community Quotes

“‘That’s one of the reasons we run this place all nice and busylike. You get lazy, you get sad. Start givin’ up. Plain and simple’”

“There were groceries and herbal shops, clothing shops and laundries, halls that housed the brotherhoods or the district associations or the offices of family clans. Uncle pointed out the building of the district from which any family came and to which I could go for help. Besides that there was the Lee family building, which would help everyone who was named Lee.”

“During the next year, I learned that the Company was more than a group of men wanting money. We were brothers: strangers in a strange land who had banded together for mutual help and protection. There were arguments, of course, but they were always worked out.”

“Also, an occupational hazard of writing is that you’ll have bad days. You feel not only totally alone but also that everyone else is at a party. But if you talk to other people who write, you remember that this feeling is part of the process, that it’s inevitable.”

“Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

“I learned at a young age that people were happy when I asked them about themselves, and I listened and retained the things they told me. I found that by sharing my personal experiences, like through my blog, we’re not alone - that the most shameful, personal, specific things you’re going through are actually universal. You can laugh about it. I want to make a contribution that matters, and I want to be as vulnerable and raw as possible so other people feel less alone. I want to make people happy and make them laugh - even if it’s at my own expense.”

“When men are no longer united amongst themselves by firm and lasting ties, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them, unless you can persuade every man whose concurrence you require that this private interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his exertions to the exertions of all the rest.”

“Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.”

“If men are to remain civilized, or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.”

“I have not a farthing, my friend, and all over the globe there is no letting of blood or taking a glister, without paying, or somebody paying for you.”

“When a group or community doesn’t tolerate dissent and disagreement, it forgoes any experience of inextricable connection. There is no true belonging, only an unspoken treaty to hate the same people. This fuels our spiritual crisis of disconnection.”

“To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.”

“Sherpas aren’t supposed to get altitude illness […]. Those who do become sick […] will often be blacklisted from future employment on expeditions.”

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.”

″‘All these people,’ the mouth organ man said, ‘are just like you, they’re tired, hungry, and a little bit nervous about tomorrow. This here is the right place for ya’ll to be ‘cause we’re all in the same boat. And you boys are nearer to home than you’ll ever get.‘”

“And there were more people sitting around than I first thought too … They were all the colors you could think of, black, white and brown, but the fire made them look like they were different shades of orange. There were dark orange folks sitting next to medium orange folks sitting next to light orange folks.”

“They had worked two and three jobs, put children through high school and college, and become pillars of their community. I admired them, but I knew the whole time that I was merely encountering the survivors...”

“The crews walked the blocks of the neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power.”

“And we heard suddenly that we were laughing, laughing aloud, laughing as if there were no power left in us save laughter.”

“We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, One, indivisible and forever.”

“We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike.”

“Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past . . . but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must.”

“They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.”

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

“You had to study hard to see any expression at all, but it was a look I was coming to know. She appeared pretty satisfied at the way things had turned out. And she’d returned law and order to the town she claimed she didn’t give two hoots about.”

“This day I shalt have to do with an idle curious man, with an unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious man; an unsociable uncharitable man. All these ill qualities have happened unto them, through ignorance of that which is truly good and truly bad. But I that understand the nature of that which is good, that it only is to be desired, and of that which is bad, that it only is truly odious and shameful: who know moreover, that this transgressor, whosoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same blood and seed, but by participation of the same reason, and of the same divine particle; How can I either be hurt by any of those, since it is not in their power to make me incur anything that is truly reproachful?”

“Nature has so made us, that we all love to be flattered and to please ourselves with our own notions: the old crow loves his young, and the ape her cubs.”

“As always, words fail when you most want to say the right thing.”

“You will not clean this up. If there are people in our community who are disparaged and hated and left out because they are mojados (wetbacks) . . . Then we shall be proud to call ourselves a wetback church.”

“Mack, that’s because you’re seeing only the institution, a man-made system. That’s not what I came to build. What I see are people and their lives, a living, breathing community of all those who love me, not building and programs.”

“Here it is. Here’s the love. Here’s the love: it’s in marriage and parenting. It’s in family and friends. It’s in sacrifice and forgiveness. It’s in dinner around the coffee table and long walks. It’s in the hands and faces of the people we see every day, in the whispers of our prayers and hymns and songs. It’s in our neighborhoods and churches, our classrooms and living rooms, on the water and in the stories we tell.And let me tell you where it’s not: it’s not in numbers—numbers in bank accounts, numbers on scales, numbers on report cards or credit scores.″

“We seek to create loving communities of kinship precisely to counteract mounting lovelessness, racism, and the cultural disparagement that keeps us apart.”

“These words aren’t peaceful. Then why do they make me feel calm?” Ky asks. “I think it’s because when we hear it we know we’re not the only ones who ever felt this way.”

“The lottery was conducted – as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program – by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic activities.”

“Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally.”

“Daughters draw with their husbands’ families, Tessie,”

“Guess we better get started, get this over with, so we can go back to work.”

“That night for the first time in my life I realized that it is the physical presence of people and their spirits that gives a town life. With the absence of so many people, the town became scary, the night darker, and the silence unbearably agitating.”

“On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.”

“In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. ‘To Arthur,’ they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

“Through this common search, hospitality becomes community. Hospitality becomes community as it creates a unity based on the shared confession of our basic brokenness and on a shared hope.”

“The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions; most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around.”

“Scripture knows nothing of a solitary Christian. People of faith are always members of a community.”

“That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. . . .

“Let us stop stereotyping government and individuals as absolute villains or absolute saviors, and recognize that each must be part of the solution. Let us use government, as we have in the past, to further the common good.”

“In times of profound and overwhelming social change like the present, however, extreme views hold out the appeal of simplicity. By ignoring the complexity of the forces that shape our personal and collective circumstances, they offer us scapegoats. Yet they fail to provide a viable pathway from the cold war to the global village.”

“We were all enclosed by the same fence, bumping into one another, fighting, celebrating. Showing one another our best and worst, revealing ourselves . . . as if that fence had created a circle of trust. A brotherhood.”

“The simple message of It Takes a Village is as relevant as ever: We are all in this together.”

“Whoever is persecuting them, and all those who tacitly support this persecution, would realize that to persecute them would mean persecuting at least 10 percent of the population—including their sons, daughters, neighbors and friends—even their own parents. It would be instantly untenable.”

“The dominance of the Circle stifles competition and is dangerous to our way of free-market capitalism.”

“Well, life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”

“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn’t want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”

“Ironically, as we discovered and distinguished ourselves, a new collective came into being—a vitality, a presence, a spirit that had not been there before.”

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

“I’ve been thinking . . . all this time, while I was sitting in my chair. Those white doctors haven’t helped you at all. Maybe we had better send for someone else.”

“I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839.”

“All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down”

“In one sense, we were huddled in there, bonded togethher in seeking security and warmth and comfort from each other, and we didn’t know it. All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.”

“Where the really sincere white people have got to do their ‘proving’ of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is — and that’s in their own home communities.”

“A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars.”

“I reflected many, many times to myself upon how the American Negro has been entirely brainwashed from ever seeing or thinking of himself, as he should, as a part of the nonwhite peoples of the world.”

“I don’t care how nice one is to you, the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

“If a person wanted to get to the moon, there was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions—exactly which way to go and what to do to get there; it depended on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone.”

“We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.”

“She is not béké like you, but she is béké, and not like us either.”

″‘What you do with her money, eh?’ Her voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said ‘money.’ I thought, of course, that is what all the rigamarole is about. I no longer felt dazed, tired, half-hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready to defend myself.”

“The individual must realize that his hours of aloneness react upon the community. In his solitude he can sunder and besmirch the fellowship, or he can strengthen and hallow it.”

″(Christophine) had a quiet voice and a quiet laugh (when she did laugh), and though she could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois, she took care to talk as they talked.”

“Cecilia was weird, but we’re not ... We just want to live. If anyone would let us. ”

“It was their talk about Christophine that changed Coulibri, not the repairs or the new furniture or the strange faces. Their talk about Christophine and obeah changed it.”

“Each member of community gives himself to it, at the moment of its foundation.”

“The law is not a “light” for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. ...The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely.”

“And now when I look about me upon my people in despair, I feel like crying and I wish and wish my vision could have been given to a man more worthy. I wonder why it came to me, a pitiful old man who can do nothing. Men and women and children I have cured of sickness with the power the vision gave me; but my nation I could not help.”

“Nephew, I know now what the trouble is! You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth. You must have the horse dance first for the people to see. Then the fear will leave you; but if you do not do this, something very bad will happen to you.”

“I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until there were only heaps and heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; […] they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.”

“But only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth. Sometimes I think it might have been better if we had stayed together and made them kill us all.”

“One ought not even consider that a particular citizen belongs to himself, but rather that all belong to the city; for each is part of the city.”

“He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he’d heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library.”

“One by one his links to life snap, Leo blue his best friend is now one of those leading the manhunt against him, the betrayal of the Olmech family, the death of his parents and Elisha........., his last link, the last thread, his saviour and friend time and again........SNAP!”

“A solemn story about a little sparrow that sacrifices himself for the betterment of his community.”

“Hobberdy Dick is the hobgoblin who protects Widford Manor and has for countless years.

“A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret.”

“Up, voices! Louder! Higher!”

“Foundling (noun) also wastrel. Stray people, usually children, found without a home or shelter on the streets of cities or even, amazingly, wandering exposed in the wilds. The usual destination for such orphaned children are workhouses, mills or mines, although a fortunate few may find their way to a foundlingery. Such a place can care for a small number of foundlings and wastrels, fitting them for a more productive life and sparing them the agonies of harder labor.”

“Everybody’s doing ups!”

“At each station somebody got out and the rest cried good-night, and sent messages to those at home. We felt they were all one family, they knew everybody and were friendly together.”

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone.”

“By exploring these philosophical issues and deldeeper ving into a deeper understanding of our own individual views, one can hope to develop a stronger sense of community and intrinsic satisfaction.”

“the working definition of leadership we are using here: Energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.”

“She’s sure, on no evidence whatsoever, that trees are social creatures. It’s obvious to her: motionless things that grow in mass mixed communities must have evolved ways to synchronize with one another.”

“For we are leaders of inclusiveness and community, of love, equity, and justice.”

“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn’t belong to…a person who really believes she doesn’t belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad.”