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towns QUOTES

towns QUOTES

81 " Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places. "

― Linda Hogan , People of the Whale

82 " 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 Knausgård , Min kamp 1 (Min kamp #1)

83 " A stage adaptation of The Giver has been performed in cities and towns across the USA for years. More recently an opera has been composed and performed. And soon there will be a film. Does The Giver have the same effect when it is presented in a different way: It's hard to know. A book, to me is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does. There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat. The important thing is that another medium--stage, film, music--doesn't obliterate a book. The movie is here now, on a big screen, with stars and costumes and a score. But the book hasn't gone away. It has simply grown up, grown larger, and begun to glisten in a new way. "

― Lois Lowry , The Giver (The Giver, #1)

84 " There is a sense of danger in leaving what you know, even if what you know isn’t much. These mill towns with their narrow lanes and often narrow minds were all I really knew and I feared that if I left it behind, I would lose it and not find anything to replace it. The other reason I didn’t want to go was because I wanted to be the kind of person who stays, who builds a stable and predictable life. But I wasn’t one of the people, nor would I ever be.
I had a vision for my life. It wasn’t clear, but it was beautiful and involved leaving my history and my poverty behind me. I wasn’t happy about who I was or where I was, but I didn’t worry about it. It didn’t define me. We’re always in the making. God always has us on his anvil, melting, bending and shaping us for another purpose.
It was time to change, to find a new purpose. "

― John William Tuohy

85 " ...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound. "

― Ray Bradbury , The Martian Chronicles

86 " Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city. "

― Richard Peck , A Year Down Yonder (A Long Way from Chicago, #2)

87 " ...the assessment of psychological drift, that is the way in which an undirected pedestrian tends to move about in a particular quarter of the town, tending to establish natural connections between places, the zones of influence of particular institutions and public services, and so forth. It may well be objected that these techniques are un-scientific, disorderly and too subjective, but the fact remains that the Situationists are studying the actual texture of towns and their relationship to human beings more intensively than most architects and in a more down-to-pavement manner than most town planners. "

― , The Situationists and the City: A Reader

88 " The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of objects of consumption, which will only have consumable value illusory to the extent to which they will first of all have been objects of spectacle' -- to the extent, that is, they have first appeared on the television screen, which henceforth had to be seen as an urbanistic tool in its own right. "

― , The Situationists and the City: A Reader

89 " We get so used to the gregarious nature of our towns and villages that we forget how crowded our existence has become. "

― Fennel Hudson , Wild Carp - Fennel's Journal - No. 4

90 " ...Americans didn’t stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years—so typical a place that it only looks like an exception. "

91 " My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded. And had I not been born in Bad Munstereifel. If we had lived in the city -- well, I" m not saying the event would have gone unnoticed, but the fuss would probably only have lasted a week before public interest moved elsewhere. Besides, in a city you are anonymous; the chances of being picked out as Kristel Kolvenbach's granddaughter would be virtually zero. But in a small town -- well, small towns everywhere are rife with gossip, but in Germany they raise it to an art form. "

92 " 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 , Nuts (Hudson Valley, #1)

93 " 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. "

94 " The utilization of flat roofs as 'grounds' offers us a means of re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony deserts of our great towns for the plots from which she has been evicted to make room for buildings can be given back to her up aloft. "

95 " I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons. "

96 " What we don't talk about enough is Ohio's unique and remarkable quality of life. We are a state of cities, small towns and growing suburbs where life is affordable and destinations within reach. There is no better place to raise a family. "

97 " I've had women who move to the towns I'm living in, just pack up and move there, never even met 'em before, 'cause they heard I lived there. "

98 " In some of the middle colonies the towns and counties were both active and had a relation with each other which was the forerunner of the present system of local government in the Western States. "