Provincial Life Quotes & Sayings

I always felt strongly connected to the region where I was born. But after leaving school, the only clear thought I had about my life was to leave this provincial area and go to places where real life was happening. — Volker Bertelmann

The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study. — Honore De Balzac

From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic. — Beryl Markham

Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.
What I find appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals. — David Sedaris

Besides, there is perhaps nothing so effective as the monotony of provincial town life in the Andes for suffocating ideals and creativity. — Miguel Garnett Johnson

The author points out that, with life in provincial Washington difficult for those not of independent means, Adams and his wife undervalued the social connections that others found vital. They often made an impression as distant and prideful. — Paul C. Nagel

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there. — Oscar Wilde

That's silly," said Princess Farukhuaz. "A king would never risk his own life to get rid of a single evil spirit in some smelly provincial town."
"Ah," said the nurse, "but this one did. Not all kings are cruel immoral men who send others to do the work they are too frightened to carry out themselves."
"You're trying to trick me into softening my heart toward marriage," said Farukhuaz. "It won't work. But please continue."
"Very well," said the nurse — G. Willow Wilson

What if one were up there, drifting about among suns and feeling the tails of comets fan one's forehead! How small the earth was and how puny the people; a Norway of two million provincial souls and a mortgage bank to help feed them! What was life worth at such a rate? You elbowed yourself ahead in the sweat of your face for a few mortal years, only to perish all the same, all the same! — Knut Hamsun

I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are limited. It would have been quite easy to simply drift through life. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

That a language may retain its vitality and dignity, two things are necessary. In the first place, it must keep in close touch with life, and must respond to those constant alterations which look like corruptions but which are quite as often signs of growth. In the second place, it must submit to some kind of selective authority which creates a generally recognized but slowly changing norm of speech. Without the former condition a language will become rigid, conventional, and emotionless; without the second it will just as surely tend to become provincial and formless--even unintelligible, except locally and ephemerally. — Paul Elmer More

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory
horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene
and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since. — Barbara Ehrenreich

If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? — Henry David Thoreau

Still, to me, the bottom line wasn't about the Dark Book at all. It was about uncovering the details of my sister's secret life. I didn't want the creepy thing. I just wanted to know who or what had killed Alina, and I wanted him or it dead. Then I wanted to go home to my pleasantly provincial po-dunk little town in steamy southern Georgia and forget about everything that had happened to me while I was in Dublin. The Fae didn't visit Ashford? Good. I'd marry a local boy with a jacked-up Chevy pickup truck, Toby Keith singing "Who's Your Daddy?" on the radio, and eight proud generations of honest, hardworking Ashford ancestors decorating his family tree. Short of essential shopping trips to Atlanta, I'd never leave home again. But — Karen Marie Moning

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step. — Honore De Balzac

Why would anyone wish to be provincial in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest books ever written. — David McCullough

Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death? - no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death. — Chuck Palahniuk

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

In the United Kingdom, for example, the sheer overwhelming dominance of London makes it extremely for provincial cities to develop more than a very restricted financial function. London, in that sense, is akin to the notorious upas tree, a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous that it destroys all life for many miles around itself. — Peter Dicken

Life in the world ... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I would laugh at all my provincial inmates, but I'm too busy lusting. I'm not usually interested in a guy with "take a number" on his forehead, but this guy doesn't have a forehead - it's buried in messy blond hair. And he's not one of the twenty guys I've known my entire pubescent life. he smiles like the Fourth of July. What's a dumb girl to do but get in line with everyone else not in his league? I guess journalism just became my most beloved class. — Kristen Chandler

I had met a girl by chance that I might just as well not have met. A girl with red hair supposedly inherited from her grandfather, a plump girl with fair skin, broad lips, one eye light green and the other blue-violet, a girl who sometimes went wall-eyed and weighed around fifty-eight kilograms. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and lime, phosphorus, iron, as well as traces of other chemicals. Fifty-eight kilograms of water and a few pinches of the elements from her fellow countryman Mendeleev's table. Ten buckets of water brought to life by the great force of evolution or by our provincial God. — Tadeusz Konwicki

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

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance. — John Fowles

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom - ah the soul-destroying boredom - of long days of mild content. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Yates's determinism, like Flaubert's, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers won't move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end. — Blake Bailey

Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly. — Orlando Figes

Life ... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other ... The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was the fear of the unknown — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson