Quotes About Community

to people who are unhappy inside themselves. There is room for everyone. Everyone should be able to find somewhere on this earth to sit down.

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…" She thought: when will it come—that moment when that no longer resonates with people too tired of others and their demands, too exhausted to open their doors to those in need, too overwhelmed by the scale of humanity in all its billions to value individual human life.

I have warned you. Glasgow is full of Campbells.

Look at what very ordinary people have lost, and think about that for a moment. What has happened to working-class communities in Scotland? To miners, for example. To fishermen? Who? You might well ask. To men and women who work with their hands? Who again? These people are being swept away by globalisation. Swept away. Now they're all so demoralised that they're caught in the culture of permanent sick notes. And who speaks for the young Scottish male, as a matter of interest?

There's nowt so queer as folk?

She is a good housemother, that one," said Mma Ramotswe. Mma Potokwane agreed. "Whenever I hear people say that the country is going to the dogs—and there are such people, you know, Mma…

TEA IS ALWAYS THE SOLUTION

There are so many people who would love to be able to live in peace, but there are so many others who do not want to let them.

Siamo quelle che per prime hanno arato la terra quando Modise (Dio) la creò» , recitava un antico poema setswana. «Noi siamo quelle che preparano il cibo. Noi siamo quelle che badano agli uomini quando sono ancora bambini, quando sono giovanotti e quando sono vecchi e in procinto di morire. Noi ci siamo sempre. Ma siamo solo donne, e nessuno ci vede.»

Charity begins at home. Was that a narrow, selfish adage or was it simply an inescapable, bedrock fact of life in human society? Does the one in need on your doorstep have a greater claim than the one in need in a distant country--if the level of need in each case is exactly the same?

I can't, Tofu," said Bertie. "I can't join the cubs." Tofu was dismissive of Bertie's protestation. "You can't? Why? Is it because you think you'll fail the medical examination? There isn't one. That's the army you're thinking of. The cubs will take anyone – even somebody like you.

His eye fell on an advertisement inserted by the university. A new master's course was being offered in community relations. He read the short paragraph extolling the usefulness and topicality of this course. He wondered whether it would help, or whether it was no more than an aspiration—a course in what might be, but wasn't. But at least they were trying; at least they were not instituting a new master's programme in cynicism and indifference.

Alexander McCall Smith

people in Canada talk about feeling solitude? They sometimes call it a country of solitudes.

That's the way things are, don't you think? It's human nature. We do things for people we know. Everybody does that.

His particular insight was that we need to be at home; all his concerns with division within ourselves, with the tragic flaws in our nature, with the thwarting of love—all these point to the need that he felt we had within us to locate ourselves in a place we could live in with love, with people with whom we could share.

Look at the way people try to make points of contact with others when they meet. Look at the way you instinctively try to establish whether somebody you meet for the first time knows somebody you know.

So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness.

Los Angeles is seven suburbs in search of a city.

This is the Tree of Forgetfulness. All the headmen here plant one of these trees in the village. They say ancestors stay inside it. If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong'.

truthfully we were alone only in the ways Westerners speak of being alone in Africa, as if the few hundred locals by whom they are almost always surrounded are part of the landscape, instead of part of humanity.

The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives.

Motherhood—the way too many of us do it alone now—without an exaltation of female relatives, without a heft of knowing matrons to buoy us up, is unnatural.

And the world is where we belong, all of it.