One Town Quotes

Fear of black independence and self-determination took a Freudian form: rape hysteria. In one town after another, racial violence was sparked by rumors that a Negro had harmed a white woman. This happened in Washington; Omaha, Neb.; Kansas City, Kan.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Longview, Tex.; and Rosewood, Fla. ~ Anonymous

When you grow up in one town and your life revolves around it, you are very aware of any darkness on the edge of town. That's because it's scary and it's inviting. ~ Melissa Etheridge

This is not a call for working faster or doing more overtime or making do with fewer people," he said in one town hall forum. ~ Ed Catmull

I figured that if anyone could be wildly popular in one town, then that could be replicated everywhere, all you have to do is get the word out. ~ Slim Moon

Suggested they try the Glatt, an enormous American-style mall in Wallisellen, one town over from Dietlikon. ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

For you who came so far; for you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; for you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar, when it was still a dream to be built and people moved there, believing, and someone with sky and birds in his heart said this would be a good place for a park. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

The following "Rules for Female Teachers" were posted by the school board of one town in Massachusetts: Do not get married. Do not leave town at any time without permission of the school board. Do not keep company with men. Be home between the hours of 8 P.M. and 6 A.M. Do not loiter downtown in ice cream stores. Do not smoke. Do not get into a carriage with any man except your father or brother. Do not dress in bright colors. Do not dye your hair. Do not wear any dress more than two inches above the ankle. ~ Howard Zinn

Once," he says, "I was flying to California on the Fourth of July."
She turns her head, just slightly.
"It was a clear night, and you could see all the little fireworks displays along the way, these tiny flares going off below, one town after another. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it's like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren't equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can't live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go. ~ Ronald Reagan

A man with a broken heart is as spoilt as a single man. ~ Jordan Hoechlin

As soon as I left one town, I was in another, each one a totally different world, as if an invisible box surrounded its edges, keeping everybody in their proper place.
The rich stayed rich. The poor stayed poor. The troublemakers stayed in trouble. ~ Carolee Dean

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1965 and jumped to the section entitled "Junitaki Today." Of course, the book's "today" being 1970, it was hardly today's "today." Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a "today." And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history. ~ Haruki Murakami

I was working at a non-profit for five years. But I could always create music after work. All throughout those years, I was writing songs and recording music and performing around town. ~ Jussie Smollett

Few Americans have ever met their Congresspeople. They don't see them at the grocery store; they don't meet them at the bowling alley. They're more likely to see their representatives in photographs from the Daily Grill in Washington, D.C., than at a local town hall. ~ Ben Shapiro

I am not from Venus. . . . I am from a small town on the Serbo-Croation border. ~ Samantha Hunt

I was filled with dread at the thought my mind had skipped town and left me behind to pay the rent.
Dexter ~ Jeff Lindsay

Our arrival there and not at a busier, more crowded airport on the other side of town was yet another example of the magical efficiency and convenience of vampire travel. ~ Deborah Harkness

I wasn't always this confident. Growing up as the awkward gay kid in a small town in Pennsylvania, you're constantly told, 'Don't be yourself, don't be proud of who you are.' ~ Carson Kressley

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

Am I supposed to do something
important?
It doesn't seem enough
to merely take up space
on this planet
in this country
in this state
in this town
in this family. ~ Sharon Creech

So get up, get, get get down 911 is a joke in yo town ~ Flavor Flav

You can only give things that you own, and you own only those things you consider you created. ~ Meir Ezra

So what part did I play in all this? Well, none really. They completely ignored me for the whole twenty or thirty minutes. Which was perfectly fine, of course, I didn't mind. But it did puzzle me, because early every morning they would come yelping and scratching around the doors and windows of my house until I got up and took them for their walk. If anything disturbed the daily ritual, like I had to drive into town, or have a meeting, or fly to England or something, they would get thoroughly miserable and simply not know what to do. Despite the fact that they would always completely ignore me whenever we went on our walks together, they couldn't just go and have a walk without me. This revealed a profoundly philosophical bent in these dogs that were not mine, because they had worked out that I had to be there in order for them to be able to ignore me properly. You can't ignore someone who isn't there, because that's not what "ignore" means. ~ Douglas Adams

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

The rain swirls over the trees and roofs of the town, and the parched earth soaks it up, exuding a fragrance that comes only once in a year, the fragrance of quenched earth, the most exhilarating of all smells. ~ Ruskin Bond

And that was the point I knew I just loved this filthy, ugly, loquacious man in a fur coat, who would spend the day roaming all over town, looking for bright lights, and laughter - and then at night come on stage, and unbutton two buttons on his waistcoat, with his clumsy, fat fingers, and show you his heart beneath. ~ Caitlin Moran

Every day I am part of my local town community, part of Rio Mesa High School Alumni, part of the racing world, part of the diabetes community worldwide. ~ Charlie Kimball

Right back where you started, she told herself. Right back in the middle of that town. You were out, she told her heartburn. You. Were. Out. Her father once told her that when you leave a place, you should never go back, because no matter what the actual circumstances, it will always look like a retreat, a failure. That was sure how it felt. ~ Ari Berk

We were three hours from Chicago, so my blackness was less of a curiosity, more of a threat. And there were the black students on campus, the nerve of them, daring to pursue higher education. In the local newspaper, residents wrote angry letters about a new criminal element--the scourge of youthful black ambition, black joy. In my more generous moments, I tried to believe the locals were using anger to mask their fear of living in a dying town in a changing world. ~ Roxane Gay

Gradually I became aware of details: a company of French soldiers was marching through the streets of the town. They broke formation, and went in single file along the communication trench leading to the front line. Another group followed them. ~ Ernst Toller

With each successive pint he found that he was enjoying himself significantly less; until now he was sitting and shivering on the sidewalk outside the pub in a small Scottish town, weighing the relative merits of being sick and not being sick, and not enjoying himself at all. ~ Neil Gaiman

It was around the time of the divorce that all traces of decency vanished, and his dream of being the next great Southern writer was replaced by his desire to be the next published writer. So he started writing these novels set in Small Town Georgia about folks with Good American Values who Fall in Love and then contract Life-Threatening Diseases and Die.
I'm serious.
And it totally depresses me, but the ladies eat it up. They love my father's books and they love his cable-knit sweaters and they love his bleachy smile and orangey tan. And they have turned him into a bestseller and a total dick.
Two of his books have been made into movies and three more are in production, which is where his real money comes from. Hollywood. And, somehow, this extra cash and pseudo-prestige have warped his brain into thinking that I should live in France. For a year.Alone.I don't understand why he couldn't send me to Australia or Ireland or anywhere else where English is the native language.The only French word I know is oui, which means "yes," and only recently did I learn it's spelled o-u-i and not w-e-e.
At least the people in my new school speak English.It was founded for pretentious Americans who don't like the company of their own children. I mean, really. Who sends their kid to boarding school? It's so Hogwarts. Only mine doesn't have cute boy wizards or magic candy or flying lessons.
Instead,I'm stuck with ninety-nine other students. There are twenty-five people ~ Stephanie Perkins

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

But people in a small town tend to do a lot of talking, even when they don't know what they're talking about. ~ Don Roff

There's lots of people-this town wouldn't hold them;
Who don't know much excepting what's told them. ~ Will Carleton

Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell. ~ Mark Leibovich

They stopped briefly at an inn near the town of Altaussee, a tidy village tucked in the woods near a pristine alpine lake. Outside, trimly uniformed SS officers were offering their services to the liberators, who they were sure would soon be at war with the Soviets. No? Then the SS officers were happy to surrender, as long as they could keep their sidearms. They feared their own troops would shoot them in the back. ~ Robert M. Edsel

At eight-thirty that night Ian stood on the steps outside Elizabeth's uncle's town house suppressing an almost overwhelming desire to murder Elizabeth's butler, who seemed to be inexplicably fighting down the impulse to do bodily injury to Ian. "I will ask you again, in case you misunderstood me the last time," Ian enunciated in a silky, ominous tone that made ordinary men blanch. "Where is your mistress?"
Bentner didn't change color by so much as a shade. "Out!" he informed the man who'd ruined his young mistress's life and had now appeared on her doorstep, unexpected and uninvited, no doubt to try to ruin it again, when she was at this very moment attending her first ball in years and trying bravely to live down the gossip he had caused.
"She is out, but you do not know where she is?"
"I did not say so, did I?"
"Then where is she?"
"That is for me to know and you to ponder."
In the last several days Ian had been forced to do a great many unpleasant things, including riding across half of England, dealing with Christina's irate father, and finally dealing with Elizabeth's repugnant uncle, who had driven a bargain that still infuriated him. Ian had magnanimously declined her dowry as soon as the discussion began. Her uncle, however, had the finely honed bargaining instincts of a camel trader, and he immediately sensed Ian's determination to do whatever was necessary to get Julius's name on a betrothal contract. As a result, Ian was the first man ~ Judith McNaught

Both Mitt and I have summer places up in New Hampshire on Lake Winnipesaukee. And a few summers ago I was taking my grandchildren and children to town in the boat for ice cream ... And I realized there was nobody in the boat to help me dock the boat, handle the ropes, do anything ... And I looked up and there was Mitt Romney. So he pulled me in, he tied up the boat for me. He rescued me just as he's going to rescue this great country. ~ J.W. "Bill" Marriott Jr.

You grow up real quick, a half-Mexican in a sailor's suit, because I'd be riding the streetcar to school everyday - minding my own business, humming out a 'Frere Jacques' - and I realized that in any other town, this might be considered cute. But you know what it is in San Francisco? Sexy. ~ Al Madrigal

Having that college-town atmosphere with a live repertory company available was a real gift. I found myself gravitating toward the theater from about the age of nine. I guess it was the environment that got me started. ~ Christopher Reeve

Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters. ~ John Green

During his life, the witcher had met thieves who looked like town councilors, councilors who looked like beggars, harlots who looked like princesses, princesses who looked like calving cows and kings who looked like thieves. But Stregobor always looked as, according to every rule and notion, a wizard should look. He was tall, thin and stooping, with enormous bushy gray eyebrows and a long, crooked nose. To top it off, he wore a black, trailing robe with improbably wide sleeves, and wielded a long staff capped with a crystal knob. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it. ~ Roald Dahl

This journey started about 42 years ago in a little town of Brunswick, Georgia. ~ Wade Boggs

God made the country, and man made the town. ~ William Cowper

Leaving town I sat next to a senseless and beautiful boy
who asked where I live.
His unwashed hair or the way his eyes were just eyes…
the soul is a tiring thing. You can have it.
I don't know what you mean's what I told him.
It's more simple than that. I'm just passing through. ~ Alex Dimitrov

You don't go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that's benign conquest. It's a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way. ~ Ben Kingsley

And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity. ~ Herman Melville

I know what it's like to be from an incredibly small town and the oppressiveness of it and the desire to get out. But I didn't realize that readers in Seattle, New York, and San Francisco might not get that so instinctively. ~ John Corey Whaley

That clock's a lot like the town, she decided. Looks good, sounds great, pretends to be some sort of masterpiece. But it's broken. It's rotten and broken right down inside where its heart's cogs meet. That's Toll. ~ Frances Hardinge

Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods. ~ Edna Ferber

This is aeons older than you or your family. Older than the town. Blood makes the sun shine and the crops grow. This is the truth of the world."
Tate stared down at her, then said in a soft, deadly voice that was almost a whisper, "Fuck the world. I just want my sister back. ~ Brenna Yovanoff