Top 100 Our Town Quotes
#2. In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.
Bruno Schulz
#3. She's a lovely young woman from upstate New York, but you should be very thankful for those romance-novel-reading, tween-movie-watching women. They've had a big hand in making our town a success." "And Julian's love life, once he learned to spray himself with glitter.
Kristen Painter
#4. Everyone in our town has a story
but it's not the one he tells himself. Its author has a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred pens that never stop scribbling.
Carsten Jensen
#5. We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories.
John Sladek
#6. The beginnings of my studies also came to me from my father, as well as from the Rabbinical Judge of our town. But they were preceded by three tutors under whom I studied, one after the other, from the time I was three and a half till I turned eight and a half.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
#7. My major contribution to the format was to suggest that I be able to step out of the plot and speak directly to the audience, and then be able to go right back into the action. That was an original idea of mine; I know it was because I originally stole it from Thornton Wilder's play Our Town.
George Burns
#8. Our town was small enough that I never developed a healthy fear of strangers. To me, they were exciting things, gift-wrapped and full of possibilities, the sweet smell of somewhere else wafting from them like perfume.
April Genevieve Tucholke
#9. Our town was christened Buyan, after the legend of a Slavic island that appeared, and disappeared, at will. That would later seem an eerie, and disconcerting, premonition.
A.B. Shepherd
#10. Our town carves up and spits out a few seeds each year. We all approach autumn with dread because nobody wants to be a seed.
Howard Odentz
#11. No one in our town ever really died, because no one in our town ever lived, or did good or evil. We had no saints or sinners, only daydreamers in the World of Illusion.
I.L. Peretz
#12. In our town, Halloween was terrifying and thrilling, and there was a whiff of homicide. We'd travel by foot in the dark for miles, collecting candy, watching out for adults who seemed too eager to give us treats.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#13. I was down in Washington when 9/11 happened. We were in the middle of putting together the next summer season, and all I could think of was something somehow must make sense to us. Our Town kept coming into my mind.
Joanne Woodward
#14. It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.
Elie Wiesel
#15. I did an 'Our Town' in San Diego in the seventies with amateurs that I can tear up just thinking about.
Jack O'Brien
#16. Maybe Macon Ravenwood wasn't the only town shut-in. I didn't think our town was big enough for two Boo Radleys. But
Kami Garcia
#17. Our town was known for two things--no, three: salted fish, expertly dyed fabrics, and corruption.
Angela Elwell Hunt
#18. This is, like, the biggest thing to happen in our town since that girl found a potato that looked like Mother Teresa.
John M. Cusick
#19. Love is best when mixed with anguish.
In our town,
we won't call you a Lover
if you escape the pain.
Look for Love in this way,
welcome it to your soul,
and watch your spirit fly away in ecstasy.
Jalaluddin Rumi
#20. Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone.
Hedda Hopper
#21. Our family life, before figure skating turned it upside down, seemed normal. Our town of Riverside, Connecticut, was part of Greenwich, and we had the advantage of their wonderful community, with great beaches and beautiful parks.
Dorothy Hamill
#22. Tulsa was the kind of place where you could go to any door and borrow a cup of sugar. Everybody knew everybody. Truthfully, I don't even remember dealing with any racism in our town; we all got along.
Charlie Wilson
#23. Smart writers never understand why their satires on our town are never successful. What they refuse to accept is that you can't satirize a satire.
Hedda Hopper
#24. Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a
Michael Chabon
#25. Up until I was thirty years old I was your standard issue Christian- the kind christian schools and churches in our town pounded out year after year like spiritual Model-T's, mostly in one color-beige. We were covenant children, so we figured we came with a cradle-to-grave, salvational warrantee.
Clare De Graaf
#26. This is Halloween, everybody make a scene Trick or treat till the neighbors gonna die of fright It's our town, everybody scream In this town of Halloween.
Danny Elfman
#27. He was one
of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good
feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a
capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.
Albert Camus
#28. I was one of two Jewish kids in my school. We were probably one of two Jewish families in our town.
Michael Lynton
#29. There were two kinds of people in our town. The stupid, and the stuck.
Kami Garcia
#30. Of course the reason that all the children in our town like Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is because Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle likes children, she enjoys talking to them and best of all they do not irritate her.
Betty MacDonald
#31. Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.
Tom Robbins
#32. Casper Wyo., population 18,000 when I was born, was large enough to hold the surprises of civilization, but small enough that the prairie was close by - for some in our town, right out the front door - stretching on forever, under the great curving sky.
Lynne Cheney
#33. In our town, the most popular way out was joining the service. So my three best friends joined the Navy to get out. I didn't.
Jon Bon Jovi
#34. Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.
William Fulton
#35. All over town kids lay awake & wondered: Am I smart enough, pretty enough, strong enough, tall enough? If our fears were smoke, the town would be covered night & day by an inky pall.
Ron Koertge
#36. The specific patterns, out of which a building or a town is made
may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner
forces loose, and, set us free; but when they are dead they keep
us locked in inner conflict.
Christopher Alexander
#37. Because they're twins. they've got each other, wolf. This is a tough town in a tough world. But no matter how tough it get - our boys will always have each other.
Ben Elton
#38. Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?
Mark Twain
#39. There is a cannibalism that's loose in our society in which public figures such as the Clintons could try to come into this town and do something good for this country and then they get hammered away even though they're trying to do the right thing.
David Gergen
#40. ...it is not news that we live in a world
Where beauty is unexplainable
And suddenly ruined
And has its own routines. We are often far
From home in a dark town, and our griefs
Are difficult to translate into a language
Understood by others.
Charlie Smith
#41. After two hours and a half of this odd travelling (including a stoppage at a small town, where we were saluted by a gun considerably bigger than our own chimney), we reached Hartford,
Charles Dickens
#42. Really? We are being herded on a bus to drive across town to an all-boy academy where we disembark and join our lonely counterparts on a dance floor. Sounds like a scorecard situation to me.
Adriana Trigiani
#43. Baby, this town rips the bones from our back it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. We got to get out while we're young.
Bruce Springsteen
#44. My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#45. I didn't sing for years and years, but I started playing harp when I was maybe 9 or 10. I had actually wanted to play for years leading up to that, but no teacher in our little town would take me on as a student, because I was too young.
Joanna Newsom
#46. Why do we insist on building the largest and most impressive structures in our city when people on the other side of town are hungry, jobless and worshipping in storefronts?
K.P. Yohannan
#47. My favorite book title ever is Ross Thomas' THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE. Good book too as I recall read it a long time ago but Ross Thomas is consistently good.
Howard Kaplan
#48. Participant (Productions) is the only production company in town that has a double bottom line: social good plus financial returns. It's too early to tell how our returns are going to look - though all signs are promising - but social good is what we're really after.
Jeffrey Skoll
#49. Love can be so hauntingly beautiful, waking up past selves that have been wandering aimlessly through the corridors of our soul, for far too long. When someone else can take us from the ghost-town of our inner-selves, to exciting new landscapes, it's worth the risk, just to feel reborn.
Jaeda DeWalt
#50. And Cape Town is not what it used to be. Foreigners have left their imprint on our culture.
K. Sello Duiker
#51. Is it okay to go the roof of the tallest building in your town and jerk off into the street?
Eugene Mirman
#52. But, for me, being attractive is about more than just what a man's been blessed with. I like that Gideon doesn't know he's the handsomest man in town. Once, when we were on our way to the Finnemore house, a girl almost walked into a post because she wasn't paying attention. But Gideon had no idea.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#53. We had been given flowers, good food, and a soft bed, all in exchange for declaring our love. I thought we might go from town to town and marry in each one.
William Klaber
#54. We know our neighbors - so far as we have the right to know them. We hear of their joys and their sorrows, and hasten to make them ours so far as we may. Life in a small town is like a layer cake. One gets the whole of it, frosted top, lemon filling and all.
Laura E. Richards
#55. Obligation
They cannot ask for kindness
Or for mercy plead,
Yet cruel is our blindness
Which does not see their need,
World-over, town or city,
God trusts us with this task:
To give our love and pity
To those who cannot ask.
Edgar A. Guest
#56. We moved around a bit when I was younger, but I grew up primarily in Rhode Island, in a beautiful seaside community called East Greenwich. It was a small town, and so safe that we rarely locked our doors at night.
Michelle Gagnon
#57. In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip.
Mona Simpson
#58. The library drew Bean down the street, as it had drawn all of us over the years. Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town's library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week.
Eleanor Brown
#59. Lordy, lordy, lordy do I love money. It is a character flaw, no doubt, one that springs from a panicked childhood in which I always felt as if our family was only a couple missed child support payments from being tossed onto the pitiless streets of our suburban New Jersey town.
Michael Ian Black
#60. Smell brings to mind ... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.
Diane Ackerman
#61. Sorry, ladies. I guess that's our cue. We like to storm into town, inflict maximum damage, and then disappear ... like a KISS concert.
Brian K. Vaughan
#62. At the end of the day, we're defined by our predicament, not by the sides of town.
Jesse Jackson
#63. Things ain't never gone change in this town , Aibileen. We living in hell. Our kids is trapped.
Kathryn Stockett
#64. Man, Duke and I work our fannies off. We don't eat expensive dinners out. We don't go to the mvies or buy our clothes anywhere but Kmart
our biggest treat is taking the kids to Walmart on Friday nights, having a fast food hamburger and doing the grocery shopping.
Lori Copeland
#65. The people I bring out of suspension to populate my town won't have Facebook or iPhones, iPads, Twitter, next-day delivery. They'll interact like our species used to. Face-to-face. And
Blake Crouch
#66. The fact that our team had penetrated 150 miles into Pakistan, carried out the raid in the middle of a military garrison town, and then escaped without the Pakistani military being the wiser was an awful black eye.
Robert M. Gates
#67. We get so used to the gregarious nature of our towns and villages that we forget how crowded our existence has become.
Fennel Hudson
#68. Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.
Roger Bannister
#69. The whites have resolved to destroy our liberty and have therefore brought a force commensurate to their intentions. The Cape, after a proper resistance, has fallen into their hands, but the enemy found only a town and plain in ashes; the forts were blown up, and all was burnt.
Toussaint Louverture
#70. When our identities are tethered to externals, our sense of self-worth is always in danger. In the end, we become hypersensitive, insecure, and discontent, always comparing ourselves to the next parent, the next young professional, the next pastor across town. But
David Hickman
#71. Help, and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause, incredible things will happen in the world you live in.
Tom Hanks
#72. You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life.
Thornton Wilder
#73. Our fellow-citizens, as they now realized, had never thought that our little town might be a place particularly chosen as one where rats die in the sun and concierges perish from peculiar illnesses.
Albert Camus
#74. There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.
Bernard Cornwell
#75. But what is striking about this, in a town that often talks about tax cuts, we could quite easily, Republicans and Democrats working together, do something that everybody in America desires, and that is a simplification of our Tax Code.
Richard Neal
#76. I'm just a Chicago actor who's a playwright. Even with the success of 'August,' the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they've seen me onstage so much.
Tracy Letts
#77. In our beautiful memory
We were all handsome
We could all sing
We all had the heart
Of the prettiest girl in town
And we all hit .300
John Buck O'Neil
#78. This time I join him, and our voices drift together across the sleeping town. When
Jennifer Niven
#79. My mom, she was unbelievable. She ran the whole town. She was like the mayor. There would be 15 people eating at our lunch table. She'd drag people from the street.
Francisco Costa
#80. Our arrival there and not at a busier, more crowded airport on the other side of town was yet another example of the magical efficiency and convenience of vampire travel.
Deborah Harkness
#81. One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing.
James Howard Kunstler
#82. Speaker Boehner needs to understand the urgency for reform. Until the House passes a bill that includes a pathway to citizenship, we will continue to be in the streets, at town hall meetings and on the phones, demanding justice for the 11 million aspiring Americans in our country.
Eliseo Medina
#83. I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town's Latin school.
Hermann Hesse
#84. Ooh, big day in town for our park warden," I said. "They're even making you wear the uniform.
Hayley's mom will be happy. She thinks you look hot in it."
Dad turned as red as his hair.
Mom's laugh floated out from her studio. "Maya Delaney. Leave your father alone.
Kelley Armstrong
#85. In our language rhyme is a barrel. A barrel of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line smoulders to the end and explodes; and the town is blown sky-high in a stanza.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#86. Our Welsh teacher thinks he is young. He tells us that the Welsh for skiving in town is 'mitchio yn y dre'.
Joe Dunthorne
#87. Toph looks at me. I nod gravely. In this world, in our new world, there will be rocking. We will pay tribute to musicmakers like Journey, particularly if this is Two-for-Tuesday, which means inevitably that one of the songs will be: Just a small-town girl ...
Dave Eggers
#88. And underscoring it all was my father's insistence that my sister and I were the prettiest, smartest, and baddest bitches in Gotham town, no matter how many times we pissed ourselves or cut our own bangs with blunt kitchen scissors.
Lena Dunham
#89. So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy's seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection.
David Axelrod
#90. Maybe all those years when Josh was running around town, acting like an idiot, he was just trying to find a way to escape. Maybe that was what all of us were doing, in our different ways.
Heather Demetrios
#91. There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system.
Steven Chu
#92. I grew up outside of Boston in a town called Manchester by the Sea, and we spent our summers in Nantucket.
Nat Faxon
#93. I think it's our obligation to play, Honor. It's just a game, so can I kiss you?
Robin Bielman
#94. I think our failure in the production of good town churches of distinctive character must have struck you often, as it has me, when contrasted with our comparative success in country churches.
George Edmund Street
#95. It was very much like Norman Rockwell: small town America. We walked to school or rode our bikes, stopped at the penny candy store on the way home from school, skated on the pond.
Dorothy Hamill
#96. Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#97. I was born in Saratoga, Texas, a little town there in the Big Thicket about 60 miles north of Beaumont. Needless to say, we were very, very poor, but we always managed to have enough to keep our bellies full.
George Jones
#98. As Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!
Richard Rohr
#99. We were taught to be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#100. You're shocked, Mr. Burton, at hearing what our gossiping little town thinks. I can tell you this - they always think the worst!
Agatha Christie
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