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

“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

“I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable--most folks where we've lived our whole lives don't trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes--they don't hide anything. If I don't care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don't care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don't know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn't bother with small lies.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“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

“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

“(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

“(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

“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

“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

“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

“They said all the world was a stage, and Lydia had never been very convinced of that. But a small town was most definitely a stage when drama was going on.”
― Maisey Yates, Tough Luck Hero

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

“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

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

“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

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

“By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Alice's mother used to host wild edible classes that would attract a lot of people, but this was a small town and once you teach those interested few everything you know, then there's no one left to teach. It becomes, after a while, a strategy for convincing others that your way of life is important.”
― Keith Lesmeister, We Could've Been Happy Here

“She wondered how many towns like this existed all over the country?Bucolic scenery on the outside, with its own private soap operas, gossips and hells on the inside. She wondered if the suburbs in huge cities were merely a collection of small towns, piled on top of each other and each place was ultimately the same. The thought struck her as exceedingly depressing. However, her spirits were not in their best shape.”
― Jaime Allison Parker

“Next door was a vegetarian café and deli, and next to that was the Wooly Bear yarn shop. Its logo was a caterpillar in shades of yellow, green, and scarlet. Maggie went in.
The shop was warm and bright, with one entire wall given over to cubbyholes filled with yarns of every hue in many weights and fibers. The opposite wall held small skeins and spools of thread on pegs for embroidery and quilting. There were racks of pattern books and magazines, and in the back a mini classroom was set up with a small maple table and folding chairs, now accommodating a group of eight-year-olds wielding fat knitting needles and balls of oversize wool. A girl of about sixteen wearing a Rye Manor sweatshirt was helping a little boy to cast on stitches.”
― Beth Gutcheon, The Affliction

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. And people who prefer misfortune out here to misfortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“Romantic souls seeking real beauties go to the small shops of small towns, not to the big shops of big cities!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Maybe it's the unique people. Maybe the old-fashioned bucolic setting or the nostalgia it brings—he'll never be sure. But it's there he knows that his family truly became close. Of course, their end there was tragic, yet he knows those years were something else. Those years were the best of their lives.”
― Michael Dault, The Sons of Summer

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

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