A Town Quotes

I'm so uncomfortable wearing colors in public. I really am. Even denim. If I've got a day off in a town, I want to go out for a walk I'll put on denim. But almost everything I've got the black on. ~ Johnny Cash

There's this idea that when you make a certain amount of money that you should be staying at four-star hotels and taking town cars. And believe me, I will take a town car every day, but there are some things where it's like, 'Is this necessary? Is this important?' ~ Mary Lambert

Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms through the year. And depend on it that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last. ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Doctor Who: Violence doesn't end violence, it extends it. ~ Toby Whithouse

I frowned, staring into the eerie blackness along Route 33 truckers always complained about. It is odd how we rarely encounter true darkness. Somewhere, there is always light; a house, a town, headlights. Not here. Just total and complete darkness. I had been on the night run for months, long enough to get accustomed to total darkness if not entirely comfortable with it. What concerned me was the silence. I'd often had to pull over and take a pee along that godforsaken beltway. There were crickets rubbing their legs together in the cotton and wheat, grasshoppers jumping through the corn stalks, and June bugs flittering above the fields. Occasionally while relieving myself I'd even hear a lone armadillo burrowing. Tonight, however, I heard nothing. Less than nothing. Always there existed a strangeness here the truckers talked about, but tonight something had inexplicably hushed the sounds of night and made it stranger. The silence itself was dead; the kind of silence you get high up in the mountains when it snows, hushing the entire world beneath a white blanket. The blanket along Damnation Road was black, and it felt…unnatural." - NIGHT RUN - Bobby Underwood ~ Bobby Underwood

Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless. 'Please leave me alone,' Ms Godwin warned the offending student, 'or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small.' The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. 'And what might that weapon be, little lady?' the lout allegedly asked. 'Gossip,' Gail Godwin replied. ~ John Irving

Is it the lack of opportunity that creates the lack of ambition, or has that always existed? Most of them must have parents who work, or who studied, and who of course want the same thing for their kids. But how do you find that in a town where the major achievement was always seen as escaping it? Eventually ~ Matt Dunn

We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

A town in Upstate New York is being accused of being biased 'cause they sent out absentee ballots that say 'Barack Osama.' Today they apologized and printed new ballots that say 'Barack Hussein Osama.' ~ Conan O'Brien

Peter had spent his whole life in a town where fights were either drunken and friendly, or silent and petty. True war was foreign to him. He thought of how scared and confused he had been when the battle broke out in the Nest; he was in a different world now. ~ Jonathan Auxier

Living as an openly gay guy in a town like this means this isn't my first gig as the representative of the entire gay community. I actually like it when people want to talk about it. It's better than getting stared at like you murdered someone. ~ Haven Francis

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can't ever rub it off him. ~ Agnes Sligh Turnbull

There was a town where everything was forbidden.

Now, since the only thing that wasn't forbidden was the game tip-cat, the town's subjects used to assemble on meadows behind the town and spend the day there playing tip-cat.

And as the laws forbidding things had been introduced one at a time and always with good reason, no one found any cause for complaint or had any trouble getting used to them.

Years passed. One day the constables saw that there was no longer any reason why everything should be forbidden and they sent messengers to inform their subjects that they could do whatever they wanted.

The messengers went to those places where the subjects were wont to assemble.

'Hear ye, hear ye,' they announced, 'nothing is forbidden any more.'

The people went on playing tip-cat.

'Understand?' the messengers insisted. 'You are free to do what you want.'

'Good,' replied the subjects. 'We're playing tip-cat.'

The messengers busily reminded them of the many wonderful and useful occupations they had once engaged in and could now engage in once again. But the subjects wouldn't listen and just went on playing, stroke after stroke, without even stopping for a breather.

Seeing that their efforts were in vain, the messengers went to tell the constables.

'Easy,' the constables said. 'Let's forbid the game of tip-cat.'

That was when the people rebelled and killed ~ Italo Calvino

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it. ~ Christopher Alexander

It's a town you come to for a short time. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me.
Joe Biden, speaking at a town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, Sept. 10, 2008 ~ Joe Biden

The ups and downs, the dreams and struggles, had all been part of the journey, she realized - a journey that led to a cattle ranch near a town called King, where she had fallen in love with a cowboy named Luke. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Instead, the weak-chinned Padre Guzmán opted for love-thy-neighbour in times of trouble. That might have worked in the big city, where not knowing your neighbours made it easier to love them. But in a town of four thousand people it fooled no one. ~ Rusty Young

As they gently lowered it into the earth, all stared silently at the coffin but one: a young woman of twenty-five who glanced absentmindedly into the distance where an unknown figure stood – watching, waiting, his face buried in the shadow of his hat. Whether by intuition or paranoia she could not tell, but the presence of the man troubled her and her eyes were fixed on his motionless body and would not stir. Tourists rarely came to a town as small and uneventful as theirs, let alone to visit a funeral where they did not introduce themselves and only beheld the spectacle from afar. ~ Renate Linnenkoper

If truth in hearts that perish
Could move the powers on high,
I think the love I bear you
Should make you not to die.
Sure, sure, if steadfast meaning,
If single thought could save,
The world might end to-morrow,
You should not see the grave.
This long and sure-set liking,
This boundless will to please,
-Oh, you should live for ever
If there were help in these.
But now, since all is idle,
To this lost heart be kind,
Ere to a town you journey
Where friends are ill to find. ~ A.E. Housman

A few days after he unveiled the iPad in January 2010, Jobs held a "town hall" meeting with employees at Apple's campus. ~ Walter Isaacson

The arrival of a good clown exercises a more beneficial influence upon the health of a town than of twenty asses laden with drugs. ~ Thomas Sydenham

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in. ~ Nina LaCour

In Koln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavement fang'd with murderous stones,
And rags and hags, and hideous wenches,
I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The River Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth whash the river Rhine. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

How was Savannah supposed to pretend this glamorous life was what she'd always known? She was from a slummy neighborhood in a town outside San Francisco. These people were going to see right through her. ~ Michelle Madow

Ive grew up in Chingford, a town on the northeast edge of London. His father was a silversmith who taught at the local college. "He's a fantastic craftsman," Ive recalled. "His Christmas gift to me would be one day of his time in his college workshop, during the Christmas break when no one else was there, helping me make whatever I dreamed up. ~ Walter Isaacson

New Haven was a town forever on the brink of things. ~ Leigh Bardugo

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong ~ James Gleick

It was a brave city, she decided, eyeing them. Brave in its other sense; not courageous, so much as outstanding, commanding. It was too nice a town to die in. Though it had no honeysuckle vines and no balconies and no guitars, it was meant for love. For living and for love, and the two were inseparable; one didn't come without the other.
("Too Nice A Day To Die") ~ Cornell Woolrich

Magnus remembered a town in Peru whose Quechua name meant "quiet place." He recalled even more vividly being obscenely drunk and unhappy over his heartbreak of that time, and the maudlin thoughts that had recurred to him over the years, like an unwanted guest slipping in through his doors: that there was no peace for such as he, no quiet place, and there never would be.
Except he found himself remembering lying in bed with Alec - all of their clothes on, lounging on the bed on a lazy afternoon, Alec laughing, head thrown back, the marks Magnus had left on his throat very plain to see. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

When you go to Detroit you see a town that is resilient, that's just fighting to win again, and there's an energy to that. Just watching a city really fighting to get back on its feet and watching the inner strength of a city is tremendous. ~ George Clooney

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square. ~ Gloria Steinem

One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there. ~ Christine Jennings

The Lady Ishil gestured. "Oh, we asked. It wasn't difficult. Everyone in this pigsty of a town seems to know where you sleep." A delicately curled lip. She let him go. "And with who."
Ringil ignored that one. "I'm a hero, Mother. What do you expect? ~ Richard K. Morgan

Yazoo is the name of an old blues label and also a town in America. I like it because it doesn't mean a thing, it has no immediate connotations. That's what I hate about so many names today - they're so obviously fashionable. ~ Alison Moyet

I really need to know I may just never see you again, or might as well You took advantage of a world that loved you well I'm going to a town that has already been burnt down I'm so tired of you, America. ~ Rufus Wainwright

I simply argue that the cross be raised again,
at the centre of the marketplace
as well as on the steeple of the church.
I am recovering the claim that
Jesus was not crucified
in a cathedral between two candles
but on a cross between two thieves;
on a town garbage heap;
at a crossroad of politics so cosmopolitan
that they had to write His title
in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek …
and at the kind of place
where cynics talk smut,
and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble.
Because that is where He died,
And that is what He died about.
And that is where Christ's own ought to be,
And that is what church people ought to be about. ~ George Macleod

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life. ~ Lori Wilde

Jesus comes from Nazareth, a town from which folks said nothing good could come. He knew suffering from the moment he entered the world as a baby refugee born in the middle of a genocide. Jesus knew poverty and pain until he was tortured and executed on a Roman cross. This is the Jesus we are called to follow. With his coming we learn that the most dangerous place for Christians to be is in comfort and safety, detached from the suffering of others. Places that are physically safe can be spiritually deadly. ~ Shane Claiborne

In the chemistry lab at school, did you ever hold a test tube, pouring in liquids and powders and seeing nothing happen until a certain powder is poured in and then everything begins to smoke and fume, bubble and boil, hiss to foam, and sometimes even explode? The tube is suddenly full of action and movement and life. Well there are people like those certain liquids or powders; at a given moment they come into a room, or into a town, even into a country-and the place is never the same again. Things bubble, boil, change. Sometimes the whole world is changed. ~ Langston Hughes

Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice. ~ Marius Brill

The specific patterns, out of which a building or a town is made
may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner
forces loose, and, set us free; but when they are dead they keep
us locked in inner conflict. ~ Christopher Alexander

Even an ice cream parlor - a definite advantage - does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore. ~ Natalie Goldberg

But what is striking about this, in a town that often talks about tax cuts, we could quite easily, Republicans and Democrats working together, do something that everybody in America desires, and that is a simplification of our Tax Code. ~ Richard Neal

My grandfather lived to be 96 years old. He was born in a town outside of Salerno in Southern Italy. He came to New York when he was 20. He lived in the States from age 20 to 96, but he brought his culture with him, he brought his food with him, he brought his language with him, he never spoke a word of English. ~ Abel Ferrara

Well, it's like this. Deep in your consciousness there's this core that is imperceptible to yourself. In my case, the core is a town. A town with a river flowing through it and a high brick wall surrounding it. None of the people in the town can leave. Only unicorns can go in and out. The unicorns absorb the egos of the town people like blotter paper and carry them outside the wall. So the people in the town have no ego, no self. I live in the town-or so the story goes. I don't know any more than that, since I haven't actually seen any of this with my own eyes. ~ Haruki Murakami

The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town
to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. ~ James Lane Allen

We have it, we're lucky enough that we've created a show where it's not about ... a family, or a kid, it's about a town. ~ Trey Parker

But this was Dublin, the nation's capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it. ~ John Boyne

I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not foolin' a soul"). He ~ Neil Gaiman

I could stand in the middle of Front Street shrieking like a banshee and nobody would notice me. You don't need magic to be invisible in a town like this. Being poor works just the same. So stand behind me and think quiet thoughts. ~ C.M. Hayden

Would it not be downright cruel to keep him in semi-captivity in a town or city, where the opportunities for wreaking havoc and destruction upon the landscape are necessarily so limited? In a word, is it right to attract Wombats? ~ Will Cuppy

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

The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant - the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did. ~ Donna Tartt

I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time. ~ Kathryn Stockett

A Paper Town is a town that's got a paper mill on it. ~ John Green

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

Roger and I would squat in the heavily scented shade of the myrtle bushes and watch the array of creatures that passed us; at certain times of the day the branches were as busy as the main street of a town. ~ Gerald Durrell

Cards and boards, [Johnny] thought. And the dead. That's not dark forces. Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding to door when it is really coming up through the floorboards. Real dark forces ... aren't dark. They're sort of gray, like Mr. Grimm. They take all the color out of life; they take a town like Blackbury and turn it into frightened streets and plastic signs and Bright New Futures and towers where no one wants to live and no one really does live. The dead seem more alive than us. And everyone becomes gray and turns into numbers and then, somewhere, someone starts to do arithmetic ... ~ Terry Pratchett

If a man ordered a beer milkshake he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known. ~ John Steinbeck

To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised;
even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the
face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said
'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos
dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture
from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the
trams and taxis and much of the other t ~ George Orwell

He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish. ~ John Vaillant

In a town church the right place for the admission of light. ~ George Edmund Street

There is scarcely a town or school in Russia from which boys have not run away to the war. Hundreds of girls have gone off in boys' clothes and tried to pass themselves off as boys and enlist as volunteers, and several have got through, since the medical examination is only a negligible formality required in one place, forgotten in another. ~ Stephen Graham

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 Knausgaard

In a town full of phonies, I'm not afraid to be me. ~ Kyle Richards

I'm a highly, highly, highly creative human being. I write music all the time. I write scripts constantly. I run my own production company. I'm also a very determined businesswoman. I've a town to deal with. I've got a lot of things to do and I don't have time to be classified as difficult, and I don't have time to care. ~ Kim Basinger

This is Golgotha: people tend to end up dead in these here parts; it's kind of a town tradition. ~ R.S. Belcher

If you want a reliable tip, drive into a town, go to the nearest appliance store and seek out the dishwasher repair man. He spends a lot of time in restaurant kitchens and usually has strong opinions about them. ~ Bryan Q. Miller

There was a town, and there was a girl, and there was a theft. I was living in the town, and I was hired to investigate the theft, and I thought the girl had nothing to do with it. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question 'Why would somebody say something was stolen when it was never theirs in the first place?' Instead, I asked the wrong question - four wrong questions, more or less. ~ Lemony Snicket

A town, before it can be plundered and, deserted, must first be taken; and in this particular Venus has borrowed a law from her consort Mars. A woman that wishes to retain her suitor must keep him in the trenches; for this is a siege which the besieger never raises for want of supplies, since a feast is more fatal to love than a fast, and a surfeit than a starvation. Inanition may cause it to die a slow death, but repletion always destroys it by a sudden one. ~ Charles Caleb Colton