Top 100 Quotes About Small Towns
#1. I suppose more than anything, it's the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.
Nicholas Sparks
#2. In the schools of small Midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess.
Ellen Gilchrist
#3. Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo.
Garrison Keillor
#6. It's always so nerve-wracking being up there on stage. It's even harder playing in your hometown - and I have a couple of home towns - but, you're playing for all the people you knew in high school, so it causes no small degree of panic in my mind.
Nellie McKay
#8. In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers' markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.
Thomas Frank
#9. People always describe small towns as quaint or cozy or familiar. "You know who your neighbors are," they always seemed to say. But what you won't find depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting is how cruel those same neighbors can be.
T. Torrest
#10. A manufacturing resurgence is what will give local communities and small towns across America a fighting chance for survival. Many of today's American entrepreneurs come from those very places but make their wealth elsewhere. We need to change that.
Hamdi Ulukaya
#11. Admittedly, they [(places in novels)] didn't all have such ridiculous names as the ones in the Piddle Valley where her father's group of parishes was centered. It would have been hard to make credible a romantic fiction set in Farleigh Piddle, Middle Piddle, Nether Piddle and Piddle Dummer.
Val McDermid
#13. There are so many people who don't know small towns exist. When I write, I want to give my readers two things: one is a sense of consolation, and two, I want to make them laugh.
Jan Karon
#14. I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.
Tom Drury
#16. In those small towns you come to realize how the cathedrals utterly outgrew their whole environment.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#17. I'm all about small towns. I think it's a great place to grow up.
Kacey Musgraves
#18. 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
#19. I don't like bad mouthing towns and just thinking that I live in such a great place. I mean, I would hate to live in a small town and have a public persona say, "That town sucks." I would really not want to hear that.
Carlos Dengler
#20. History records the large events or the general condition of society, but only an individual can put down the way of life in a small town ...
Gladys Taber
#21. I hate small towns because once you've seen the cannon in the park there's nothing else to do.
Lenny Bruce
#22. I'm a guy who comes from a small town in the Midwest. It's not in my nature to say the most explicit things in public.
Jim Gaffigan
#23. In small towns as well as large, good people outnumber bad people by 100 to 1. In big towns the 100 are nervous. But in small towns, it's the one.
Paul Harvey
#24. In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.
Mark Twain
#25. Small towns seem to appreciate things a little bit more. They're less jaded and they're more kind of authentic and more themselves and they don't care as much.
Pauly Shore
#27. They say people from small towns have big dreams and that pretty much describes me. I had big dreams growing up and I'm still a dreamer.
Clay Guida
#28. One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city
as I once did for a couple of years.
Edward Abbey
#29. Small towns are like metronomes; with the slightest flick, the beat changes.
Mitch Albom
#30. Small town people assume you are a friend if you simply remember their names.
Randal Marlin
#31. Take a detour.
Discover small towns
and friendly faces
that don't grow along the highway.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
#32. I had a big family - two older sisters and a younger brother. My family was like moving around a lot so I lived in a lot of small towns. My father was very restless.
Jessica Lange
#33. My town's quite small and you kinda recognize everyone when you see them, so I definitely get funny looks from people.
Birdy
#34. He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think.
Victor Hugo
#35. I'm just a small-town New Zealand girl. But, I do think it was incredibly necessary for me. Wild Things wouldn't exist if I hadn't have made some dramatic changes and that all happened in LA.
Ladyhawke
#37. I enjoy small towns, I've got my friends there. I have friends in L.A. too, but I'm not much on traffic.
Jacob Lofland
#38. I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns.
Daniel Woodrell
#39. Naodyma isn't exactly a one-temple town, you know.
Andrew Ashling
#40. Thousands of cities in America are crying out for relief from the burden of illegal immigration. Small towns like mine can no longer wait for Washington.
Lou Barletta
#41. The thing is, you can't always have the best of everything. Because for a life to be real, you need it all: good and bad, beach and concrete, the familiar and the unknown, big talkers and small towns.
Sarah Dessen
#42. As a kid I never had the impulse to climb anything. I think that most kids who live in small towns or rural areas outside of the city, that's what they do - climb walls, or trees, or whatever. To me, it was more dance classes and not being very boyish.
Jamie Bell
#43. There was not a lot of room for someone like me, who kept the gossip mill running like a hamster wheel.
Molly Harper
#44. The code of small towns is simple but encompassing: if many forms of craziness are allowed, many forms of cruelty are ignored. Piggy
John Irving
#45. It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.
Peter Straub
#46. To read the papers and to listen to the news ... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.
Charles Kuralt
#47. I think small towns are the closest to heaven you can get on earth. I'm glad that some other people, my wonderful readers especially, feel the same way I do.
Diana Palmer
#48. When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
Louise Erdrich
#49. Hunch is your brain's way of taking a shortcut to the truth.'
'In small towns news travel at the speed of boredom'.
Carlos Luiz Zafon
#50. They were like two poor little leaves in a storm which bore death and annihilation not only to the heads of individuals, but to whole towns and entire tribes. What hand could snatch it and save two small, defenseless children?
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#51. I come from a small town in Maryland. I came to California in 1972 to begin Maude.
Bea Arthur
#52. Bluffton is growing. But we must hold on to that small-town character.
Laura Bush
#53. In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness.
Stephen King
#54. I was into punk, but I didn't go whole-hog. A lot of kids who grew up in small towns that were into punk music went the "safe" way - not doing drugs, being straight edge.
Daughn Gibson
#55. (This town) doesn't look like anything; it isn't anything. Its five tin-roofed huts cling to the skinny tracks of the Uganda Railway like parasites on a vine.
Beryl Markham
#56. By reflecting a little on this subject I am almost convinced that those numberless small Circuses we see on the moon are the works of the Lunarians and may be called their Towns.
William Herschel
#57. Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.
Paul Theroux
#58. Living in a small town ... is like living in a large family of rather uncongenial relations. Sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it's perfectly awful, but it's always good for you. People in large towns are like only-children.
Joyce Dennys
#59. As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.
Victor LaValle
#60. Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns.
Kent Haruf
#61. Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere.
Paul Ryan
#62. I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
Alice Munro
#63. I think in small towns like this one, whether you're a man or a woman, you basically do what there is to do.
Estelle Parsons
#64. I've seen it [Australia] go from a lot of small towns to big towns, but I think it has found its identity in all this time ... it's a very special country, I could easily live here.
Suzi Quatro
#65. 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
#66. I love New York, but am happy to be away from it. I really like small towns, with welcoming barbecue restaurants.
David Burnett
#67. His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.
Steven Johnson
#68. And somewhere
out there,
in the river of
addicts,
alcoholics,
wife beaters,
doormats,
overeducated legalized thieves,
fascist police,
and bitter rivalries
someone told me
it's a good city,
and I don't know
what's more frightening
Phil Volatile
#69. Small towns are sometimes like that; familiarity runs high, while regard for personal space is low, if nonexistent.
Laurie Notaro
#70. Small towns have their own heartbeat, no matter how many people come or go.
Mitch Albom
#71. I've had gay friends who grew up in small towns in France who had to lie for most of their lives, even to themselves. But eventually such lies become stronger than the people, and they have to face them.
Guillaume Canet
#72. I suppose I am a snob. I loathe towns. I loathe townspeople. They have small minds and giant backsides. Which is to say, what they lack in interiors they make up in posteriors.
Kami Garcia
#73. Small towns blossomed by elevators and the trains
Once every 14 miles along the prairie veins
We were born of progress, now progress will decree
That we're no longer viable, and should no long be ...
Still Standing about Canada's Prairie Elevators (The First Song album)
Phyllis Wheaton
#74. I thought people in small towns were supposed to be nice, not act like the son of Satan.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#75. Even the classic American main street, with its mixed-use buildings right up against the sidewalk, is now illegal in most municipalities. Somewhere along the way, through a series of small and well-intentioned steps, traditional towns became a crime in America.
Andres Duany
#76. The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.
Stendhal
#77. I like the world, but I feel very, very Italian. I love the small parts of my country: Tuscany, Capri in the winter. I don't like big towns.
Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo
#78. Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.
Stellan Skarsgard
#79. The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does.
Immanuel Kant
#80. Small towns are the worst for getting recognised.
Wayne Knight
#81. Back then every small town had a gym, and if itseated more than 2,000 then we'd be interested in playing in it.
Bob Cousy
#82. What we don't talk about enough is Ohio's unique and remarkable quality of life. We are a state of cities, small towns and growing suburbs where life is affordable and destinations within reach. There is no better place to raise a family.
Bob Taft
#83. Bakersville was never going to be the same. She'd been to other small towns where the residents all thought serial killers looked like monsters, that no member of their community could hide such dark desires. Once upon a time, she'd lived in one.
And the monster there had ripped her life apart.
Elizabeth Heiter
#84. When I go home to Pennsylvania, my cousins who live in small towns and are twenty-three with kids are like 'Krysten, when are you getting married?' 'When are you having a kid?' Honestly, those aren't the most important things to me right now.
Krysten Ritter
#85. I started my career in a town so small the local clinic was called Fred's Hospital and Grill.
Joan Rivers
#86. A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds.
Sonya Hartnett
#87. Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.
Stephen King
#88. (This place) presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof.
Beryl Markham
#89. When I was a kid down there it was always a dream to go to a Nebraska game but when you live in those small towns you hardly ever get up to one.
Larry The Cable Guy
#90. It's true that what you find in New York is something other than America. Only small towns and small countries are self-satisfied; a real capital goes beyond its borders.
Simone De Beauvoir
#91. I just moved [Bloomington] because I didn't do well with New York. It made me kind of anxious and it was just incredibly expensive. It just has this very small-town feel.
Shaun Fleming
#92. I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.
Lee Smith
#94. Small towns are best for spending Christmas, I think. They catch the mood quicker and change and come alive under its spell.
Truman Capote
#95. My films play only in Bengal, and my audience is the educated middle class in the cities and small towns. They also play in Bombay, Madras and Delhi where there is a Bengali population.
Satyajit Ray
#96. There's nothing left of my hometown in Kentucky. All those small and mid-sized towns and cities in the U.S. are just about malls around the edges and suburbs. That was definitely a loss, because everything just gets homogenized. You can't tell where you are, it's all the same.
Richard Hell
#97. I meet a lot of young people in the Midwest, and I saw what a difference a show like In the Life can make to their lives in some of these small towns where, you know, there are probably two gay people in the whole damn town.
Lesley Gore
#98. It wasn't as if she'd thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn't always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want.
Shannon Celebi
#99. I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.
Charles Kuralt
#100. I have lived most of my life in small towns, and I'm in the habit of knowing and talking to everyone.
Ellen Gilchrist
