Quotes About Community

In India, I learned a proverb that may seem somewhat heartless: "The tears of strangers are only water." It means we are obligated to help only our own; if others have a problem, we wish them well, but it's their problem.

FBI data show that more men from this community have joined, or sought to join, a foreign terrorist organization over the last dozen years there than in any other jurisdiction in the nation. From this community alone, 45 members left to join either the Somalia-based insurgency al-Shabab or the Iraqi and Syrian wing of ISIS.37

They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.

Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.

If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they've been. If I see a city I see it's living ghostliness—the stray looks, the dying hands. I see it's needs and its discomforts locked in apartments.

rich old gentleman who lived at Scoatney Hall, five miles away, always sent us a ham at Christmas whether we paid the rent or not. He died last November and we have sadly missed the ham.

The ones who are prepared to see these changes and not crumble in fear will be the pillars on which others will lean when nothing makes sense to them. It doesn't mean you will provide the truth to them, it just means you are not falling down like they are.

You'll become a beacon and the light spreads far and wide. Many see it and are attracted to it. And they will flock to you like a moth to a candle. Even though they have not been aware or interested before, now they see they want to be a part of it.

Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'drive to lunch syndrome,' typical of edge nodes where nothing is planned in advance and all the development takes place in isolated 'pods'.

The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe... Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought.

Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone.

I want to eat lunch. You want to eat lunch. We're people in the world. We need to eat and talk.

People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

What people discard could make a nation

I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.' 'Feel bad,' he said.

This is the point of Babette.

Peace of mind, purpose, true fellowship.

She lived just three blocks away, in a faded brick building whose limitations and malfunctions she'd come to understand as the texture of her life, to be distinguished from a normal day's complaints.

These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People

Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.

What people in an exodus fear most immediately is that those in positions of authority will long since have fled, leaving us

In the world today everything is shared. What kind of misery is it that can't be shared?