Quotes About Community

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you see. Roots to leaves, yes—those you can, in part, see. But it is more—it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.

And like all of us, your existence changes the world.

Selim, you will speak with your kin and your friends in Gurneh; perhaps some of them will respond to direct threats--questions, I mean to say.

She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people.

But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

One is left so much on one's own. People are shy of the bereaved. They don't quite know what to be.

Not the least of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your dreams to your satisfaction?

The passion of being forever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible.

see a little village a mile ahead of us with a venerable church on a mound in the middle of it gravely presiding over the surrounding wide parish of corn.

It's in the air. You have to get fond of people here.

When you have no real power, go public—really public. The public is where the real power is. Those

Of course, not every kid has the same risk of becoming a victim. A large number of those gun deaths occur in poor neighborhoods.

We need to live our values, to be the kind of nation that invests in opportunity, not just for some of us, but for all of us.

In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.

Shoving the ends at him, I headed for the common. It wasn't far away: a green, tree-lined oasis, brightened with many seasonal varieties of Coca-Can discardus, Crisp-packetus-cheese-and-onionus, and the occasional, fragrant dog turd underfoot.

I had a dream that I was being drowned in a flood and I realized it was a flood of people.

A great stag woven of rushes and fluttering with green ribbons was borne through the streets to the music of pipe and tabor. Crowds of women surrounded it, leaping and grabbing at the ribbons.

One man alone can give up and subside into the cold and die, far more easily than two together, who will both brace and provoke each other, wrangle and support, give each other warmth and challenge each other's endurance. (The Virgin in the Ice, p. 87 of 200)

You have not lived here among us. She did. You are English, she was Welsh, she knew us, and was never so moved against us that she withdrew or complained. We know she is there, no need to exclaim or make any great outcry. If we have needs, she knows it, and never asks that we should come with prayers and tears, knocking our knees on the ground before her. If she grudged a few brambles and weeds, she would have found a means to tell us. Us, not some distant Benedictine house in England!

of another, and he who received more accordingly must not preen himself on being supplied beyond his brothers, and he that received less but enough must not grudge the extra bestowed on his brothers. And above all, no grumbling, no envy.

Master Thomas, for the child that should be born to Aline and Hugh, for young Philip and the parents who had recovered him, for all who suffered injustice and wrong, and sometimes forgot they had a resource beyond the sheriff.

If your crisis has turned into a long-lasting trial, it's more important than ever that you surround yourself with intelligent, caring friends who will be in it with you for the long haul. The greater the spiritual battle, the more there is likely at stake—in your life and in the spiritual realm. Gird yourself for battle, and refuse to give in or give up.

Presentational immediacy is our immediate perception of the contemporary external world, appearing as an element constitutive of our own experience. In this appearance the world discloses itself to be a community of actual things, which are actual in the same sense as we are.