Simple Town Quotes & Sayings

13 The foolish woman is noisy; she is simple and open to all forms of evil, she [willfully and recklessly] knows nothing whatever [of eternal value]. 14 For she sits at the door of her house or on a seat in the conspicuous places of the town, 15 Calling to those who pass by, who go uprightly on their way: 16 Whoever is simple (wavering and easily led astray), let him turn in here! And as for him who lacks understanding, she says to him, — Anonymous

Keep it simple' wasn't always the right response. Many things that boosted my happiness also added complexity to my life. Having children. Learning to post videos to my website. Going to an out-of-town wedding. Applied too broadly, my impulse to 'Keep it simple' would impoverish me. 'Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings,' warned Samuel Johnson, 'let us therefore by cautious how we strip her. — Gretchen Rubin

It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town ... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety. — Henry David Thoreau

I heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Life seems harsh, and cruel. Says he feels all alone in threatening world. Doctor says: "Treatment is simple. The great clown - Pagliacci - is in town. Go see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. "But doctor ... " he says "I am Pagliacci." Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. — Alan Moore

I'm a simple man. Grew up in a small town. Came from humble beginnings. No silver spoon. — Robin S. Sharma

I had a very simple, unremarkable and happy life. And I grew up in a very small town. And so my life was made up of, you know, in the morning going to the river to fetch water - no tap water, and no electricity - and, you know, bathing in the river, and then going to school, and playing soccer afterwards. — Ishmael Beah

Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle. "I wither slowly in thine arms," he read. "Here at the quiet limit of the world," and repeated to himself: "Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world" ... as a monk will repeat a simple pregnant text, over and over again in prayer. — Evelyn Waugh

Our town, Kasrilevke - that's where I'm from, you know - is a small town, and a poor one. There is no thievery there. No one steals anything for the simple reason that there is nobody to steal from and nothing worth stealing. And besides, a Jew is not a thief by nature. That is, he may be a thief, but not the sort who will climb through a window or attack you with a knife. He will divert, pervert, subvert, and contravert as a matter of course, but he won't pull anything out of your pocket. He won't be caught like a common thief and led through the streets with a yellow placard on his back.

("A Yom Kippur Scandal") — Sholom Aleichem

Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. 'Strider' I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. — J.R.R. Tolkien

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

The simple truth is that you can understand a town. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just another part of it. — Brenna Yovanoff

Each hamlet or village or town should be a place, its own place. This is not a matter of fake historicism or artsy-craftsy architecture. It is a matter of respect for things existing, subtle patterns of place woven from vistas and street widths and the siting and color and scale of stores, houses, and trees ... If the countryside is to prosper, it must be different from city or suburb ... The difference is in part the simple business of containing our towns and giving them boundaries. — Robert Christopher Riley

The basics of running this town are very simple. All you need to do is reward those with something to offer, and the way to recognize them is that they can do something you can't; it's that simple. And when you identify them, you protect them with the meanest bastards you can find. — Matt Mayr

To me, living a rich life means focusing on the minutiae, the seemingly small, insignificant moments that can pass us by if we don't watch carefully. They're the quiet, chilly morning walks with my [dog]; the adventure of going for a bike ride in a new part of town; cooking a dinner alongside my boyfriend; or even the simple activity of crimping a pie crust. These moments don't require much, just a little planning and attention. — Adrianna Adarme

They understood that. They all understood it. This is not the same as comprehension, but it was good enough. When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America. — Stephen King

Simpletons! Yes, yes! I'm a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We'll build a town and we'll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they'll be dead! Simpletons! Let's go! This ought to show 'em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is! — Walter M. Miller Jr.

Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, 'You love beer so much. I'll bet some day you'll go in and order a beer milk shake.' It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn't let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn't forget it ... If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn't known
they might call the police. — John Steinbeck

There are always things I find difficult - being in crowds, remembering faces. I do like routines. I always travel with someone. My life in Avignon is a very quiet one. I have an apartment that looks over the whole city. I can drop into town, but a lot of the time I write from home. In some respects I still live a very quiet, simple life. — Daniel Tammet

I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going on around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation was the idea of "sin" - this sense that it was possible to go "too far," and that many people were doing it - was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. — Joan Didion

For any American who had the great and priceless privilege of being raised in a small town there always remains with him nostalgic memories ... And the older he grows the more he senses what he owed to the simple honesty and neighborliness, the integrity that he saw all around him in those days. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners; but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader. — Edward Gibbon

What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging ... in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set, 'Laramie' often brings to mind 'Our Town,' the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire. — Ben Brantley

I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me. — Bruce Springsteen

He didn't dislike New York with the simple diffidence of a small-town kid or the tragic ignorance of a yokel
he hated it with what he hoped was his soul. — Barry Lyga

My parents are very humble people who have simple lives ... they live in a pleasant little town in China. — Liu Wen

He was suffering from wanderlust, complicated by the tension of knowing that he was rooted to this town by something as simple as his name. — Jodi Picoult

The theory behind AltConf is simple: it's worth being in town for WWDC, even if you don't have tickets, and if you're already there, you might as well go to the conference next door. The reality of what AltConf has become is an important addition to the very controlled stream of information Apple provides. Some of the industry's best speakers don't work at Apple, and some of the industry's most important topics aren't being discussed by Hair Force One. — Mike Lee

Nothing in my life had prepared me to see things that were strange or beyond belief. I was a simple kid in a simple town in a simple family. But what I saw then, right after the collapse of the woman, ripped the "simple" out of my understanding of the rules of the world, and changed my life forever. — James Dashner

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

Simple as that," said Nina. "Did you know I'm next in line for the Fjerdan throne? They call me Princess Ilse of Engelsberg." "There is no princess of Engelsberg," said Matthias. "It's a fishing town." Nina shrugged. "If we're going to lie to ourselves, we might as well be grand about it. — Leigh Bardugo

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

Rejecting a simple grid for the capital as "tiresome and insipid", he argued that such a pattern made sense only for flat cities. Not only would diagonal streets provide "contrast and variety," but they would serve as express lanes, shortening the distance between places. Town squares would be situated where diagonal avenues crossed. — Ron Chernow

She wore a simple purple long-sleeved turtleneck, but streaks of white across her chest - flour perhaps? - distracted him, made him want to volunteer for cleanup duty. — Melissa McClone

Boy you really missed the boat. I'll make it simple, so's even fuckin you can understand. Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants; then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the fuck outta town". Water rushes to his eye-holes. "Don't be lookin up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers". He takes hold of my shoulders, spins me around, and punches me towards the mirror on the wall. "You're the God. Take responsibility. Exercise your power — D.B.C. Pierre

It is no accident that I made Cartoon Town a simple little village - in many ways it mirrored my home town. And, yes, many of my puppet characters took on some of the more eccentric characteristics of people I knew there. — William Jackson

Whether Maycomb knows it or not, we're paying the highest tribute we can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.'
'Who?' Aunt Alexandra never knew she was echoing her twelve-year-old nephew.
'The handful of people in this town who that that fair play is not marked White Only; the handful of people who say a fair trial is for everybody, not just us; the handful of people with enough humility to think, when they look at a Negro, there but for the Lord's kindness am I. — Harper Lee

Give me a Sunday morning, that's full of grace, A simple life and I'll be okay, here in small town U.S.A. — Justin Moore

A simple way to determine whether the right to dissent in a particular society is being upheld is to apply the town square test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it's a fear society. — Natan Sharansky

Not far away lay the big cannons that had held Ulysses Grant at bay for fifty siege days while the citizens of the town ate rat flesh and clung to their long-cherished beliefs. How many had died in that lost cause? Dr. Tarver wondered. Fifty thousand casualties at Gettysburg alone, and for what? To free the slaves who built this house? To preserve the Union? Had Stonewall Jackson died to create a nation of couch potatoes ignorant of their own history and incapable of simple mathematics? If those brave soldiers in blue and gray had seen what lay in the future, they would have laid down their muskets and walked home to their farms. — Greg Iles

P. G. Wodehouse ... used, when in town, to solve the problem of the long walk to the post-office by the simple expedient of tossing his letters out of his window: his belief that the average human, finding a stamped and addressed envelope on the pavement, would naturally pop it into the nearest pillar-box was never once, in decades, shown to be unfounded ... — Stephen Fry

I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That's sort of like living in a small town. It's a simpler game, but it's played to a higher level. — Peter Hessler

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor ... I am Pagliacci. — Alan Moore