Quotes About Community

Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming.

Simply being a social isolate as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading - to reconnect to that community.

It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty's greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.

three Crossroads sophomores were shoveling snow with a zeal that suggested their work was voluntary.

She didn't need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.

I am a firm believer in family life. I feel that the home is the foundation of true happiness...much more the foundation than the church (or temple) or the school can ever be.

Gary si augurava che ogni ulteriore migrazione verso le coste venisse proibita, e tutti gli abitanti del Midwest fossero incoraggiati a tornare ai cibi pesanti, agli abiti fuori moda e ai giochi di società, in modo da mantenere una riserva nazionale strategica di idiozia

They're all about being the special one, the chosen one. 'Only you can save the world from Evil.' That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They're the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about them.

Chip, who much preferred queer theory to queer practice

As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not.

Marion had long been inspired, intellectually, by Russ's conviction that a gospel of love and community was truer to Christ's teachings than a gospel of guilt and damnation. But lately she'd begun to wonder.

Jonathan Franzen

L'America, [...] il paese della libertà, il luogo dei grandi spazi aperti dove un figlio poteva ancora sentirsi speciale. Niente, però, disturba questa sensazione quanto la presenza di altri esseri umani che si sentono altrettanto speciali.

To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

A caste society," wrote U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel 25 years ago, "violates the style of American democracy.… The nation in effect does not have a truly public school system in a large part of its communities; it has permitted what is in effect a private school system to develop under public auspices.… Equality of educational opportunity throughout the nation continues today for many to be more a myth than a reality.

When I had asked Mrs. Flowers how she held up in the face of all the death and violence within her neighborhood, she had given me a simple answer: "This family talks to God.

Segregation, he concluded, "is neither sought nor imposed by healthy Ã¢â'¬Â¦ human beings.

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.

Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the tables center. 'To the human heart!' Diners at other tables glanced to see what was the matter.