Top 100 Provincial Quotes
#1. Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
#2. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?
Henry David Thoreau
#3. Although we have do not have adequate access to all parts of Darfur we do fortunately have humanitarian personnel, including staff from my own office, in each of the three provincial capitals of Darfur.
Jan Egeland
#4. New York is very provincial. They're very cut-off; they don't have an awareness of so much that is going on in the world.
Robert Wilson
#5. In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory
horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene
and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#6. When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
Hilary Mantel
#7. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.
David Sedaris
#8. Long ago it took a Copernicus to tell a provincial world that this planet was not the center of the universe. Some selfish moderns need a Copernican reminder that they are not the center of the universe either!
Neal A. Maxwell
#9. Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
George Eliot
#10. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#11. Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Margaret Halsey
#12. (Always remembering, that our strength is continental, not provincial
Thomas Paine
#13. But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#14. Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.
Albert Camus
#15. My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don't have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#16. All Gaza's temples are torn down and burned and the city is cleansed of every belief but the Christian faith. The most stubborn opponents, faute de mieux, are tied up, marched away to the provincial capital, severely tortured, and all killed mala morte, 'a great number.'
Ramsay MacMullen
#17. What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that's about it.
Thomas Pynchon
#18. There was, I think, a prevailing
impression common to the provincial mind, that his misfortune was
the result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger.
Bret Harte
#19. It would be naive to imagine we have solved all our income security problems simply because the roles of the federal and provincial governments in the area of skills training have been clarified.
Kim Campbell
#20. I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.
John Darnielle
#21. Our neighbor Canada has 2,200 troops serving in Afghanistan. Canada has also assumed responsibility for the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, which was originally established by our own military.
Tom Lantos
#22. The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of mustaches.
Victor Hugo
#23. Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly.
Orlando Figes
#24. That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
#25. The author points out that, with life in provincial Washington difficult for those not of independent means, Adams and his wife undervalued the social connections that others found vital. They often made an impression as distant and prideful.
Paul C. Nagel
#26. A patchwork solution of provincial targets is an admission of defeat and a statement that we have failed our children and grandchildren.
Elizabeth May
#27. When you're a mayor and you have a problem you blame the provincial government. If you are provincial government and you have a problem you blame the federal government. We don't blame the Queen any more, so once in a while we might blame the Americans.
Jean Chretien
#28. I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad ...
Philip Larkin
#29. Berlin is like being abroad in Germany. It's German, but not provincial.
Claudia Schiffer
#30. My youngest brother and I went on a ten-day canoe trip in Bowron Provincial Park in British Columbia years ago. Believe it or not, we took only granola, thinking we'd be eating a lot of lake trout. Well, we neglected to bring along a net, and our fishing line was only 8-lb. test.
Will Hobbs
#31. The way you blunder from one catastrophe to the next, it's a wonder the whole galaxy doesn't hate you.
The galaxy is a big place, General. You provincial military types don't get far enough out to really see that.
-General Tagon & Captain Kevyn Andreyasn
Howard Tayler
#32. As a child, I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.
Julie Burchill
#33. Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom - ah the soul-destroying boredom - of long days of mild content.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#34. The term American, like the term democrat, began as an epithet, the former referring to an inferior, provincial creature, the latter to one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.
Joseph J. Ellis
#35. Like paths and alleys overgrown with hardy, rank-growing weeds, the words we use are overgrown with our individual, private, provincial associations, which tend to choke the meaning.
Stefan Themerson
#36. Oppression does not know the meaning of provincial boundaries. Aren't our energies better spent fighting the common enemy instead of each other?
Benazir Bhutto
#37. You know, the state of Connecticut is ... sometimes it's a provincial state. And I've been working very hard to get the endorsement of the people within our state, and ultimately, the ultimate endorsement is from the voters in the state of Connecticut.
Linda McMahon
#38. I've noticed that my resolutions involve me not doing stuff that I wasn't going to do anyway so here's something more positive. I'm going to retrain as a Latin teacher in a provincial public school.
Arthur Smith
#39. Tom looked more and more like a rabbi. As is the way of men of character in provincial towns, he tended to become a collection of mannerisms, a caricature of himself.
Frank O'Connor
#40. Socially, Philadelphia was still a fairly provincial city, its business community governed by the mores of the Main Line. Politically, it was a cauldron of ethnic rivalries, dominated by competing Irish and Italian constituencies.
Andrea Mitchell
#41. Except to heaven, she is nought; Except for angels, lone; Except to some wide-wandering bee, A flower superfluous blown; Except for winds, provincial; Except by butterflies, Unnoticed as a single dew That on the acre lies
Howard Mumford Jones
#42. If you lived in a provincial town like Torre Annunziata, where there was nothing to do in the evening but go to the movies with your friends, the cinema was a world of fantasy. I had always been in love with it.
Dino De Laurentiis
#43. When I first came to Canada, I thought it was going to be easy to be a Canadian; like so many stupid Americans, I pictured Canada as simply some northern, colder, possibly more provincial region of the United States-I imagined it would be like moving to Maine, or Minnesota.
John Irving
#44. I grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra - places like Akola, Betul, Wardha, Jhansi; I thought the rise of provincial India would be an interesting subject to tackle.
Pankaj Mishra
#45. Complete self-government for the province [gubernia and region], district and community through bureaucrats elected by universal suffrage; the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.
Vladimir Lenin
#46. In any event, colonization and the grant of lands were provincial matters.
Albert Bushnell Hart
#47. The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.
Alison Bechdel
#48. The reason for a Lahore-based cricketer being treated with a degree of animosity by the Karachi lobby (or vice versa a Karachi cricketer being treated similarly by the Lahore lobby) needs to be set in a wider context of historical regional and provincial tensions. Rivalries
Shaharyar M. Khan
#49. Bistro cooking is good, traditional food, earnestly made and honestly displayed. It is earthy, provincial, or bourgeois; as befits that kind of food, it is served in ample portions.
David Liederman
#50. The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
Honore De Balzac
#51. It's nearly impossible to believe just how provincial the wine world was in 1978, the year I launched my journal, 'The Wine Advocate.' There were no wines exported from New Zealand and virtually none from Australia (including Penfolds Grange, one of the greatest wines in existence).
Robert M. Parker Jr.
#52. Every person lives bounded by the structural formation of human anatomy and the provincial demands of the human condition.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#53. The divinity in man is the true vestal fire of the temple which is never permitted to go out, but burns as steadily and with as pure a flame on the obscure provincial altar as in Numa's temple at Rome.
Henry David Thoreau
#54. In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is the insanity of dialectics.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#55. We are very grateful for what the Ontario provincial government is doing, and for cooperation from provincial and local police forces all across Canada.
Paul Cellucci
#56. Sometimes I hate this place. I mean I really, truly, hate it. It offends my narrow-minded and provincial sensibilities regarding good universe design.
Garon Whited
#58. I'm not in the business of saying just one thing about just one place. If you only see Palestine in my films, then I've failed because then I'm just a provincial filmmaker.
Elia Suleiman
#59. You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
W.G. Sebald
#60. When I was very young, Denmark was a very small country, and we still are, but it was then very provincial and everybody knew everybody. Now, we are very much like the rest of the world, especially with the arrival of the internet.
Michala Petri
#61. How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change.
Learned Hand
#63. Why would anyone wish to be provincial in time, any more than being tied down to one place through life, when the whole reach of the human drama is there to experience in some of the greatest books ever written.
David McCullough
#64. The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.
Pat Conroy
#65. The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.
Phyllis McGinley
#66. Australians are very provincial in many ways. If they feel that you've used them as a stepping stone to bigger things, they resent it.
Graham Russell
#67. Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself.
Margaret Atwood
#68. An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini
#69. With the idea that a single creator can build a society wherein a huge number of people will live, Le Corbusier later approached Stalin. In India, he charmed a powerful provincial family and ended up making huge, sculptural relics in Chandigarh.
Masato Otaka
#70. It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.
Stephen Harper
#71. He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function.
Elena Ferrante
#72. I first visited Kurdistan in 2003. I arrived in the town of Sulaimaniyah, courtesy of smugglers who drove me across the border from Iran. Sulaimaniyah was a small, charming provincial Kurdish town.
Luke Harding
#73. In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.
Richard M. Weaver
#74. World class is a phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment events, as well as a wide variety of insecure individuals, to assert that they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.
John Ralston Saul
#75. India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.
Aravind Adiga
#76. My sense of Los Angeles was very New York provincial, as in 'all those people are crazy out there' (which they are), and stupid (which they're not), and immoral (it's more interesting than that).
Lynda Obst
#77. Mistress Allen was only an ordinary provincial manor lady, bent on nothing more sinister than retrieving money of which she felt defrauded, and in the process either quarreling with or using people.
Anya Seton
#78. What the novel portrays is basically the reality of Vienna today: one of the world's great cities robbed of its lifeblood, reduced to a bland provincial capital filled with beautiful old buildings.
Tom Reiss
#79. I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.
Sherwood Anderson
#80. Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis.
Ayelet Waldman
#81. Wuthering being a significant, provincial adjective descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.
Emily Bronte
#82. I know that a prime minister of Canada needs to be deeply respectful of the other levels of government - whether it be municipal, provincial, or even nation-to-nation relationships with aboriginal governments.
Justin Trudeau
#84. We must break through the provincial crust if we are to reach the core of all-India nationalism.
Mahatma Gandhi
#85. When my party won the elections convincingly on February 18th, 2008, we immediately reached out to other parties to form broad-based coalitions of national unity in the National Assembly and in the four provincial assemblies.
Asif Ali Zardari
#86. The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#87. The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study.
Honore De Balzac
#88. We lived in the provincial town of Ramat Gan where I spent most of my youth adjacent to the chess board.
Arnon Goldfinger
#89. On every album I've put out, I've put diverse Canadian songs on it. They're not provincial album; my albums are national albums. There'll be a song about Saskatchewan and Vancouver and Nova Scotia on there.
Stompin' Tom Connors
#90. Besides, there is perhaps nothing so effective as the monotony of provincial town life in the Andes for suffocating ideals and creativity.
Miguel Garnett Johnson
#91. Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. A provincial is always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-sufficient.
Patrick Kavanagh
#92. Who among all the provincial lords - besides Lord Asakura - is a man upon whom we could rely? Who is the most reliable military leader in the country today? Does such a man exist?" "He
Eiji Yoshikawa
#93. I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.
Pablo Picasso
#94. You're just poor cornball provincial people, you critics; you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
George Cukor
#95. We lived in Northern Quebec, and the nearest school was thirty miles away, so my mother took on the task of home schooling me. She spoke to some friends, received some instructions from the provincial school board, and found some interesting books that perhaps I might find useful.
Willard Boyle
#96. Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.
Aravind Adiga
#97. For over 20 years, the federal and provincial governments have made enormous efforts employing a variety of approaches in an attempt to stimulate Montreal's economy.
Kim Campbell
#98. In regard to education, something has been done by the Provincial Legislature; but to build churches, and to place clergymen is a work of greater difficulty.
John Strachan
#99. Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death? - no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death.
Chuck Palahniuk
#100. Boston - wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming - has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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