Quotes About Community

The police did not like to come to neighborhoods like this one, where the best they could hope for was hostile indifference.

To normalize help-seeking, it is essential for us to speak out about counseling. Sharing the effect that counseling has had on our lives with others serves to normalize the practice.

Ichioka, Gee, Ichioka's brother Victor, Vicci Wong, Floyd Huen, and Richard Aoki—dubbed themselves the "Asian-American Political Alliance," coining "Asian-American" in emulation of their Afro-American fellows

by the end of the Seventies, most Asians in America were recent immigrants, who naturally weren't inclined to see themselves through the lens of being "Asian." They thought of themselves first as members of their own specific ethnic communities, and second as aspirational Americans; the pan-ethnic organizing work of the Asian American pioneers of the Sixties made as little sense to them as it might to the relatives they'd left behind in Asia.

The thrust is that in order to improve society you should concentrate on the small things. If you control those—or fix them—then the bigger changes will follow.

Observe the Baltimore Irish Catholic in his natural environment, eating soft ice cream and onion rings after a movie.

No man is an island,' John Donne wrote more than three and a half centuries ago. 'Every man is a piece of the continent.' The United States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Equator. 'I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

not a single woman

Sebastian felt sure Bruno's father wasn't the kind of man who would share a front door with someone else.

We need the rich today to do their modest part to enable all of society to share in prosperity. By passing that hurdle, we would reduce the need for long-term transfers from rich to poor in the future. The

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization."5

The most powerful tool for breaking extreme poverty is a holistic community-based development strategy that combines vocational training and job placement, early childhood development, educational upgrading, and local infrastructure. Each part of the antipoverty effort supports all of the others. This kind of ground-up development effort must in practice be led by the communities themselves but backed with financing from the federal and state governments. Options

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?

I went to church. It didn't help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again.

Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.

Out past the weekly glimpsed windows, out past the street, lived the world, which had, Old Mrs. Karafilis knew, been dying for years.

Lefty and Desdemona's cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built

It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night. The Lisbon girls became a symbol of what was wrong with the country, the pain it inflicted on even its most innocent citizens, and in order to make things better a parents' group donated a bench in the girls' memory to our school.

General John L. Throckmorton set up the headquarters of the 101st Airborne at Southeastern High, where my parents had gone to school.

In 1922 there were barely a hundred people living in the village. Fewer than half of those were women. Of forty-seven women, twenty-one were old ladies. Another twenty were middle-aged wives. Three were young mothers, each with a daughter in diapers. One was his sister. That left two marriageable girls. Whom Desdemona now rushed to nominate.

Becoming a person, of course, means finding your people, and your place among them

People felt they owned the trees. Their dogs had marked them daily. Their children had used them for home plate. The trees had been there when they'd moved in, and had promised to be there when they moved out. But when the Parks Department came to cut them down, it was clear our trees were not ours but the city's. to do with as it wished.

At the same time, the fact that the girls were slowly sinking hadn't completely penetrated our minds, and on some mornings we awoke to a world still unruptured: we stretched, we got out of bed, and only after rubbing our eyes at the window did we remember the rotting house across the street, and the mossblackened windows hiding the girls from our sight. The truth was this: we were beginning to forget the Lisbon girls, and we could remember nothing else.