Neighbors Quotes

“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean.”
― Jon J. Muth

“Though Alec had never seen the occupants of the first floor loft, they seemed to be engaged in a tempestuous romance. Once there had been a bunch of someone's belongings strewn all over the landing with a note attached to a jacket lapel addressed to "A lying liar who lies." Right now there was a bouquet of flowers taped to the door with a card tucked among the blooms that read I'M SORRY. That was the thing about New York: you always knew more about your neighbors' business than you wanted to.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Lost Souls

“If we don’t live in the same vibe, it is hard to be aware of each other. When our reading differs from our neighbors’ reality, our surroundings may take a range of discordant shades and daily episodes become unrecognizable. But if we endeavor to find out, the “who is who”, the “what is what” and the “where is Waldo”, we might demonstrate our social literacy and connectedness. ("Fish for silence.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“One must love God first, and only then can one love one's closest of kin and neighbors. We must not be idols to one another, for such is not the will of God.”
― Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

“The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

“I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors.”
― Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost

“If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared.
(pg. 59, "Racism and the Economy")”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Good neighbors always spy on you to make sure you are doing well.”
― Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy

“Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.”
― Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck

“We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club

“So often when we say 'I love you' we say it with a huge 'I' and a small 'you'. We use love as a conjunction instead of it being a verb implying action. It's no good just gazing out into open space hoping to see the Lord; instead we have to look closely at our neighbour, someone whom God has willed into existence, someone whom God has died for. Everyone we meet has a aright to exist, because he has value in himself, and we are not used to this. The acceptance of otherness is a danger to us, it threatens us. To recognise the other's right to be himself might mean recognising his right to kill me. But if we set a limit to this right to exist, it's no right at all. Love is difficult. Christ was crucified because he taught a kind of love which is a terror for men, a love which demands total surrender: it spells death.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.”
― W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays

“Neighbours complaining about someone’s dog making an awful racket. You could hardly blame the poor beast, its owner had died in her bed at least a fortnight before and there hadn’t been much left of the old girl worth eating.”
― James Oswald, Natural Causes

“Discover the fulfillment of intimate relationships with flesh-and-blood neighbors and teammates in concrete place and time, and we escape the pressure of mainstream media to channel intimacy only as virtual embrace.”
― Jose Panate-Aceves and John Hayes

“A porcupine has fur like a fence. That makes it a good neighbor unto itself.”
― Jarod Kintz, Whenever you're here, I'm there for you

“I'm convinced that most of the important tasks in our lives all amount to the same thing: clearing away the burdens that block our way.”
― Greg Kincaid, Christmas with Tucker

“Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor (I Cor. 10:24). Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely "neighbor-regarding concern for others," which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“I’m the neighborly sort to them that’s neighborly. However, it seems there are folks around that don’t know the meaning of the word nor the sentiment behind it. - David MacLean”
― Will Colt, Big Sky Marshal: A Classic Western Adventure Series (Book 4)

“We are so foolish, we have such little minds, we try to hide our doings from our neighbors, who are all going through the same experiences and are equally desirous of concealing them from us. If all our screens were taken away what a comedy of errors would be disclosed. How surprised we should be to see everyone committing follies of which we have been so ashamed and so anxious to hide from the eyes of all!”
― Jenny Wren, Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl

“When you drive up later,
how happy you will be to see our other neighbor
has replaced the Confederate flag hanging in his yard
with one with snowflakes & a cardinal”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Xtra good xia mi! Xavier the Xenial Xenops ate it at home. Hospitable, he shared some with neighbors in Xenia, Ohio, a city whose name means hospitality.”
― Olivia Weisman, Alphabet Animal Adventures Across America: A to Z with Friends, Foods and Places to Go

“That's how community often begins. Not with grand gestures. With neighbors. With invitations. With someone simply saying, 'You should come try this.”
― Colleen Riddle, Came for the Game, Stayed for the People: True Stories of Pickleball, Friendship & Belonging

“The same few people rotated through the positions like a game of musical chairs played in slow motion by people who didn’t like music or chairs.”
― Sherrye Pomeroy, I'm Not Cleaning a Weather Balloon

“Governing Fauxpointe Estates was like herding feral cats who’d been given clipboards.”
― Sherrye Pomeroy, I'm Not Cleaning a Weather Balloon

“It looked like a Tuscan villa had mated with a Home Depot and the offspring were decidedly feral.”
― Sherrye Pomeroy, I'm Not Cleaning a Weather Balloon

“He had leased a one-bedroom place for $1600 a month, but unfortunately, it was located inside his apartment.”
― Sherrye Pomeroy, I'm Not Cleaning a Weather Balloon

“The exact path of smoke from my cigarette which caused my neighbor to cross-dress.”
― Sherrye Pomeroy, I'm Not Cleaning a Weather Balloon