Quotes About Community

Is there any way we can get society right if we don't first get the church right? If that is true, then is there any way we can get the church right if we don't first get families right? If that is true, is there any way we can get families right, if we don't first get marriages right? And if that is true, is there any way we can get marriages right if we don't get men right?

What's important is that I know how much you worry about shit. And what's also important is that I know a big part of your worry is that, no matter what group of friends you're in, no matter how long you've known them, you always assume you're the least-wanted person there. The one everyone else could do without.

If one of us falls, we all fall.

Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.

Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yourself left at all?" ~pg 11

Here I am. Here we are. Here we go. Here is all that matters.

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

No," Seth says, firmly, "what I've learned is that there actually is more. There's you guys. You guys are my more.

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don't remember nothing, don't remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone's ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it's true, but who knows?

He'd heard once that the only people who could effectively treat the trauma of surviving an airplane crash were other survivors of airplane crashes. You could only instinctively trust someone who had been there, who had seen it firsthand.

I want a campfire box.

When one falls we all fall.

The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.

And we dream the same in my town as you probably do in a city. We yearn the same, wish the same. We're just as screwed-up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else.

C'era una volta un uomo invisibile, che s'era stufato di non essere visto da nessuno. Non che fosse davvero invisibile. Il fatto era che la gente era abituato a non vederlo. E se nessuno ti vede, esisti davvero?

Libraries are not facing crisis, they are in crisis.

Along the edge of this green lived a man. His name is not important, as no one ever used it. The villagers only ever called him the Apothecary.

But fog does not stop the Land. We simply open our voices wider, passing the small steps in front of us along and along and along, each to each, until a whole picture of the march opens in front of us and our own limited physical sight in the fog becomes a single walking vision. The Land is not blind. The Land marches.

Men and their Noise. I don't know how they do it, how they stand each other

Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you ave any of yerself left at all?

One night a whole storehouse of wheat was taken, so completely and successfully it's obvious now there's people in the town and the army who've been helping 'em. Which is bad news for the town and the army.

Everyone's got something. Not even just us, everyone we know. (...) Except maybe the indie kids. They're probably the most normal ones out there.

I'd heard there were some gay girls in senior year who were dating each other right out in the open. But not any boys. Its different for boys. I mean, everybody knows somebody gay - duh, it's not 1980 or something - but not at school. At school, it was a secret, and you were on your own.

I]ndividual readers may conceivably choose (or be led) to regard a given text as literary in cases where such a response is not shared by others, but until their individual responses lose their idiosyncratic nature by being adopted by a larger interpretive community, such responses will be regarded as being to a greater or lesser degree aberrant, and the offender will be regarded as lacking in good taste or good sense or both.