Country Town Quotes & Sayings

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she'd ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn't very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). — Jane Smiley

Geology ... offers always some material for observation ... [When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks. — Archibald Geikie

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said. — Willa Cather

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns. — Tom Spanbauer

When I am in the country, I never wish to leave it; and when I am in town It is pretty much the same. They have each their advantages, and I can be equally happy in either. — Jane Austen

They who have already enjoyed the crowds and noise of the great city, know their desire to return is little more than the restlessness of a vacant mind, that they are not so much led by hope as driven by disgust, and wish rather to leave the country than to see the town. — Samuel Johnson

Speaker Boehner needs to understand the urgency for reform. Until the House passes a bill that includes a pathway to citizenship, we will continue to be in the streets, at town hall meetings and on the phones, demanding justice for the 11 million aspiring Americans in our country. — Eliseo Medina

The tragedy for so many town councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right. But — Bill Bryson

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed. — Barry Hannah

Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes. — Bobbie Ann Mason

I'm a small-town kid who grew up with a cornfield in the back yard and dreaming of serving my country in public office. — Mike Pence

Did you call someone and tell them you're safe?"
"Called and told 'em I'm not dead. Not so sure about safe
yet. — Jamie Farrell

Molly, a home is not a place. It's not a country or a town or a building or possession. Home is with the other half of your soul, the person who shares your grief and helps you carry the burden of loss. Home is with the person who throughout it all never gives up on you and brings you eternal happiness. That, Molly dear, is your home sweet home. — Tillie Cole

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. — Henry James

The motivation I possessed to serve my country is what got me out of the small town of Lyons, Texas where I grew up, and into the world of service, love of country, helping others, and being an American soldier." (Page 90). — Kenneth A. Bracewell

It gives him an eerie feeling to sit in London reading about streets - Waalstraat, Buitengracht, Buitencingel - along which he alone, of all the people around him with their heads buried in their books, has walked. But even more than by accounts of old Cape Town is he captivated by stories of ventures into the interior, reconnaissances by ox-wagon into the desert of the Great Karoo, where a traveller could trek for days on end without clapping eyes on a living soul. Zwartberg, Leeuwrivier, Dwyka: it is his country, the country of his heart, that he is reading about. — J.M. Coetzee

Hell, they'd say in the country club locker room, you know how Milt's getting his. Everybody knew, bearing testimony to the fact that suburban vice, like a peeling nose, is almost impossible to conceal. It went all over town, this talk, like a swarm of bees, settling down lazily on polite afternoon sun porches to rise once more and settle down again with a busy murmur among cautious ladylike foursomes on the golf course, buzzing pleasurably there amid ladylike whacks of the golf ball and cautious pullings-down of panties which bound too tightly. Everybody knew about their affair and everybody talked about it, and because of some haunting inborn squeamishness it would not have relieved Loftis to know that nobody particularly cared. — William Styron

Heard a rumor you can't cook," he said.
She didn't look away from her reading. "You know rumors.
They're always true."
She had him there. According to some of the tabloids, he had fourteen love children, two with aliens and one with the sister of Bigfoot. — Jamie Farrell

Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus. — Sylvia Plath

In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible. — Elizabeth Goudge

Shy South comes home to her farm to find a blackened shell, her brother and sister stolen, and knows she'll have to go back to bad old ways if she's ever to see them again. She sets off in pursuit with only her cowardly old step-father Lamb for company. But it turns out he's hiding a bloody past of his own. None bloodier. Their journey will take them across the lawless plains, to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feuds, duels, and massacres, high into unmapped mountains to a reckoning with ancient enemies, and force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, a man no one should ever have to trust ... — Joe Abercrombie

So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean? Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The American Scholar — Haven Kimmel

In what neighborhood - town or city, rural area or village in the country - could I raise a brown boy and believe that no harm could ever come to him, where — Ana Castillo

When I moved to Brighton from London in 1995, I was struck by what I thought of as its townliness. A town, it seemed to me, was that perfect place to live, neither city nor country, both of which like to think they are light years apart but actually have a great deal in common. — Julie Burchill

One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing. — James Howard Kunstler

Well, I want to go to South America."
"Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to that."
"But you've never been to South America."
"South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same. This is a good town. Why don't you start living your life in Paris? — Ernest Hemingway,

Help, and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause, incredible things will happen in the world you live in. — Tom Hanks

For many people it is depressing even to move house. A lost fragment of life always remains. To move to another town, settle in a foreign country, is for everyone a major decision. But, to be suddenly driven forth, within twenty-four hours, from one's home, one's work, the reward of years of steady industry. To become a helpless prey of help. To be sent defenceless out to Asiatic highroads, with several thousand miles of dust, stones, and morass before one. To know that one will never again find a decently human habitation, never again sit down to a proper table. Yet this is all nothing. To be more shackled than any convict. To be counted as outside the law, a vagabond, whom anyone has the right to kill unpunished. — Franz Werfel

The government's objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their level of ability, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers. — Peter Fraser

I realize that the memories I cherish most are not the first night successes, but of simple, everyday things: walking through our garden in the country after rain; sitting outside a cafe in Provence, drinking the vin de pays; staying at a little hotel in an English market town with Larry, in the early days after our marriage, when he was serving in the Fleet Air Arm, and I was touring Scotland, so that we had to make long treks to spend weekends together. — Vivien Leigh

I love Nashville. It's such a great town, and I'm a huge country music fan. That's what I listen to on the radio in the car. — Joanna Garcia

Carl Bridenbaugh's study of colonial cities, Cities in the Wilderness, reveals a clear-cut class system. He finds: The leaders of early Boston were gentlemen of considerable wealth who, in association with the clergy, eagerly sought to preserve in America the social arrangements of the Mother Country. By means of their control of trade and commerce, by their political domination of the inhabitants through church and Town Meeting, and by careful marriage alliances among themselves, members of this little oligarchy laid the foundations for an aristocratic class in seventeenth century Boston. — Howard Zinn

I had to drive to Minneapolis once, and went on a back road just to see the country. But there was nothing to see. It's just flat and hot, and full of corn and soybeans and hogs. Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest thing is the flies. — Bill Bryson

I think the editorial page of the Washington Post is the best in the country. I think the editorials - considering it's a liberal town, liberal constituency and from the liberal tradition - I think it's the best editorial page around. It's quite balanced. — Charles Krauthammer

Beth's not on that train?"
"Nope. She's not even in that station, that town, or that part of whatever country your metaphor lives in. — J.R. Ward

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now
North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere — Hector Tobar

Suppressed I Rise" is the true story of a courageous mother from South Africa and her two daughters. It started when Adeline, the granddaughter of missionaries from Germany, met and fell in love with a handsome young teacher, Richard Beck. They were married in the Cape Province of South Africa and would have been able to enjoy a normal life if it hadn't been for the dark clouds of World War II. Their first child Brigitte was born in Cape Town in 1936, just as Germany was ordering its citizens to return to Germany, the Vaterland. Richard Beck obeyed his country's call and returned to Mannheim bringing his family with him. — Hank Bracker

Junk stands and antique markets are the perfect place to pick up clues about the history of a country, region or town. — Judith Miller

If I just think of the churches in my little town here because I've been to every one of them, there are 27, there aren't that many where you walk in and say wow, people are excited about their faith. A lot of them, it's just what you do on Sunday at 10:00 or 11:00 and that's not true in other countries. In some other countries, it's still a very lively, vibrant experience. — Philip Yancey

VI. Hundreds of People VII. Monseigneur in Town VIII. Monseigneur in the Country IX. The Gorgon's Head X. Two Promises XI. A — Charles Dickens

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild ... savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical. — Bill Bryson

There's one place, and one place only, to see polar bears in America. You have to travel to the country's northernmost point, the very apex of Alaska's North Slope, to the permafrost shores that stretch out on either side from the Inupiat town of Kaktovik. — Michael Shnayerson

Or consider how we citizens of rich countries obtain our oil and minerals. Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of tiny Equatorial Guinea, sells most of his country's oil to American corporations, among them Exxon Mobil, Marathon, and Hess. Although his official salary is a modest $60,000, this ruler of a country of 550,000 people is richer than Queen Elizabeth II. He owns six private jets and a $35 million house in Malibu, as well as other houses in Maryland and Cape Town and a fleet of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. Most of the people over whom he rules live in extreme poverty, with a life expectancy of forty-nine and an infant mortality of eighty-seven per one thousand (this means that more than one child in twelve dies before its first birthday). — Peter Singer

The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep,and to study; its extremes of squalor and of splendor do not stimulate, but sadden me; certain phases of its society I profoundly value, but would sacrifice them to the heaven of country quiet, if I had to choose between. — Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country. — Aravind Adiga

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others. — Mohsin Hamid

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements. — Adam Smith

The counties with the highest per capita income aren't near New York City or Los Angeles - they're in the Washington, D.C. area - a one-company town where the company is the government. The three counties with the highest incomes in the entire country are all suburbs of Washington. Eleven of the 25 counties with the highest incomes are near Washington. — Ann Coulter

But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too far from where you live has a law that bars me from coming within five miles of its borders. — Lemony Snicket

Coca-Cola is the only business in the world where no matter which country or town or village you are in, if someone asks what do you do, and you say you work for Coca-Cola, you never have to answer the question, 'What is that?' — Muhtar Kent

The thing about Nashville is, it's not just country music ... There's rock & roll, there's every kind of music. It's just a music town ... There's so much fun stuff to get in to. — Connie Britton

One hundred and fifty years ago, the monster began, this country had become a place of industry. Factories grew on the landscape like weeds. Trees fell, fields were up-ended, rivers blackened. The sky choked on smoke and ash, and the people did, too, spending their days coughing and itching, their eyes turned forever toward the ground. Villages grew into town, towns into cities. And people began to live on the earth rather than within it. — Patrick Ness

On the morning of September 17, together with Mrs. Washington and my three children, I started for Atlanta. I felt a good deal as I suppose a man feels when he is on his way to the gallows. In passing through the town of Tuskegee I met a white farmer who lived some distance out in the country. In a jesting manner this man said: "Washington, you have spoken before the Northern white people, the Negroes in the South, and to us country white people in the South; but Atlanta, to-morrow, you will have before you the Northern whites, the Southern whites, and the Negroes all together. I am afraid that you have got yourself in a tight place." This farmer diagnosed the situation correctly, but his frank words did not add anything to my comfort. — Booker T. Washington

There is not a man of common sense who would not chuse to be agreeable in company; and yet, strange as it may seem, very few are — The Town And Country Magazine. Vol. 11, 1779

Auroville (City of Dawn) is an 'experimental' township in Viluppuram district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India near Puducherry in South India. It was founded in 1968 by Mirra Richard (since her definitive settling in India called '[The] Mother') and designed by architect Roger Anger. Auroville is meant to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity. — Mirra Alfassa

In the country, a good he-snowstorm makes a lovely design for putting on a holiday greetings card. In the city it just makes an infernal mess for the street-cleaning department to wrestle with. ... By midday of next day it would be licked to a custard - molten into puddles of foggy slush where cellar furnaces exhaled their hot breath up out of sidewalk gratings, roiled and fouled and crunched down beneath the heels and the tires of the town, flung up in crumply billows by the conscripted shovel crews, and under the park trees and on the park meadows would show a stark and grayish cast like the face of a grimy pauper whose corpse the undertaker scanted. And the longer it stayed there the sootier and the dirtier and the deader-looking it would get to be. You may worry the city with your winter weathers; you cannot keep her licked for any great length of time. — Irvin S. Cobb

All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time...Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which "the town was illuminated." There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated...The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary...It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater...Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness. — G.K. Chesterton

Everyone called it losing Mother, but she wasn't lost. She was gone, and no matter where I went - another town, another country, Fairyland, or Gnome Caverns - I wouldn't find her — Gail Carson Levine

In our part of the country, spring passes quickly. If you haven't been out for five days, you find the trees in bud. If you don't see the trees for another five days, you discover that they've put out leaves. In another five days, they're so green you wouldn't recognize them. It makes you wonder: Can these be the same trees I saw a few days before? And you answer yourself: Of course they are. That's how fast spring goes by. You can almost see it. From far away it comes racing toward you. And when it reaches you it whispers in your ear, 'I'm here,' and then runs swiftly on.
Spring - what a rush it's in. Every place seems to be urging it to come. If it delays its arrival a bit, the sunlight fades and the earth turns to stone. Trees especially can't endure any delay. Let spring dally even briefly on the way, and many lives are lost. ("Spring In A Small Town") — Xiao Hong

When you travel around the country, you see what a tough town New York is: rude, competitive, a town where good, logical ideas are ignored in favor of unworkable ones. And yet, all these other towns are so dead and boring compared to New York. — Woody Allen

The rich man has his motorcar, His country and his town estate, He smokes a fifty-cent cigar And jeers at Fate. He frivols through the livelong day, He knows not Poverty, her pinch. His lot seems light, his heart seems gay; He has a cinch. Yet though my lamp burns low and dim, Though I must slave for livelihood- Think you that I would change with him? You bet I would! — Franklin P. Adams

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London ... but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country'.
Quoted in The Tale of Beatrix Potter a Biography by Margaret Lane, First Edition p 32-33 — Beatrix Potter

We need to work our level best in this legislative session to help grow Montana's economy, so that grandchildren can stay in Montana, grandchildren can visit their grandmother and grandfather by driving across town, not flying across the country. — Brian Schweitzer

They hadn't been good months. About as ugly as a wet warthog and as messed up as a bumblebee in a snowstorm. — Jamie Farrell

Meetings constitute the charm of travelling. Who does not know the joy of coming, five hundred leagues from one's native land, upon a Parisian, a college friend, or a neighbour in the country? Who has not spent a night, unable to sleep, in the little jingling stage-coach of countries where steam is still unknown, beside a strange young woman, half seen by the gleam of the lantern when she clambered into the carriage at the door of a white house in a little town? — Guy De Maupassant

The first of the telegrams arrived shortly after noon, and Jeeves brought it in with the before-luncheon snifter. It was from Aunt Dahlia, operating from Market Snodsbury, a small town of sorts a mile or two along the main road as it leaves her country seat.
It ran as follows:

Come at once. Travers.

And when I say it puzzled me like the dickens, I am understating it, if anything. As mysterious a communication, I considered, as was ever flashed over the wires. I studied it in a profound reverie for the best part of two dry Martinis and a dividend. I read it backwards. I read it forwards. As a matter of fact, I have a sort of recollection of even smelling it. But it still baffled me. — P.G. Wodehouse

I grew up in a very small, rural country town, and we didn't really have 'the arts.' — Steve Kazee

I feel like I am beginning to be a part of a musical community, but I wouldn't say I'm a country artist because I wouldn't want to invalidate anybody else or to even begin to be so preposterous as to think I can just skate into town and get some fans. — Sheryl Crow

Coming from a little suburban town, I wasn't a hip city kid. I was quite the opposite, really. Songs like 'Saturday's Kids' rang a bell for kids all over the country. That song was about the kids I grew up with. — Paul Weller

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) — W. H. Auden

She was still in the hotel bed of the AMTEX Hotel, the only place in town that catered to foreign visitors. The only refuge in a dangerous country besides the American Military's Kandahar Airbase just across the street. She looked around the room quickly and noted that she was alone and exactly where she'd been when she tried to jump into Jamey's dream. It fricking worked! She smiled. Finally, she'd entered Jamey's dream. And he'd jumped out with her. Thank God. — Kim Hornsby

Puttin' on a cowboy hat & a pair of boots doesn't make you country; Like puttin' on a ball gown & glass heels won't make me Cinderella. — Kellie Elmore

Kids are doing meth in every town in the country, Cat. Dang. Get your head out of your butt. — Lauren Myracle

See others as yourself. See families as your family. See towns as your town. See countries as your country. See worlds as your world. — Laozi

It was the last town in what was then a civilized country. Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant. "Taxes," Big Ross said, and laughed - but not in a funny way. — Stephen King

I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer. — Nelson Algren

This town, this country, this world, is full to the brim with clever people, and just look at it. Never been in such awful shape. Clever people don't give a damn about anybody but themselves. Too busy being clever. The world doesn't need anymore clever people. It needs people with wisdom. — Jon Steele

Detroit - and I'm not blowing smoke at anybody - is probably the greatest fan sports town in the country. They'll support anything. — William Clay Ford, Sr.

My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not, by any means, an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which men can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate. — Oscar Wilde

When D's cabin caught fire, D was out of the country. Half the town-Christians and drinkers alike-came out to fight the fire and loot the cabin. There were individual piles of loot, and fights over the piles. "That's my pile." "The hell it is, it's mine. — John McPhee

There is a cannibalism that's loose in our society in which public figures such as the Clintons could try to come into this town and do something good for this country and then they get hammered away even though they're trying to do the right thing. — David Gergen

Why one day in the country Is worth a month in town; Is worth a day and a year Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion That days drone elsewhere. — Christina Rossetti

But I'm old now and Ward has made himself rich and powerful. He has the resources to ensure that one day he'll perfect his standardising system and if that happens, instead of a thousand Wards there will be a hundred thousand, a million, a billion. He'll grow exponentially until there's nothing and no one else left. Just Ward, Ward, Ward in every house, in every town and every city, in every country in the world. Forever. — Steven Hall

Both Mitt and I have summer places up in New Hampshire on Lake Winnipesaukee. And a few summers ago I was taking my grandchildren and children to town in the boat for ice cream ... And I realized there was nobody in the boat to help me dock the boat, handle the ropes, do anything ... And I looked up and there was Mitt Romney. So he pulled me in, he tied up the boat for me. He rescued me just as he's going to rescue this great country. — J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr.

I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection. — Nevil Shute

I think I had the same notion most people have, which is it's simply a town that percolates around country music. Though country-music history is deep and richly steeped throughout the city, this is a place that's been expanding musically and culturally ... People coming from Europe and Canada-there are all kinds of different cultures and different music being represented here. It continues to blossom. — Joy Williams

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn - an illusion still in the land - rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence. — N. Scott Momaday

Boys,
I'm probably sleeping, but hopefully y'all got up on time. You need to be down at the factory by 9. Ask for Zeke.I listened to your interview with Starnes-it's good work, but I've changed my mind about some things.
At six hours per person, we'll never get through the whole town. I'd like you only to ask the following four questions: Where would you live if you could live anywhere? What would you do for a living if you didn't work for the factory? When did your people come to the country? And What do you think makes Gutshot special? I think that'll move things along nicely. They're expecting you at the factory. Lindsey will accompany you.
See you tonight.Hollis.
PS.I'm writing this note at 5:30., SO don't wake me up. — John Green

I had a blast on tour with Little Big Town. We got to play some beautiful rooms around the country - some really amazing old theaters. And it was just cool to see a band that's been together for so long. — Kacey Musgraves

The train whistled, and chuffed out of the station. The children pressed their noses to the window and watched the dirty houses and the tall chimneys race by. How they hated the town! How lovely it would be to be in the clean country, with flowers growing everywhere, and birds singing in the hedges! Pg 5 — Enid Blyton

There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is. — Rose Wilder Lane

And this is Kimmie Elias."
Kimmie inhaled a loud breath. "I had a dream you were the
love child of Bugs Bunny and the abominable snowman, but in my dream that was a good thing, and you lived in a mushroom that had
secret passages into outer space," she said.
And here he thought he'd already heard it all. — Jamie Farrell

It is not true what everyone always says that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. — Italo Calvino

We were probably the last people in the country to get a VCR and we didn't have cable. There wasn't any admiration of glamour, no, 'I want to look like them or have that lifestyle', because everyone in my town had the same lifestyle. So I didn't think, 'Ooh, a movie star's birthday!' I just thought, 'What?' — Christina Hendricks

In Town VIII. Monseigneur in the Country IX. The Gorgon's Head X. Two Promises XI. A Companion Picture — Charles Dickens

It was the most popular tree-buying destination in Asheville. Lots were everywhere in the mountains of North Carolina - this was Christmas-tree-farm country, after all - so to distinguish themselves, the Drummonds offered friendliness and tradition and atmosphere. And free organic hot apple cider. Asheville loved anything organic. It was that type of town. — Stephanie Perkins

Back in those days there was still an unbroken stretch of heath that lay on the route of our excursions, all that was left of a heath that once had extended almost up to the town on the one side and almost to the little village on the other. Here the honeybees and white-gray bumblebees hummed over the fragrant blossoms of heather, and the beautiful gold-green beetles ran among the plants; here in the sweet clouds of the erica and the resinous bushes hovered butterflies that could be found nowhere else on this earth. — Theodor Storm

Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on. — Michael Schur

In Rome you long for the country. In the country you praise to the skies the distant town. — Horace

If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town — William Faulkner