Quotes About Provincial

His arduous revolutionary career was not, however, a distinguished one. For upwards of a decade he remained a provincial revolutionary operating in his native Transcaucasus. He had no dramatic anti-tsarist exploits to his credit, and prior to 1913 he contributed no writings that helped shape Bolshevism as an ideological current. He was one of the party's practical workers—an organizer, conspirator, propagandist, and journalist.

I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Cambridge... the place bowled me over. Leeds, where I had been born and brought up... but though I was not blind to its architectural splendours... I was famished for antiquity. I had never been in a place of such continuous and unfolding beauty as Cambridge and, December 1951 being exceptionally cold, the Cam was frozen and a thick hoarfrost covered every court and quadrangle giving the whole city an unreal and celestial beauty. And it was empty, as provincial places in those days were.

My impressions of contemporary France were mixed. I personally felt that it was quite provincial.

Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.

There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it, or if it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of the universe and the seat of all knowledge.

Japan continues to give this unexampled view of history. It also offers the excitement of watching change. Old and new in these small provincial cities continue to exist side by side, and the new is often built directly beside, rather than directly on top of. One may, for a time, compare; for a space, see history in the gap. Very attractive to a heritage-starved, history-parched American.

Cascadia is, after all, a place of the heart as much as it is a specific landscape. No one really agrees what its physical borders are. Is it a bioregion? Is it a repressed nation defined by state and provincial borders that strains to free itself from the smothering clutches of the imperialist US of A and Canada? Are its borders defined by the tectonic plates of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, or the spawning grounds of the enigmatic Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus?

Thus the heirs of Rus are not the Ukrainians, with their funny language and quaint provincial ways, but the far more successful Russians themselves.

The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.

The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.

Singapura means lion-city; prehistoric, myopic, Sanskrit-speaking visitors having spotted a mangy tiger or two in the mangroves. Sly Malays sometimes call it Singa pura-pura, which means pretending to be a lion.It is a profoundly provincial town pretending to be a metropolis.

In any event, colonization and the grant of lands were provincial matters.

I grew up in Indianapolis, Ind., then a conservative, provincial city. Anglophilia was the first foreign language I was exposed to. Or maybe it was a way of one-upping the local white people. Or maybe it was an early manifestation of homohood.

Berlin is like being abroad in Germany. It's German, but not provincial.

I'm a child of provincial France.

I love provincial politics.

You're just poor cornball provincial people, you critics; you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

Denmark can be very small, provincial, and mediocre.

The candidates before you know that the IFP has set up a system of deployed IFP national and provincial leaders who are not only monitoring the performance of candidates during these elections but will also do so after these elections.

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.

New York is just as provincial as anyone else.

I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place.