Quotes About Community

Each spring we go to big banquets, press and politicians all done up in formal dress, where everyone applauds the awarding of prizes to journalists who have exposed the crumminess of the political leaders sitting at the head table, joining in the ovation and fun. Lots of jokes are made. Lots of hands are shaken. It is a community affair.

Not to mention the loneliness. And at the same time, the crowdedness. The never being really alone, just to think, to rest or to do something private - anything private. You can`t even got to toilet in private. And if you want company, real company, not just people hanging about making a noise, that`s when you realize how lonely you are.

Pero estamos todos entrelazados, como las hebras de un trozo de tela, y nos apoyamos mutuamente, por suerte o por desgracia.

There were times when everybody in the house has the flu. You're cleaning up vomit and it's 2 in the morning, and you're wishing there was somebody else there to help you.

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star...

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them.

Sisterhood," she said, "is about being together with other women in a cause that allows all women to make the individual choices they want. Because as long as women are separate from one another, organized around competition—like in a children's game where only one person gets to be the princess—then it will be the rare woman who is not in the end narrowed and limited by our society's idea of what a woman should be.

The world is so enormous, but if you have places where they know what you like to drink, then all is well.

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives.

But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire—whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

In the old days of Take Back the Night, you could march with other women and feel that all the rapists of the world were small and powerless.

If the twenty-first century taught you anything, it was that your words belonged to everyone, even if they actually didn't.

Nor is it simply the small socialist gatherings Joe attends, though he hates to be a joiner, can't stand to be part of a group, even for a cause he believes in like this one, sitting earnest and cross-legged on someone's mildewed carpet and just listening, just taking information in, not offering anything of his own.

The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers

Now they were gathering because the world was unbearable, and they themselves were not.

It's so wonderful that all of you have so much more freedom than I did. But along with that freedom can sometimes come a sense that you don't need other women. And that isn't true.

Families always seem to me like this weird accident." "What do you mean?" Opal asked. "I don't know," said Erica. She gestured with both hands, fingers splayed. "It's almost as if a bunch of people who have absolutely no reason to be together all drew straws and somehow wound up on the same commune.

Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY, the women were waking up.

Jonah was a skeptic, the way all decent scientists were, but his skepticism was outmaneuvered by the good feelings that he now connected with being here among these people. This was what a family felt like; this was what a family was.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the survivors of a plane crash