Small Towns Quotes

“The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics: The Annotated

“In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions.' Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts.' ("Village Ghosts")”
― W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

“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.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“There was not a lot of room for someone like me, who kept the gossip mill running like a hamster wheel.”
― Molly Harper, Driving Mr. Dead

“(This place) presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.”
― Peter Straub

“People here liked to say they rooted for the underdog, but some of them got real quiet when the underdog was different from them.”
― J. Ryan Stradal, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

“People who have lived together for many generations share a special kind of madness.”
― Catriona Ward, The Last House on Needless Street

“(This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“I drank the rest of the sours and had dark sticky dreams. My mother had cut me open and was unpacking my organs, stacking them in a row on my bed as my flesh flapped to either side.”
― Gillian Flynn

“Streets were quieter then. Dogs had the run of the town and children played outdoors. The side streets were for Simon Says and Green Light and Giant Step and other games. We set up our own carnivals. We told fortunes and sold coin purses that we made. But the buses on Wisteria Drive meant no one played outside my house. Even the dogs were wary except for one who only had three legs and still chased cars.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“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.”
― Helen Grant, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

“You've gotten to play big fish in this little pond, but you don't' know what it is to be a bottom feeder in a place like this.”
― Allie Ray, Inheritance

“Doesn't every town in America have an old-timer called The Professor? That duffer who knows everything and everybody, as long as they are dead.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Water Museum

“Do you believe a place can have its own distinct rhythm? I do. Just as surely as the pulling of tides. Just as meaningful as a beating heart. And just as mysterious as the throaty purr of a well-stroked cat. I believe every place has its own unique rhythm. And I believe we are either in or out of sync with it.”
― Marti Healy, The Rhythm of Selby

“As usual, small towns like this were full of those who needed entertainment and whilst money was difficult to earn, the philosophy of giving the people what they wanted, which Franco lived by, had paid dividends.”
― Christopher Byford, Den of Shadows

“In a small community, alien takeovers, portals to Hell, and demonic murder cults can better establish a foothold.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“They made this town theirs. And their magic is powerful. Their wards have held for almost two centuries.”
― Sam J. Miller, The Blade Between

“Nothing passes in a small town.”
― Allie Ray, Inheritance

“What saves me is people. Strangers. Old women. Shopkeepers. Young lovers and milkmen doing their rounds and window cleaners with ladders fixed on top of their vans. Individuals oblivious to one another and yet, in a way, they act like insurance. An invisible web. Nothing too bad will happen on the street of a small town like this because people are everywhere. If something heinous occurs, then it's likely to be short-lived. Terrible acts are more difficult to conceal in a place like this. Someone will eventually step in or call the police. Horrors can still take place, but people look after people even though they might never think of it that way.”
― Will Dean, The Last Thing to Burn

“The myth of Main Street in the South has always been a chaste, puritanical fantasy. The reality is found on back roads and dirt lanes under a sky gone black, in the back seat of rust modeled Buicks and the beds of ramshackled trucks.”
― S. A. Cosby

“In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, you must, if you walk abroad at all, at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say good-morning, and go on. It is a close shave. Out in the world the escapes are not so narrow.”
― Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart

“We are all from small towns. But we dream big!”
― Avijeet Das, Why the Silhouette?

“To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn't that, it's nothing.”
― barbara kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“To those who always fantasize about love and think the magic you read is all fictional. Your real, soul-crushing, world-spinning, heart-exploding love is coming. And thank you to romance books for being mine.”
― Monica Lu, Damned and Beautiful

“She pressed me for information, not punched me in the face, but in small towns among small groups of friends, there is little difference between those two things. Ryan can hold a grudge.”
― Ashley Elston, First Lie Wins

“What was Sam afraid of? Withering away here. Dreaming of chances she'd never be able to take, and shriveling up from that denial, getting poorer and put under more pressure and pushed farther from the rest of the world. Compared to those fears, getting mauled by a bear seemed a delight.”
― Julia Phillips, Bear

“There'd been only three hundred students in the whole school, which made it a tiny, gossipy hellhole, a bucket of crabs snapping at each other and falling over themselves.”
― Julia Phillips, Bear

“I don't write about the wealthy. Small towns will have a few with money. But there just isn't much to say. Addictions, Failure, and Drama. They have all the same problems their poor neighbors think money will fix.”
― Damon Thomas, Some Books Are Not For Sale

“To admit you want. It’s very dangerous to live in a small town and want. It’s like building a garden of tiny flowers on a racecourse. Stick a head too high and be tramped to dirt.”
― Jane Flett, Freakslaw