Quotes About Community

For Dickinson as part of a middle-class community anxious about female creativity, self-assertion, self-expression, and egoism, Shakespeare and Stratford may have been emblems appropriate to her own task as a writer: to achieve literary renown but also authorial disappearance.

he who discards his worldly duties can justify himself only by assuming some kind of responsibility toward a much larger family." The

What we mean when we say that something is cultural is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!

There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere.

Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole.

Social exchange is certainly among the oldest of human behaviors, as humans have depended on sharing and exchanging resources for a very long time.

Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.

The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.

You would think he was somebody the way he carries on. My God, he's from Spartanburg. Spartanburg of all the pitiful places. The upcountry. The goddam, no-count upcountry.

Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it's very important to help Americans.

I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.

beneficent realization that he was a stranger no longer, that he belonged

Football is a game where you can't feel lonely.

As a town, we had made the error of staying small—and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

I saw the necessity of living and accepting bullcrap in my midst. It was everywhere. In teachers' manuals, in the platitudes muttered by educators, in school boards, in the community, and most significantly, in myself.

pervasive part of the island culture

Isn't that amazing? Here are all of these people, different in so many ways, yet united by their hopes and goals and dreams. This is how the world should be." The

Here in Raine, I can walk with the sunlight on my face. I can speak to anyone who speaks to me. I can learn my daughter's language. I can be called the name I was given when I was born. Here I am no longer my own secret. Will you let me stay?

women hold their councils of war in kitchens: the knives are there, and the cups of coffee, and the towels to dry the tears.

I suppose it was easier, in that harsh world, to make demons out of your neighbors, with their imperfections, tempers, rheumy eyes, missing teeth, irritating habits and smells, than to find angelic beauty in them.