Small Town Quotes

“No matter what you do, someone always knew you would.”
― Ami McKay, The Birth House

“Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“‎The simple truth is that you can understand a town. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just another part of it.”
― Brenna Yovanoff

“It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“Mr Churchill caught the end of one of the long ribbons from her bonnet, which were flying madly in the strong breeze. He toyed with it for a long while, then looked up into her eyes. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked.
“No, I don’t suppose I do,” Jane answered. Her heart started beating harder. That was a lie. Maybe her breath was catching in her throat because she was lying: she fell in love with him the moment she saw him, rescuing the poor store clerk. Or maybe it was because he was standing so close to her, just on the other end of her bonnet ribbon. She felt her cheeks growing warm, and tried to talk herself out of blushing. He was not standing any closer to her than when they danced together, or sat on the same bench at the pianoforte. Why should it fluster her that he was wrapping the end of her bonnet ribbon around his fingers like that?”
― Jeanette Watts, My Dearest Miss Fairfax

“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

“Murder, gambling, and beating up women doesn't illicit my sympathy, no matter what kind of language you dress it in.”
― Albert Waitt, The Ruins of Woodman's Village

“Living in a small town...is like living in a large family of rather uncongenial relations. Sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it’s perfectly awful, but it’s always good for you. People in large towns are like only-children.”
― Joyce Dennys, Henrietta Sees It Through: More News from the Home Front 1942-1945

“The people feel and look the same, like they've settled here even though they know there's something more-something better-just beyond where they are.

Small-town life.”
― Courtney Summers, Fall for Anything

“I wish I could show you the little village where I was born. It's so lovely there...I used to think it too small to spend a life in, but now I'm not so sure.”
― Mary Kelly

“He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.”
― Jess C Scott, Take-Out, Part 1

“Living in a small town [in India] was like living in a glass house!”
― Mallika Nawal, I'm a Woman & I'm on SALE

“Rain Valley newcomers pretty much fell into two groups: people running away from something and people running away from everything.”
― Kristin Hannah, Magic Hour

“Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“Future Farmers of America. Group who take ag classes and are going to inherit the farm. Hot shit around here, they have a couple guys in every clique, and they stick together, 'cause they know they'll be seeing each other every week for the next sixty years.”
― John Barnes

“It was like hundreds of roads he'd driven over - no different - a stretch of tar, lusterless, scaley, humping toward the center. On both sides were telephone poles, tilted this way and that, up a little, down...

Billboards - down farther an increasing clutter of them. Some road signs. A tottering barn in a waste field, the Mail Pouch ad half weathered away. Other fields. A large wood - almost leafless now - the bare branches netting darkly against the sky. Then down, where the road curved away, a big white farmhouse, trees on the lawn, neat fences - and above it all, way up, a television aerial, struck by the sun, shooting out bars of glare like neon. ("Thompson")”
― George A. Zorn, Shock!

“The real core of this book is about the open secrets that can fester in a community until an outsider raises questions.”
― J. Alexander Greenwood, Pilate's Cross

“The point on which the town of Seal Cove is built, shelters a small harbor on the south, and a series of lovely secluded coves on the north, one of which lends its name to the town.”
― S.W. Clemens, The Seal Cove Theoretical Society

“This town was caught in a perpetual state of stagnation. The same three thousand or so people were still living the same small-town life. They thought they ruled the universe from the confines of this one-mile square, yet their world ended at the city limits.”
― Kimber Silver, Broken Rhodes

“Yako went to the boxes holding Lilly and Candice, undid the bungee cords, and opened them. She used smelling salts to arouse them.”
― Karl Braungart, Triple Deception

“in the 1970s people still referred to my mother as a Communist because she had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly,”
― Haven Kimmel

“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

“.I never felt particularly connected to Coalfield; I mean, I felt anchored to it, like the years I’d spent here would make it harder for me to live anywhere else, but I never felt shaped by it. Everyone thinks the South is, like, Flannery O’Connor. They think it’s haunted. And maybe it is, deep down, in the soil, but I never saw it that way.”
― Kevin Wilson

“It's better to wake up than fall back asleep in a town with no dreams.”
― Dennis E. Staples, This Town Sleeps

“Welcome to Guthrie.'

'What do you mean?' I asked.

'Where everybody knows everything but no one says a word.”
― Louise Miller, The City Baker's Guide to Country Living

“You don't have to be better - you can just be. Be here.”
― Kerrigan Byrne, Nevermore Bookstore

“Heard from whom? I always hated this small-town-grapevine nonsense. That's something I love about the city. The anonymity. No one knows who you are, and no one gives a shit about your business. It's a beautiful thing.”
― Rachel Harrison

“It was always something in Dixie County. A storm knocked out your power. A squirrel. A blown fuse. The reasons would vary. It made no difference. You were still sitting at home in the dark.”
― Damon Thomas, Some Books Are Not For Sale

“Southern is a design element these days. A large craft market exists for this Decorative Southernness. Framed art and throw pillows saying – "I Love You Like Biscuits and Gravy" and "Bless Your Heart!" But I've yet to see a "You Don't Look Like You're From Around Here" dish towel. This was the phrase I heard most growing up in small town Florida.”
― Damon Thomas, Some Books Are Not For Sale

“Without realizing it, somewhere along the way, the life I'd pictured for myself happened.”
― Piper Collins