Towns Quotes - Page 11

• They drove a long way through the snowy woods, till they came to the town of Pepin. Mary and Laura had seen it once before, but it looked different now.

  Laura Ingalls Wilder

  Long, Different, Woods

  Laura Ingalls Wilder (200?). “The little house treasury”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Believe, Men, Role Models

  7 Copy quote

• I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Football, Team, Sacrifice

  "Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades". www.elle.com. May 20, 2009.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away.

  William Wycherley

  Country, Night, House

  'The Country Wife' (1672-3) act 1, sc. 1

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• A total of 1,580 people, the civilian population, suffered as a result of the bloody wave of terrorist acts that swept over Moscow and other towns and villages of our country.

  Boris Yeltsin

  Country, People, Population

  Boris Yeltsin's speech to the summit of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Istanbul, news.bbc.co.uk. November 18, 1999.

  85 Copy quote

  Show source

• My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New York City?

  Henny Youngman

  New York, Dad, Drinking

  11 Copy quote

• Social Democratic and trade union organs have approved of the illegal invasion of Belgium, of the massacre of suspected guerrillas, as well as their wives and children, as well as the destruction of their homes in various towns and districts.

  Clara Zetkin

  Children, Home, Wife

  24 Copy quote

• Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  America, People, Deserve Better

  "Come Hell or High Water". Book by Michael Eric Dyson, www.today.com. 2006.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• We still have community, but we don't seem to have local community. Even in a small town where you know your neighbors and your mother's down the street, they're not in arm's length.

  Helen Fisher

  Mother, Community, Arms

  "Motherhood 2.0: It takes an (online) village" by Adrienne Mand Lewin, www.today.com. October 12, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think the perspective that small-town directors bring to films is very different.

  Anurag Kashyap

  Thinking, Perspective, Directors

  4 Copy quote

• Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

  Dorothy Allison

  Grief, Heart, Drunk

  5 Copy quote

• Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts.

  Peter S. Beagle

  Kings, Dark, Castles

  Peter S. Beagle (1968). “The Last Unicorn”, Roc

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• what sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.

  Bill McKibben

  Zoos, Animal, Exotic

  Bill McKibben (2014). “The Age of Missing Information”, p.124, Random House

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

  Franz Kafka

  People, Giving, Defense

  Franz Kafka (2009). “The Metamorphosis: And Other Stories”, p.35, Schocken

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

  Oscar Wilde

  Country, People, Importance Of Being Earnest

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “The Importance of Being Earnest: Revised Edition”, p.7, Bloomsbury Publishing

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.

  Michael Chabon

  Morning, Home, Destiny

  Michael Chabon (2011). “Wonder Boys”, p.55, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

  William Faulkner

  Moving, Reality, Bereavement

  William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck (1971). “William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck”

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately.

  Joshua Ferris

  Believe, College, Colorado River

  12 Copy quote

• What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!

  Charles Dickens

  Light, Opposites, People

  Charles Dickens (1853). “Bleak House”, p.156

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

  Nick Hornby

  Writing, Character, Class

  Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

  Thornton Wilder

  Time, Moving, Passion

  Thornton Wilder (1966). “Three Plays: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker”

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

  Tom Waits

  Song, Home, Records

  Song: Hold On, Album: Mule Variations

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he had left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Eye, Men, Doe

  Thomas Wolfe (1997). “Look Homeward, Angel”, p.508, Simon and Schuster

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• [In 1951] we were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when someone's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real.

  Bob Dylan

  Uncles, Children, Real

  Bob Dylan (2011). “Chronicles”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

  William Gibson

  New York, Lag, Hours

  William Gibson (2003). “Pattern Recognition”, p.8, Penguin

  16 Copy quote

  Show source