Village Quotes

“There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.”
― Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

“Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".”
― David James Duncan

“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

“Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.

We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.

And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness
in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“I did a research assignment on life in the Middle Ages only last year. I found the era fascinating, all that chivalry and court romance. But I never pictured anything as poor as this village. This is the pits. There's no romance here, definitely no chivary. And it stinks--of sweat and smoke and sewage.”
― Marianne Curley, Old Magic

“ब्याह औरतों से आँगन छीनता है और व्यापार मर्दों से गाँव.”
― Satya Vyas, Chaurasi/चौरासी/84

“The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.”
― Tahir Shah, House of the Tiger King : The Quest for a Lost City

“Heaven might have streets of gold, but this entire town is covered in it. Amber sunlight is everywhere, glowing off of the yellow brick buildings, reflecting from the windows, even hanging in the dust. Sunlight, apparently, smells like slightly overripe fruit, the kind perfect for the picking, that shouldn’t be left for any other day. It’s meant to be enjoyed now.”
― Corinne Beenfield, Where Green Meets Blue

“Things used to be so much easier.”
― Jordan Hoechlin

“There was trouble away in the South, and it seemed that the Men who had come up the Greenway were on the move, looking for lands where they could find some peace.
The Bree-folk were sympathetic, but plainly not very ready to take a large number of strangers into their little land. One of the travellers, a squint-eyed ill-favoured fellow, was foretelling that more and more people would be coming north in the near future. ‘If room isn’t found for them, they’ll find it for themselves. They’ve a right to live, same as other folk,’ he said loudly. The local inhabitants did not look pleased at the prospect.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Living in a city shouldn't make you cynical and living in a village shouldn't make you vulnerable.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“In the distance, smoke plumes from brick kilns where men, women and children will spend their entire lives on their knees under the sun cooling, patting, stacking, packing red bricks that are sent across the country. They will never leave that burning land, always thousands of rupees short of freeing themselves from their debts to the kiln’s owner”
― Sanam Maher, The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch

“Aubignane, like a small wasps' nest, was stuck against the salient of the plateau. It was true that only three persons remained there. A grassless slope went down from the village. Almost at the bottom, there was a patch of soft earth and the wiry hair of a stunted osier bed. Below was a narrow valley with a little water.”
― Jean Giono, Regain

“It doesn’t take a village. Rather, it takes the God Who created the village.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“There’s no geography in this story. Generally speaking, it takes place in three settings of national importance: the city, whether that one or another one; the mountains, where you take refuge when you’re attacked or you want to make war; and the village, which is for each and every one of us the ancestral home.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“A village becomes a town when a tomato trades before it reaches the belly.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“J’aime ce pays, et j’aime y vivre parce que j’y ai mes racines, ces profondes et délicates racines, qui attachent un homme à la terre où sont nés et morts ses aïeux, qui l’attachent à ce qu’on pense et à ce qu’on mange, aux usages comme aux nourritures, aux locutions locales, aux intonations des paysans, aux odeurs du sol, des villages et de l’air lui-même.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant - Le Horla

“En ese momento me di cuenta de que Sarah no era solo una chica más, una chica del pueblo cualquiera, sino alguien que había llegado al corazón de mucha gente, y parecía que lo había hecho de forma adecuada: para quedarse.”
― Josh T. Baker, La vida secreta de Sarah Brooks

“It wasn't that easy to leave your established home, the place made sacred by the graves of your parents, and move on to who knew where.”
― Valentin Rasputin, Money for Maria and Borrowed time: Two village tales

“Think twice, if a X asks for directions to reach your Y.”
― Monaristw

“Think twice, if X asks for directions to reach your Y.”
― Monaristw

“(...) wyłącznie to chyba robią na tych wsiach, patrzą się na innych, co za szaleństwo.”
― Adrian Skoczkowski, Trel w koronie

“My home, my village is just like a heaven, it's full of peace, love and bliss.”
― Santosh Kumar

“We pass under a sign that declares WELCOME TO PIXLEY’S HIDDEN MAGICAL VILLAGE, ESTABLISHED IN 1875.
I roll down the window, staring at this new world.
At this hour, only a few people are strolling on the sidewalks. It’s a typical small town, with one main road that runs through, with shops and quaint restaurants. But it’s magical. Each shop looks like a world of its own, with stately brick fronts or sleek glass minimalistic buildings or quirky cottages in a rainbow of colors. And the signs take my breath away:

ELIXIRS OF EUPHORIA
MYSTIC HAHN’S HAVEN FOR THE OCCULT
SARAH AND SUE-O’S SCONES AND SWEETS
QUILL TREE FOX ART GALLERY
LEON THE LION’S TOY EMPORIUM”
― Julie Abe, The Charmed List

“In the dream,
the fields are green again,
the river is unnamed and runs like rivers
run, connecting with another artery of water, running into
the shore of another village.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Nanjanad is the biggest, Badaga village in The Nilgiris / India, famous for hospitality, originality, and spirituality.”
― Dr Sivakumar Gowder

“Cent percent of village people are innocent. We can trust them.”
― Dr Sivakumar Gowder

“Pariva was a small village, unimportant enough that it rarely appeared on any maps of Esperia. Bordered by mountains and sea, it seemed untouched by time. The school looked the same as she remembered; so did the market and Mangia Road---a block of eating establishments that included the locally famous Belmagio bakery---and cypress and laurel and pine trees still surrounded the local square, where the villagers came out to gossip or play chess or even sing together.
Had it really been forty years since she had returned? It seemed like only yesterday that she'd strolled down Pariva's narrow streets, carrying a sack of pine nuts to her parents' bakery or stopping by the docks to watch the fishing boats sail across the glittering sea.
Back then, she'd been a daughter, a sister, a friend. A mere slip of a young woman. Home had been a humble two-storied house on Constanza Street, with a door as yellow as daffodils and cobblestoned stairs that led into a small courtyard in the back. Her father had kept a garden of herbs; he was always frustrated by how the mint grew wild when what he truly wanted to grow was basil.
The herbs went into the bread that her parents sold at their bakery. Papa crafted the savory loaves and Mamma the sweet ones, along with almond cakes drizzled with lemon glaze, chocolate biscuits with hazelnut pralines, and her famous cinnamon cookies. The magic the Blue Fairy had grown up with was sugar shimmering on her fingertips and flour dusting her hair like snow. It was her older brother, Niccolo, coaxing their finicky oven into working again, and Mamma listening for the crackle of a golden-brown crust just before her bread sang. It was her little sister Ilaria's tongue turning green after she ate too many pistachio cakes. Most of all, magic was the smile on Mamma's, Papa's, Niccolo's, and Ilaria's faces when they brought home the bakery's leftover chocolate cake and sank their forks into a sumptuous, moist slice.
After dinner, the Blue Fairy and her siblings made music together in the Blue Room. Its walls were bluer than the midsummer sky, and the windows arched like rainbows. It'd been her favorite room in the house.”
― Elizabeth Lim, When You Wish Upon a Star

“I’m kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition for its benign tolerance... I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.”
― Richard Dawkins