Small Town Quotes

“I remember Peyton [Manning] called me as soon as I got out to Denver. He started the conversation by asking me, ‘When did you get in?’ We mainly just talked to get familiar with each other.”
― Vernon Davis, Playing Ball: Life Lessons from My Journey to the Super Bowl and Beyond

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“You can remember how it was, because you weren't really any different. You could believe the things that people told you, too. Their words were gospel, and you trusted them. You believed because you were sixteen…or seventeen…or eighteen. You believed because your dreams had started running up against the Line like it was a brick wall that didn't have a single crack. And you believed—most of all—because you had to. You needed to believe that someone could get out of this town, same way you needed to believe that that someone just might be you.
And you held onto that belief. You had to. You held on, and it saw you through the Run, saw you crowned the winner. And it saw you down the black road to a cleared patch of dirt in a cornfield, a spot where Jerry Ricks's Smith & Wesson took all your dreams away.”
― Norman Partridge, Dark Harvest

“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

“the anger that had been his constant companion for nine years had begun to fade, replaced by something far more dangerous—hope.”
― Ella Braeme

“These volunteers—dropping everything in their normal lives at a moment’s notice—showed a dedication that spoke volumes about their commitment.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“The adrenaline from the rescue had faded, leaving in its wake a different kind of tension—one that had been building since her arrival in Elken Grove.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“She wore her rank with an ease that came from experience and hard-won respect.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“Years of therapy, of self-reflection, of swearing he’d changed, and here he was, falling into the same damned pattern.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“Somewhere between resentment and respect, between past and present, he’d crossed a line he hadn’t even seen coming. He loved her—not as a memory or an idea, but as the woman she’d become.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“I’m tired,” she whispered, angrily wiping at the tears that kept coming. “So damn tired of fighting this. Fighting you. Fighting us.” Her voice broke. “Tired of not being held by you. Tired of not trusting you. Tired of being strong all the time.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“Tonight,” she whispered against his shirt, “I just want to be held by you. Loved by you. Can you do that for me?”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“She was secure in the knowledge that tomorrow, he’d be back. That thought alone was enough to follow her into dreams”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“That was her for the past nine years—circling alone, hunting for purpose, never letting anyone close enough to fly beside her. But now she wondered if maybe it was time to stop being the lone hawk, time to let others share her sky.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“Now I think I understand that accepting help doesn’t make me weak. That trusting someone else with my heart doesn’t diminish me.” She looked up, meeting his gaze. “That maybe the strongest thing I can do is let someone in again.”
― Ella Braeme, Rekindled Flame

“This is how she’d looked while standing in front of Reece Caldwell, the sexiest man to ever walk the halls of the high school?”
― Christine Miles