Neighborhood Quotes

“To you, the beautiful human in you, who, like everybody else on this planet, is on an everyday struggle to love and be loved. I hope you find the love, happiness, and enlightenment you have been looking for, in you, in your backyard, in your wretched little neighborhood.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It was they who taught me that a conversation even between strangers could be a gift and sport of sorts, a chance for warmth, banter, blessings, humor, that spoken words could be fire at which you warmed yourself.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night.
The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge.”
― Daniel Amory, Minor Snobs

“He said that for those who hadn't been to California, what it was most like was an enchanted island. The spitting image. Just like in the movies, but better. People live in houses, not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next. The only way buildings compared favorably to houses was in terms of proximity. A neighborhood of buildings makes distances shorter, he said. Everything is closer. You can go walking to buy groceries or you can walk to your local tavern (here he winked at Reverend Foster), or the local church you belong to, or a museum. In other words, you don't need to drive. You don't even need a car. And here he recited a list of statistics on fatal car accidents in a county of Detroit and a county of Los Angeles. And that's even considering that cars are made in Detroit, he said, not Los Angeles.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“It was they who taught me that a conversation even between strangers could be a gift and a sport of sorts, a chance for warmth, banter, blessings, humor, that spoken words could be a little fire at which you warmed yourself.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

“Their neighbors in Penn Villas are strangers, transients – accountants, salesmen, supervisors, adjusters – people whose lives to them are passing can and the shouts of unseen children.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“People could get used to any change. All we needed was time.”
― Megan Miranda, Such a Quiet Place

“The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as 'protectionism' — and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not 'isolationism.”
― Wendell Berry

“If you ask a server for a seriously old wine in my neighborhood, they’ll look at you funny and then bring you a half-finished glass from somebody else’s table.”
― Gina Barreca

“What is the proper response to seeing a child arrested? Another child, the umpteenth child, when you've lived here long enough. And worse, arrested for something you can't be sure they actually did, even if they get found guilty?”
― Alyssa Cole, An Extraordinary Union

“When I lived in a small town, the whole town got together to help my family when tragedy struck our home. Now in a big city, my neighbor one block down doesn't know who I am.”
― James Hauenstein

“One person caring for one neighborhood, that's how we'll change the world, not with policy and policing.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live

“Neighbors communicating concern and sharing news through stoop sitting and "door" popping... Technology, while a huge boon to rebuilding, also ensured that you didn't have to get your hands dirty, or even physically interact with the community... A digital echo chamber is not a stoop. A stoop is a stoop is a stoop.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“We do not live in a zoo so we will not act like it as a neighborhood, in order to be a great neighborhood each of us needs to do our part and start acting like it”
― James D Wilson

“When my brain functioning was at its worst, I was getting lost in my own neighborhood where I had lived for years.”
― Steven Magee

“While the USA administration changed from Obama/Biden to Trump/Pence, the reality on a daily basis is that nothing changed in my neighborhood.”
― Steven Magee

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

“I was only aware of the USA government changing from Obama/Biden to Trump/Pence because I saw it on television, as nothing changed in my neighborhood.”
― Steven Magee

“More than any city I know, San Francisco is made up of discrete neighborhoods, each with its own unique aura. The main reason for this is its terrain. Its convoluted landscape defines San Francisco's neighborhoods, endowing each of them with a specific terroir.”
― Gary Kamiya, Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“Why does the world not rebel against a capitalistic society that places the right to pursue greed ahead of the collective good of a community? Why do so many people who live next door or across a hallway from one another never speak to their neighbors? Why do so many people go to great lengths to avoid interacting with their neighbors by installing tall privacy fences and timing their ingress and egress to avoid unscripted encounters with one another? In an age where electronic advances makes communicating with people a rapid convenience, why is it that we live as a species more isolated than ever before from people outside our immediate enclave?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster

“Són els llogaters del tercer tercera. Una història més a la ciutat.”
― Marta Orriols, Dolça introducció al caos

“Local and state governments can help civil society by building towns and cities in ways more conducive to neighborliness and community building. Walkability is a big thing. Mixing residential and commercial development would create real neighborhoods where people can walk to the corner store for a gallon of milk and run into their neighbors. It could allow for “third places” like neighborhood pubs, barbershops, and sandwich shops.”
― Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

“You look at a neighborhood like this and see a slum. I see the garden I was meant to tend.”
― Elizabeth Camden, Carved in Stone

“Nutty Community (The Sonnet)

Crazy am I, crazy are you,
When crazy together, we live anew.
Miserable am I, miserable are you,
When miserable together, I find joy in you.
Broken am I, broken are you,
When broken together, we are each other's glue.
Insecure am I, insecure are you,
When insecure together, we find it all untrue.
Disfunctional am I, disfunctional are you,
When disfunctional together, we function well.
Fallen am I, fallen are you,
When we fall together, we'll rise sure as hell.
Let us go against ourselves in defying self-centricity.
You be a nut, I'll be a nut, let's build a nutty community.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“I came to understand more broadly that the look and feel of our communities has a profound effect on the collective mental state of the people living there.”
― Antong Lucky, A Redemptive Path Forward: From Incarceration to a Life of Activism

“In the north of Tehran, right by the foothills of Tehran’s bit of the Alborz mountain range is Niavaran. The district is an entanglement of slopes and roads where way back in the day, going back to the Qajar era, villas and houses were all you would see. Now though it has become an extension of the city center with buildings and towers scattered across its narrow roads. Even with all of the congestion, the weather is a few degrees cooler than the rest of the city and it remains one of the “port out, starboard home” districts in Tehran.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“The Night Bomber by Stewart Stafford

Stefan and Elyse came home by rote,
To find a stranger's chilling note,
"I’m going to kill you" scrawled in red,
Pranks locked out with nothing said.

Then the hall window smashed,
In a firework’s screaming flash,
They threw it out before it burned,
Danger had not passed, they learned.

A ticking device left behind,
Elyse kicked it away just in time,
A garden explosion's massive bang,
Their ears and windows loudly rang.

They wondered what psycho did this deed,
And how they'd crossed this evil breed,
Then they heard them bomb their neighbours
who thought Stefan and Elyse were perpetrators.

Then another blast three doors down,
Stefan ran to help with a worried frown,
Concerned to see who else got hit,
Seeing their attacker was still at it.

A bomber in a ski mask did a backflip,
To dodge their lunging, angry grip,
He swung on ropes and vaulted high,
An acrobat mocking with a stylish eye.

The bomber fled in his getaway car,
A neighbour leapt on before he got far,
He held on tight but got dragged along,
Rolled to the kerb, he couldn't hold on.

The Night Bomber of Sheila’s Cabin
On the loose, an explosive phantom,
Stalking without any reason or pity,
His laughter echoed across the city.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Part of being a good neighbor is respecting what your close neighbors are telling you.”
― Steven Magee

“I would not do any home upgrade that a close neighbor was objecting to. It is just a recipe for a future bad relationship.”
― Steven Magee