Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Edward AbbeyRead
One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city - as I once did for a couple of years.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Small towns foster a sense of belonging for everyone, regardless of social status.
Edward Abbey's quote emphasizes the unique sense of community found in small towns, where every individual, irrespective of their wealth or popularity, has a defined role and place. This contrasts with city life, where anonymity often prevails, leading to a lack of the close-knit connections that bring comfort and support to individuals within a community.
Themes
CommunityBelongingSmall TownRolePlace
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about community engagement in a local town hall.
More from Edward Abbey
All quotes →I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
Edward AbbeyRead
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.
Edward AbbeyRead
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
Edward AbbeyRead
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.
Edward AbbeyRead
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
Edward AbbeyRead
Similar quotes
A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.
Madeleine L'EngleRead
I'm building shopping centers and movie theaters in the inner cities. So that means supplying jobs and letting blacks understand that we have to build our communities back, not looking to anybody else.
Magic JohnsonRead
But the people of the disaster area fundamentally needed to understand that the rest of Australia had noticed their misery and their stoicism and their intense sense of community and determination to arise from the sodden wreckage of their homes, and that Australians would dig deep to help. I helped to describe the community ethos which quickly triumphed over incipient despair. It is this mobilisation of the unifying spirit that thrills us all, even as we mourn.
Peter CosgroveRead
We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
John WinthropRead
As you discover what strength you can draw from your community in this world from which it stands apart, look outward as well as inward. Build bridges instead of walls.
Sonia SotomayorRead
When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.
Marilynne RobinsonRead