Our Town Quotes & Sayings

Good plan," Freddy was saying. "Let's get some decent sleep. Tomorrow we can shake our gravy asses into town and do some sluething. — Ali Sparkes

Though I work in New York City, in an office about a mile from the World Trade Center, I was not in New York City when the planes struck. I was on a plane above the Atlantic Ocean, heading back to New York from a family reunion and celebration in Europe. I had said good-bye to my husband in London; he was staying for a wedding of a business friend. I couldn't wait to see my kids and my parents, who would be waiting for me at a Little League game in our town, about thirty-five miles from New York City. An hour and a half into the flight, I suddenly had the feeling that the plane was making a slow turn. Nobody else seemed to notice. I sat nervously, hoping I was imagining it. But then a stewardess made an announcement. "There has been a catastrophic event affecting all of North American airspace," she said. "We are returning — Lauren Tarshis

Libraries are a force for good. They wear capes. They fight evil. They don't get upset when you don't send them a card on their birthdays. (Though they will charge you if you're late returning a book.) They serve communities. The town without a library is a town without a soul. The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance. Libraries are the torch of the world, illuminating the path when it feels too dark to see. We mustn't allow that torch to be extinguished. — Libba Bray

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes. — Neil Young

We must let this town square, which has added a significant dimension to our political process, continue to flourish. — Russ Feingold

After that, things happened very quickly. She gave me a key to her house, and I gave her a key to my apartment. If we were in town, we spent every weekend together. She cooked for me - she was good in the kitchen, but then she was good everywhere. We watched the Friday night fights on TV, and on Saturday or Sunday afternoons we'd go for long walks in the mountains above Malibu. Occasionally we would go to a movie, slipping in after the lights went down. Whenever we went out, Barbara [Stanwyck] would wear a scarf over her head, or a kind of hat, so it would be hard to tell who she was. For the next four years, we became part of each other's lives. In a very real way, I think we still are. Barbara proved to be one of the most marvelous relationships of my life. I was twenty-two, she was forty-five, but our ages were beside the point. She was everything to me - a beautiful woman with a great sense of humor and enormous accomplishments to her name. — Robert Wagner

Who, on seeing a Parisian apartment house, has never thought of it as indestructible? A bomb, a fire, an earthquake could certainly bring it down, but what else? In the eyes of an individual, of a family, or even a dynasty, a town, street, or house seems unchangeable, untouchable by time, by the ups and downs of human life, to such an extent that we believe we can compare and contrast the fragility of our condition to the invulnerability of stone. — Georges Perec

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

It's easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That's really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that's a terrifying thing about fantasy, too. — Brent Weeks

To succeed, this movement will have to change our ideals in fundamental ways. It will have to kill off the traditional American dream, the idea of constant striving for a better future, symbolized by the middle-class goal of a rising income and the purchase of a little house with a yard - not to mention the freedom to move where you please, run your life, and govern your town with your neighbors when you get there. Greg Galluzzo, Obama's mentor and the man who created the grassroots crusade that inspired Building One America, dismisses the American dream as a sham. What really makes Americans move to the suburbs, says Galluzzo, is 'racism and greed. — Stanley Kurtz

A few years have gone and come around when we were sittin' at our favorite spot in town and you looked at me, got down on one knee. Take me back to the time when we walked down the aisle; the whole town came and our mammas cried. And you said "I do.", and I did, too. Take me home where we met so many years before; we'll rock our babies on the very front porch. After all this time, you and I. And I'll be eighty-seven you'll be eighty-nine, I'll still look at you like the stars that shine. In the sky. Oh, my my my. — Taylor Swift

I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor. — Anita Shreve

But even though our old home had physically seen better days, I knew in that moment that we had taken the soul of that house with us to our new home. And as I branched out and left our small town, I'd taken all the best bits of home life - the essence of its soul - with me wherever I went. It's the soul that matters most, after all. And even though over the years I've lived in everything from a cramped dorm room at school to a grand apartment in Paris and finally to our family town home in Santa Monica, I have taken the soul of home with me, wherever I am. — Jennifer L. Scott

I'm not saying a hunt isn't something we crave, but to a man, we hate to be manipulated. And this is our town, as much as any human's. Our home, and our neighbours and perhaps even our friends. You fall into the trap of thinking as Fallon does, that there are only heroes and villains, monsters and victims, and nothing between. We all stand in that space, crossing the line to one side, then the other. Even you. — Rachel Caine

The small town is passing. It was the incubator that hatched all our big men, and that's why we haven't got as many big men today as we used to have. Take every small-town-raised leader out of business and you would have nobody left running it but vice-presidents. — Will Rogers

The people I bring out of suspension to populate my town won't have Facebook or iPhones, iPads, Twitter, next-day delivery. They'll interact like our species used to. Face-to-face. And — Blake Crouch

I am a Magyr. I could crush your skull with my hands and drink this rat town under the table afterwards. And if I wanted to kill myself a passel of sailors, I'd bloody well do it with cannon, saber, and a fist in the teeth, not by batting my damn eyelashes. You'd be wise to remember it, Maggie, my love, and if we see a mermaid on our jaunt across the high seas, the best thing for all of us would be to let Sheapshank here put an arrow through her giggling head. — Catherynne M Valente

Everyone in our town has a story
but it's not the one he tells himself. Its author has a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred pens that never stop scribbling. — Carsten Jensen

The outsider hero is hero riding into town, he's the gunslinger, shame - the same thing, he didn't want to do it anymore, he wanted to live a different life but part of who you are sort of haunts you and you can't run away from evil and if you have special skills, and most people are mistreated, which is unfortunately in our world, we always need an equalizer, that type of character to come to our rescue. — Antoine Fuqua

Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I'd crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquites and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, til the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows-and still we rolled. — Jack Kerouac

We get so used to the gregarious nature of our towns and villages that we forget how crowded our existence has become. — Fennel Hudson

Sorry, ladies. I guess that's our cue. We like to storm into town, inflict maximum damage, and then disappear ... like a KISS concert. — Brian K. Vaughan

Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): "No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class." George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. And so on. On the other hand, town mechanics, laborers, and seamen, as well as small farmers, were swept into "the people" by the rhetoric of the Revolution, by the camaraderie of military service, by the distribution of some land. Thus was created a substantial body of support, a national consensus, something that, even with the exclusion of ignored and oppressed people, could be called "America. — Howard Zinn

We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault. — Germaine Greer

And in this way I have, during the years I have been regarded as grown up, lost nine situations, to the great mortification of my father, the architect of our town. I have served in various departments, but all these nine jobs have been as alike as one drop of water is to another: I had to sit, write, listen to rude or stupid observations, and go on doing so till I was dismissed. — Anton Chekhov

A Thunderstorm In Town
She wore a 'terra-cotta' dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom's dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
We sat on, snug and warm.
Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
Had lasted a minute more. — Thomas Hardy

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

I was a pretty lousy bass player. But the band I was in couldn't find a bass player in our small town and it was more important to have a bass than keyboards, so that's what I did. — Anne Boleyn

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

The drive was difficult, because at this point it seemed that everyone in town but the two of us had hopped onto the buzzing shadow entity train, and were loping around town as malevolent holes in our reality, emanating an energy that made the hairs on your arm stand and your bowels vibrate. Or maybe that was just the chemistry with Carlos I was feeling. — Joseph Fink

Things ain't never gone change in this town , Aibileen. We living in hell. Our kids is trapped. — Kathryn Stockett

Oh I know what they say about us in town, and I say, the hell with them! I tell you, I don't give a damn. I have got to be an old woman in the twinkling of an eye, and it is sort of a relief, I can tell you. I do what I want to now. Last week I traded all our eggs for ice cream at Holden's Grocery. Now that I have shrunk down little as a child, I figure I might as well act like one. I don't care. I like ice cream. Juney does too. We like to put bourbon in it, and make ourselves a milkshake. — Lee Smith

Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down ... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical. — Albert Camus

So - people a thousand years from now ... This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying. — Thornton Wilder

I think it's our obligation to play, Honor. It's just a game, so can I kiss you? — Robin Bielman

Lucy: Our teacher wants us to write an essay on praying. Charlie Brown: Praying is important when you wake up at two o'clock in the morning feeling sick from eating something dumb the day before. Lucy: I'll just say we were out of town and I didn't have time to write anything. — Charles M. Schulz

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a 'Public Safety Complex' around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith-esque fire station. — Rachel Maddow

Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature. — John Steinbeck

They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads? However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. — Karl Ove Knausgard

There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system. — Steven Chu

Tulsa was the kind of place where you could go to any door and borrow a cup of sugar. Everybody knew everybody. Truthfully, I don't even remember dealing with any racism in our town; we all got along. — Charlie Wilson

It's the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm - it's not life, it's egoism, laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit. — Anton Chekhov

I had no thought, that night - none, I am quite sure - of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since, that when we had stopped at the garden gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then, and there, that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time, and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill. — Charles Dickens

He was one
of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good
feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a
capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to. — Albert Camus

Really? We are being herded on a bus to drive across town to an all-boy academy where we disembark and join our lonely counterparts on a dance floor. Sounds like a scorecard situation to me. — Adriana Trigiani

Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region. — William Fulton

Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don't mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I'm talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine. Walking through an unsullied hour with an unsullied heart — Amor Towles

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing. — Kris Courtney

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

My wife was born and raised in Italy until she was about 9, and then she came to America, and her mom was a great cook, and they have great recipes, and whenever her mom would come into town, we would have all these friends just randomly showing up at our house, and eventually we figured out why. They wanted Mama's cooking. — Bill Rancic

But I enjoyed the feeling of wind in my hair, and I knew my father liked to see it blow straight out when we stood on the quay and watched the boats come in. And after all it was my only pride.
The train waited behind us, puffing and hissing through its valves, and even though it was only an hour's journey to Skagen, I had never been there.
'Can't we go to Skagen one day?' I asked. Being with Jesper and his friends had made me realize the world was far bigger than the town I lived in, and the fields around it, and I wanted to go travelling and see it.
'There's nothing but sand at Skagen,' my father said, 'you don't want to go there my lass. And because it was Sunday and he seldom said my lass, he took a cigar from his waistcoat pocket with a pleased expression, lit it, and blew out smoke into the wind. The smoke flew back in our faces and scorched them, but I pretended not to notice and so did he. — Per Petterson

Smell brings to mind ... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. — Diane Ackerman

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

So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy's seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection. — David Axelrod

To sit on the front steps - whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city - and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color. — Harvey Milk

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light. — Kat Rosenfield

You're both perfectly all right," she informed them. "And we will get Aurimere back, and our magic back, and our town back, and then we will have everything we need."

"We have some important stuff already," Ash offered tentatively.

Lillian frowned. "What do you mean?"

Jared surrendered himself to the strangeness of this situation, sank back onto the pillows himself with his head near Lillian's hip, and sighed heavily to attract his aunt's attention. "He wants to know you love him more than that stupid house."

"It is a very nice house," Aunt Lillian said, sounding offended. "Your ancestors are buried in the crypt of that house."

"Sure. Okay. We'll get our lovely creepy house back. When they bury me in that crypt, I want 'Jared, very inbred, deeply uncomfortable about it' on my tombstone. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible. — John Burnside

Since I was a very small boy, traveling from town to town, three hundred days a year, I learned to love this life. The cradlelike rock and sway of the train, the hospitality of our countrymen, the gentle hearts of our countrywomen. You will find that, as long as you keep moving, there is no end to the delights awaiting you. But you must keep moving, Feliu. Even when the heart skips; even when the view blurs. — Andromeda Romano-Lax

We wander in our thousands over the
face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the
seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me
that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends
those whom we
obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most
free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,
even those for whom
home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,
even they have to meet the
spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its
valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees
a
mute friend, judge, and inspirer. — Joseph Conrad

The lights were turned off and the film began to roll. It was eerie, thought Lucy, watching the images of Luther Read flicking across the screen. Maybe he was dead or maybe he was fighting for his life, but in the darkened room he was an enormous, living presence.
Then the film ended. The final image of Luther Read's smiling face had hardly faded when the announcement came.
"Luther Read, our Newspaperman of the Year, is dead."
That was incredible enough, but an even more shocking announcement followed.
"Remain in your seats, please, as the police will be collecting information from everyone. — Leslie Meier

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

Our ancestors, when about to build a town or an army post, sacrificed some of the cattle that were wont to feed on the site proposed and examined their livers. If the livers of the first victims were dark-coloured or abnormal, they sacrificed others, to see whether the fault was due to disease or their food. They never began to build defensive works in a place until after they had made many such trials and satisfied themselves that good water and food had made the liver sound and firm ... healthfulness being their chief object. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Set we forward; let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together. So through Lud's town march,
And in the temple of the great Jupiter
Our peace we'll ratify, seal it with feasts.
Set on there! Never was a war did cease,
Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace. — William Shakespeare

We weren't very professional; she could have gone to almost any town and put together a smoother ensemble, but we were pioneers, and professional musicians probably wouldn't have come up with what we did ... professional musicians probably wouldn't have given Janis Joplin the space to be herself, which was probably our greatest gift to her — Sam Andrew

the purpose of 'systematically shaking the foundations, systematically undermining society and all principles; for the purpose of demoralizing everyone and throwing everything into chaos, and then, once society had begun to totter as a result - and was sick and weakened, cynical and devoid of beliefs, yet still yearning for some guiding idea and self-preservation - they would suddenly take it into their hands, raising the banner of rebellion and relying on a complete network of groups of five, which would all be active at the same time, recruiting and making practical efforts to search out all the means and all the weak spots that could be exploited'. He concluded that here, in our town, Pyotr Stepanovich had organized only the first experiment in such systematic disorder, — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She shut the door and moved on to the floor-to-ceiling cabinets. "There is nothing here. Nothing. What do you eat?"
"Ah ... " Assail found himself looking at the cousins for aid.
"usually we take our meals in town."
The scoffing sound certainly appeared like the old-lady equivalent of Fuck that. "I need the staples. — J.R. Ward

We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring. — Richard Bach

If they [Mexicans] touch the hair of the head of one of our citizens, tell him [Commodore Dallas] to batter down and destroy their town and exterminate the inhabitants from the face of the earth! — Andrew Jackson

There are hundreds of reasons for Daniel and me
to be impossible. History has not been kind
to two boys who love each other like we do.
But putting that aside. And not even considering
the fact that a hundred and fifty years ago,
his family was in a small town in Russia
and my family was in a similarly small town
in Ireland- I can't imagine they could have
imagined us here, together. Forgetting our gender,
ignoring all the strange roads that led to us
being in the same time and place, there is still
the simple impossibility of love. That all of our
contradicting securities and insecurities,
interests and disinterests, beliefs and doubts,
could somehow translate into this common
uncommon affection should be as impossible
as walking to the moon. But instead, I love him. — David Levithan

In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night. — Bruno Schulz

Like so many pilgrims before us, we kneel in wonder and adoration before the ineffable mystery which. was accomplished here ... In This Child - the Son who is given to us - we find rest for our souls and the true bread that never fails - the Eucharistic Bread foreshadowed even in the name of this town: Bethlehem, the house of bread. God lies hidden in the Child; divinity lies hidden in the Bread of Life — Pope John Paul II

I'm starting to understand that attempting to be perfect has been the goal of my life. Our lives. Attempting to be this fault-free, smiling person in this loving, happy family that fits so perfectly in this pretty, inoffensive little town. What was so bad about that goal after all? Only that I couldn't do it. That I let everybody down. I've been so down about it, so depressed thinking about all the balls I was trying to juggle that I've dropped, and now the cogs are turning toward total apathy toward it all, everything and all I can think about is that I am a shell of a human being. I'm a pushover. I'm to blame. — Abigail Tarttelin

I'm just a Chicago actor who's a playwright. Even with the success of 'August,' the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they've seen me onstage so much. — Tracy Letts

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

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

All over town kids lay awake & wondered: Am I smart enough, pretty enough, strong enough, tall enough? If our fears were smoke, the town would be covered night & day by an inky pall. — Ron Koertge

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

Everything was changing, that was obvious. The world was so full of music, it seemed we could never run out. 'Twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and overworked and underexposed and stuck in a nowhere town was very heaven. It was our time, the first one we had to ourselves. It was a smashing time, and then it ended, because that's what times do. — Rob Sheffield

I'm living out a childhood fantasy. Our house is in a historic district of a small town that I used to read about in storybooks. — Patty Duke

A: Money is energy. It provides our basic needs and it gives us choices and opportunities. When you have accumulated wealth, you can choose, do I want to work? Or when do I want to work? Do I want to help out this charity in town or the other charity that has a worldwide outreach? — Celso Cukierkorn

Sometimes it feels like I live in such a shit town. It meets all reasonable definitions of a shit town. There are still men who put on hats to drive on these roads, our only celebrities are sports stars and newsreaders, and everyone you meet already knows your mother. p.34 — Nick Earls

My favorite book title ever is Ross Thomas' THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE. Good book too as I recall read it a long time ago but Ross Thomas is consistently good. — Howard Kaplan

I was struck that morning, as I would occasionally be struck the entire time I was in India, by the notion that the town was brown-skinned and black-haired, that their facial features approached my own. There was a solidarity, unexpected, unreasoning, that I felt with the people I passed on the street. They were, during those moments, my people, and though I had my difficulties with the subtleties of their language, thought our manners of dress and thought were distinct, though, perhaps, these people that I passed did not regard themselves as bound together in any particular way, at these instants I would disregard such nuance and imagine a profound relationship between us. Later, during stretches more lucid, I'd marvel at this rush of emotion and wonder as to its source. — Sameer Parekh

When I was tiny, the county fair came through town. Our parents took us, and got tickets for the rides, even though I was scared to death of all of them. Edward was the one who convinced me to go on the merry-go-round. He put me up on one of the wooden horses and he told me the horse was magic, and might turn real right underneath me, but only if I didn't look down. So I didn't. I stared out at the pinwheeling crowd and searched for him. Even when I started to get dizzy or thought I might throw up, the circle would come around again and there he was. After a while, I stopped thinking about the horse being magic, or even how terrified I was, and instead, I made a game out of finding Edward.
I think that's what family feels like. A ride that takes you back to the same place over and over. — Jodi Picoult

It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life
it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit. — Anton Chekhov

A strengthened national spirit can provide the motive power to rise our people from the depths and ... pour new life and vigor in the national system.
The reinvigoration of the national spirit must take place in the grass roots, in every city, town and barrio in the Philippines, and it must start among our own people ... To be a worthy citizen of the world one must first prove himself to be a good Filipino. — Carlos P. Romulo

Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a — Michael Chabon

We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories. — John Sladek

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

I asked Phil Prentiss what he would do if they never got a baby and he said they'd die with a lot of excess love in their hearts ... ." "And let's not," Jack said. "Let's spend every drop. On the kids, on our families, on your patients, on the town. On people we don't know yet and the ones who have been our good friends forever. On each other. Let's spend our last drop as we're taking our last breaths. — Robyn Carr

A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The main thing I like about New Yorkers is that they understand that their lives are a relentless circus of horrors, ending in death. As New Yorkers, we realize this, we resign ourselves to our fate, and we make sure that everyone else is as miserable as we are. Good town. — Kyle Baker

So in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. — Marcel Proust

Of course the reason that all the children in our town like Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is because Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle likes children, she enjoys talking to them and best of all they do not irritate her. — Betty MacDonald

As often as not our whole self ... engages itself in the most trivial of things, the shape of a particular hill, a road in the town in which we lived as children, the movement of wind in grass. The things we shall take with us when we die will nearly all be small things. — Storm Jameson

The town was very nice and our house was very fine. The river ran behind us and the town had been captured very handsomely but the mountains beyond it could not be taken and I was very glad the Austrians seemed to want to come back to the town some time, if the war should end, because they did not bombard it to destroy it but only a little in a military way. — Ernest Hemingway,

And Cape Town is not what it used to be. Foreigners have left their imprint on our culture. — K. Sello Duiker

This two-bit bar, this worn-out town, just a speck in the middle of a lonely grassy prairie with the stony hills beyond, the small fix-it-yourself house I'd bought for us - that was all ours, our world, our high life. It wasn't name-brand, shiny, or white picket fences, but none of that mattered. As long as we were together, it was good, it was clean, it was ours. — Cat Porter

From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty. — Dwight D. Eisenhower