional pride was piqued. In no section of the community are class distinctions more rigid than among those who make a dishonest living by crime. The burglar looks down on the stick-up man, the stick-up man on the humbler practitioner who steals milk cans. Accuse a high-up confidence artist of petty larceny, and you bring out all the snob in him.

perceived the numbing truth that we human beings are merely as many pieces in a jig-saw puzzle and that our every movement affects the fortunes of some other piece. Just so, faintly at first and taking shape by degrees, must the germ of civic spirit have come to Prehistoric Man. We are all individualists till we wake up.

On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

In my poems I could not shut the door to the street.

A multidão humana foi a maior lição da minha vida. Posso chegar a ela com a inerente timidez do poeta, com o receio do tímido; mas, uma vez no seu seio, sinto-me transfigurado.. Sou parte da essencial maioria, sou mais uma folha da grande árvore humana.

Quiero saber, hermanos míos, dije en la Unión de Pescadores, si todos se aman como yo. La verdad es - me contestaron - que nosotros pescamos peces y tú te pescas a ti mismo y luego vuelves a pescarte y a tirarte al mar otra vez.

Nació un hombre entre muchos que nacieron, viví entre muchos hombres que vivieron, y esto no tiene historia sino tierra.

Dejé de ser niño porque comprendí que a mi pueblo no le permitieron la vida y le negaron la sepultura.

The close proximity in which people lived in India was in stark contrast to my independent existence in America.

Today, I see and create a radically new vision, one where everyone wins, everyone gets a seat at the table.

Amazing how the soup pots of small towns are just waiting to boil over anything at all.

Nothing ever happens to just one person.