Quotes & Sayings About Small Towns

Hunch is your brain's way of taking a shortcut to the truth.'
'In small towns news travel at the speed of boredom'. — Carlos Luiz Zafon

And somewhere
out there,
in the river of
addicts,
alcoholics,
wife beaters,
doormats,
overeducated legalized thieves,
fascist police,
and bitter rivalries
someone told me
it's a good city,
and I don't know
what's more frightening — Phil Volatile

There is a comfortable feeling in small towns. It is salubrious. — Andie MacDowell

Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo. — Garrison Keillor

I think in all small towns, all kind of working class communities around the world. They are kind of similar. — Sacha Baron Cohen

Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world. — Stellan Skarsgard

I'm just a small-town New Zealand girl. But, I do think it was incredibly necessary for me. Wild Things wouldn't exist if I hadn't have made some dramatic changes and that all happened in LA. — Ladyhawke

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I don't know if I have a legacy, but I will say that I'm proud of the fact that I'm from a small town in a small state and I've had more than a small impact. — Tinker Hatfield

Small towns are best for spending Christmas, I think. They catch the mood quicker and change and come alive under its spell. — Truman Capote

And I couldn't make fun of her for that dream. It was my dream, too. And Indian boys weren't supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren't supposed to dream big, either.
We were supposed to be happy with our limitations. But there was no way Penelope and I were going to sit still. Nope, we both wanted to fly: — Sherman Alexie

All that makes a writer is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible personal prejudice like Stevensons in favor of all being happy as kings no matter if consumptive, or Hardy against God for the blunder of sex, or Sinclair Lewis' against small American towns, or Shakespeare's mixed, at once against and in favor of life itself. I take it that everybody has the prejudice and spends some time feeling for it to speak and write from. But most people end as they begin by acting out the prejudices of other people. — Robert Frost

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. — Charles Dickens

A natural disaster in one American city is a natural disaster in every American city, including Fresno and, for that matter, every city and small town in the San Joaquin Valley, — Alan Autry

It wasn't as if she'd thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn't always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want. — Shannon Celebi

I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome. — Tom Drury

When you're touring and if you go to a party, there's automatically a celebrity-audience distance. It follows you around, especially when you're on the road in small towns. Any time there is awe, it gets very difficult to be normal, to be yourself. But I'm not saying that that's what made me the way I am. I've probably always been distant. — Steve Martin

The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire. — Doris Lessing

I love New York, but am happy to be away from it. I really like small towns, with welcoming barbecue restaurants. — David Burnett

Pizzerias in big cities benefit from Italian natives or descendants thereof, people who understand that real pizza comes from Naples where the crusts are thin and the toppings simple. Samantha's favorite was Lazio's, a hole-in-the-wall in Tribeca where the cooks yelled in Italian as they baked the crusts in brick ovens. Like most things in her life these days, Lazio's was far away. So was the pizza. The only place in Brady to get one to go was a sub shop in a cheap strip mall. Pizza Hut, along with most other national chains, had not penetrated deep into the small towns of Appalachia. — John Grisham

We set the town on fire and burned down every house as a warning to other small towns along the river. — Knute Nelson

I suppose I am a snob. I loathe towns. I loathe townspeople. They have small minds and giant backsides. Which is to say, what they lack in interiors they make up in posteriors. — Kami Garcia

Small towns are like metronomes; with the slightest flick, the beat changes. — Mitch Albom

I think small towns are the closest to heaven you can get on earth. I'm glad that some other people, my wonderful readers especially, feel the same way I do. — Diana Palmer

I thought people in small towns were supposed to be nice, not act like the son of Satan. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Naodyma isn't exactly a one-temple town, you know. — Andrew Ashling

If you walked around like David Bowie in 1973 in Reading, you'd get beaten up. The 1970s in a small town was more like the 1950s.. and that's the truth. The backdrop was probably Victorian. — Ricky Gervais

I started my career in a town so small the local clinic was called Fred's Hospital and Grill. — Joan Rivers

As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs. — Victor LaValle

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs. — Arundhati Roy

A small town has as many eyes as a fly — Sonya Hartnett

In my small town, nothing really good happened too often and I thought, 'What am I doing here? I'm wasting my life.' — Anne Boleyn

I think that setting a novel in a small town taps into a sense of nostalgia among readers. People tend to believe life is different in small towns, and frankly, it is different. — Nicholas Sparks

In small towns, news travels at the speed of boredom. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

In those small towns you come to realize how the cathedrals utterly outgrew their whole environment. — Rainer Maria Rilke

This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America. This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people. — Mitt Romney

A lot of times in movies, you see the "small town" people, being bowled over by this creative entity or this corporate ideal, and it's not true, at all. — John Krasinski

Over the next few days, every knowing glance and furtive look reminded me how much small towns loved to gossip. My mother delighted me each day by telling me what she'd heard. I'd pushed Leo behind a snap pea display at the farmers' market and wrestled him to the ground. I'd offered him my bagel repeatedly, refusing to take no for an answer. I'd been seen out behind the market, helping him load up his vegetables and been caught holding his cucumber. That was my favorite. — Alice Clayton

Small towns blossomed by elevators and the trains
Once every 14 miles along the prairie veins
We were born of progress, now progress will decree
That we're no longer viable, and should no long be ...
Still Standing about Canada's Prairie Elevators (The First Song album) — Phyllis Wheaton

Childhood is the small town everyone came from. — Garrison Keillor

In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it. — Mark Twain

To make a small town achieve its potential, you need everybody. When a blind person carries a crippled person who can see, both of them get where they're going. — Unita Blackwell

There's nothing left of my hometown in Kentucky. All those small and mid-sized towns and cities in the U.S. are just about malls around the edges and suburbs. That was definitely a loss, because everything just gets homogenized. You can't tell where you are, it's all the same. — Richard Hell

People from small towns have to have their edges roughed up to get along in the world. But as a street reporter, you learn quickly. — Bill Kurtis

People always describe small towns as quaint or cozy or familiar. "You know who your neighbors are," they always seemed to say. But what you won't find depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting is how cruel those same neighbors can be. — T. Torrest

Admittedly, they [(places in novels)] didn't all have such ridiculous names as the ones in the Piddle Valley where her father's group of parishes was centered. It would have been hard to make credible a romantic fiction set in Farleigh Piddle, Middle Piddle, Nether Piddle and Piddle Dummer. — Val McDermid

It's always so nerve-wracking being up there on stage. It's even harder playing in your hometown - and I have a couple of home towns - but, you're playing for all the people you knew in high school, so it causes no small degree of panic in my mind. — Nellie McKay

Bakersville was never going to be the same. She'd been to other small towns where the residents all thought serial killers looked like monsters, that no member of their community could hide such dark desires. Once upon a time, she'd lived in one.
And the monster there had ripped her life apart. — Elizabeth Heiter

Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent. — Laurie Notaro

I like the world, but I feel very, very Italian. I love the small parts of my country: Tuscany, Capri in the winter. I don't like big towns. — Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo

Did I tell you about Anton?" Loots said.
Anton?" I shook my head.
It was a week ago, Loots said. There had been a knock on the door of his apartment and when he opened it his old friend Anton was standing there. Anton was a clown. He belonged to a circus that toured the provinces, playing to small towns and villages. They talked about the old days for a while, but Anton became increasingly restless and distracted. In the end Loots had to ask him if there was something wrong.
This is going to sound strange." The clown coughed nervously into his fist. "It's The Invisible Man. He's disappeared."
Loots stared at his friend.
He just vanished," Anton said, "into thin air."
The Invisible Man?" Loots said.
Yes."
He's disappeared?"
I told you it would sound strange," Anton said. — Rupert Thomson

When news of the crash came, probably a lot of people in small towns and farms across America felt a sense of grim satisfaction that the sinners had finally been punished for their wicked ways. — Ron Chernow

Bluffton is growing. But we must hold on to that small-town character. — Laura Bush

Small towns begin with a sign. The words can be as simple as the title of a story
Welcome to Harberville, Now entering Clawson
but once you cross, you are inside that story, and all that you do will be part of its tale. — Mitch Albom

Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can't turn you away. — John Irving

You can't be an actor in a small town-you have to go to New York or L.A. — Jack White

We'll call him Maynard McSmollet and he can be from two towns over," said Aidan, snickering. "No one really knew him that well, kept to himself, but he was crashing the party because he could never resist a kegger - or how about Roderick Spoon? Roddy. The Rodster. He was in band and played electric keyboards but got kicked out of several schools for setting small fires. Yeah, that's better. What do you think, Gavriel? — Holly Black

I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening. — Sarah Palin

Too many people glorified small-town America, making it seems like a Normal Rockwell painting, but the reality was something else entirely. With the exception of doctors and lawyers or people who owned their own business, there were no high-paying jobs in Oriental, or any other small town for that matter. And while is was in many way an ideal place to raise young children, there was little for young adults to aspire to.There weren't, nor would there ever be, middle management positions in small towns, nor was there much to do on the weekends, or even new people to meet — Nicholas Sparks

The town wakes early, like it does every day; small towns need a head start if they're going to have any chance in the world. — Fredrik Backman

Like many city dwellers, they'd had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in the small towns than in the big city. In a small town everyone was fully exposed; you couldn't even disappear in the crowd. — Hans Fallada

Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool. — Agatha Christie

Wink? she thinks. Where the fuck is Wink? — Robert Jackson Bennett

'Battleship' is not a film that Francois Truffaut would have made. Nor would any of those other namby-pamby European directors. Nope, this picture eschews that Continental obsession with small stories, set in quaint towns filled with pockmarked folk doing their banal things. — Seth Shostak

There may be no secrets in small towns, but there are no strangers either. — R.A. Mathis

The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, ... says "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district! — Charles Darwin

All this imagery and syncretism of Yahweh with Asherah was, of course, frowned on by the Levitical priesthood and made intolerant zealots like Samuel furious. Asherah smiled to herself. In truth, the elitist inner circle of Levites was quite small and unable to enforce its will across the innumerable rural towns and villages of Israel. The polytheistic folk religion of the common man was often out of tune with the official national cult of monolatry. But it was much more influential on the daily lives of citizens, who did what they wanted without repercussion. Thus, Asherah had a stranglehold on Israel and could venture most anywhere she wanted, without much fear of being attacked by Yahweh's evil minions. The people empowered her with their worship. Their idolatry protected her. — Brian Godawa

I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone. — Ellen Gilchrist

His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns. — Steven Johnson

All my friends are so small town. — John Mellencamp

Living in a small town ... is like living in a large family of rather uncongenial relations. Sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it's perfectly awful, but it's always good for you. People in large towns are like only-children. — Joyce Dennys

Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask. — Doris Lessing

His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.
- discussing Ebenezer Howards' Garden City — Jane Jacobs

There was not a lot of room for someone like me, who kept the gossip mill running like a hamster wheel. — Molly Harper

I'm a Midwesterner by birth, and when I traveled there, when I was young, most of the small towns were thriving, vibrant places. — Philip Caputo

It was as though the whole world was thrown back six or seven hundred years without having the organizations those ancient peoples had." He paused, breathing heavily. "Of course, there were many survivors who understood small skills. Some of them would repair small engines, but they couldn't manufacture them. They couldn't refine fuels. Fortunately a good many doctors who had practiced in small towns and in the country survived. They had their medical books, but they could no longer get the drugs they needed. Anyway, medicine survived after a fashion. Then gradually little patterns of order began to appear and another Bureaucracy came into being. — Hugh MacLennan

I don't like bad mouthing towns and just thinking that I live in such a great place. I mean, I would hate to live in a small town and have a public persona say, "That town sucks." I would really not want to hear that. — Carlos Dengler

Be nice. (The world is a small town.) — Austin Kleon

It's a small town, it has only a few docks ... now they are in a trap. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

I think in small towns like this one, whether you're a man or a woman, you basically do what there is to do. — Estelle Parsons

Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation. — Stephen King

They say people from small towns have big dreams and that pretty much describes me. I had big dreams growing up and I'm still a dreamer. — Clay Guida

When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns. — Tom Brokaw

Wilson argued that "the wealth of America" lay in its small businesses, its towns and villages. "Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chicago," he asserted; "it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the borders of the town. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

I hate small towns because once you've seen the cannon in the park there's nothing else to do. — Lenny Bruce

A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds. — Sonya Hartnett

In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. "I have been half in love with easeful death," said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then. — Rebecca Solnit

People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny. — Richard Russo

As a kid I never had the impulse to climb anything. I think that most kids who live in small towns or rural areas outside of the city, that's what they do - climb walls, or trees, or whatever. To me, it was more dance classes and not being very boyish. — Jamie Bell

I think the measure of advancement depends on where you are stood and from what distance you look. A thousand years ago, we farmed the fields, built towns and defended our land with swords and spears. It is little different now, save for the number of people we have to protect. We still kill with a sharp edge or point of metal, blood runs red still, sons ride off to war and parents grieve. If you look at the Empire in its whole, then it is peaceful. If you look closely, you will see the small wars, the bandits and rebellions. Look more closely still and you'll see the petty crimes, the struggle to survive, the rich bleeding the poor. Even the soil can turn against its farmers, yielding few crops. Or the weather, a late frost killing the early crops. There is strife and conflict everywhere in the Empire. Everywhere you find men, you find conflict. — G.R. Matthews

In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea — William Styron

The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man's name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That's how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. — M.L. Stedman

I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals. — George Clooney

Standup keeps me grounded and keeps me in touch. I get to go from small towns to big cities, across Canada and the U.S., and you're out there and talking to people. You get a sense of what they respond to. — Howie Mandel

If social cohesion is one of the good things about growing up in a small town, the downside is the unchallengeable power of cliques. That sort of thing is in the nature of the teenage beast, but in bigger towns and cities there are usually so many different social groups within a single school or locality that most kids can find others they feel comfortable with. Not so in a small town. If you don't conform, even at the cost of sacrificing your principles and self-respect, you will be an outcast. And if you have a sensitive nature, it will mark you for life. — Sela Ward

The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does. — Immanuel Kant

Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere. — Paul Ryan

I enjoy small towns, I've got my friends there. I have friends in L.A. too, but I'm not much on traffic. — Jacob Lofland

We need to reach the millions who live in cities, the hundreds of thousands in industrial centers, the tens of thousands in medium-sized towns, the thousands in small towns, and the hundreds in villages
all these at once. Like a volcanic eruption, a spiritual revolution needs to spread through the country, to spur people to crucial decisions. People have to recognize the futility of splitting life up into politics, economics, the humanities, and religion. We must be awakened to a life in which all of these things are completely integrated. — Eberhard Arnold