Quotes About Community

Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most poeple who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be - that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.

I want to live in a world full of explorers and generous souls rather than people who have voluntarily become prisoners of their own fortresses. I want to live in a world full of people who look into each other's faces along the path of life and ask, "Who are you my friend and how can we serve each other?

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere—wherever people are living out their lives. It's a city with a million centers.

Watch for the people whose eyes light up when you talk about your dream. Those are the people you keep.

of the 1950s. It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don't have to be anything in particular; they can just be.

Then I walk back over the bridge, through the old Jewish ghetto

So that's the final lesson, isn't it? When you set out in the world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping- Tutti.

And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the cneter of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere--wherever people are living out their lives. It's a city with a million centers.

When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere--wherever people are living out their lives. It's a city with a million centers.

And with me and Rosella—things were never bad. We just lived separate lives. What you gotta understand about South Brooklyn, is that the neighborhood itself is a family. You can't break up that family. Really, my wife is married to the neighborhood. It was the neighborhood who took care of her while I was in the service. The neighborhood still takes care of her now—and Angela, too.

There is not a street in Naples in which some tough little kid in shorts and mismatched socks is not screaming up from the sidewalk to some other tough little kid on a rooftop nearby. Nor is there a building in this town that doesn't have at least one crooked old woman seated at her window, peering suspiciously down at the activity below.

Moreover, they would likely agree that there is not one special person waiting for you somewhere in this world who will make your life magically complete, but that there are any number of people (right in your community, probably) with whom you can seal a respectful bond.

My friend Susan suggested that perhaps I should establish a not-for-profit relief organization called "Divorcées Without Borders.

Love the sojourner for you were once sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.

It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community, to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quiver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again.

as if wherever he taught was a dining room instead of a classroom, and we were all eating at his table.

have often thought that the terrible thing in communism was not just that we turned against each other. It was that we turned away from each other.

We went on growing food and eating and sleeping and I cooked for a big crowd here every day, all my family. What else could we do? You just go on, if you have to.

I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the gift of not belonging.

Some people think the big city's a scary place? That's nothing to compare to the backwoods.

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.

This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy.