Village Quotes

For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.

Isa Kamari

The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulnessin their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.

Kenneth Grahame

We are relatives at the village and yet we become strangers in the city

Thabo Katlholo

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

There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.

Juan Rulfo

Tha know where thy are we' ferrets. Ya never know where ya are we' lasses

Gervase Phinn

The village lay in the hollow, and climbed, with very prosaic houses, the other side. Village architecture does not flourish in Scotland. The blue slates and the grey stone are sworn foes to the picturesque; and though I do not, for my own part, dislike the interior of an old-fashioned pewed and galleried church, with its little family settlements on all sides, the square box outside, with its bit of a spire like a handle to lift it by, is not an improvement to the landscape. Still, a cluster of houses on differing elevations - with scraps of garden coming in between, a hedgerow with clothes laid out to dry, the opening of a street with its rural sociability, the women at their doors, the slow waggon lumbering along - gives a centre to the landscape. It was cheerful to look at, and convenient in a hundred ways. ("The Open Door")

Mrs. Oliphant

You ain’t old yet but when you get old, all the women in the village start to look down on you when they find out you want to do something other than sweep the kitchen or cut up vegetables. Had this big starch mango tree when I was small. Anytime I set myself to climb it, there was always a woman passing by to yell at me and tell me to get down. Asked me why I leaving my poor mother to do all the housework. I never got to the top. It was like God was always watching, ready to send another hag to tell me down. Then, one day, they cut down the tree.

Kevin Jared Hosein

It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book.

Sara Sheridan

Dry your tears, woman, the boy will be found. Nobody can do him anything…” Gradually, the tears began to dry from Etusi’s eyes, thanks to Okokpujie’s words, a mighty force that swung the entire village to action. Pg.38

Obehi Peter Ewanfoh

Our innocent kids undergo much trouble. Not only do the children of high caste families look down upon our children calling them low caste brats, but even some teachers ridicule them. They beat our children for no reason.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Even though we are supposed to be low caste and poor our vote also has the same value and validity as that of great people.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

She believed that people born to low caste families were meant to suffer. That was their karma. She had learnt that those who indulge in sinful activities in their previous birth, especially those who humiliated others, would be reborn to low caste families. She firmly believed also that one has to suffer until the sin was paid for through suffering and good deeds.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Killing life in whatever way, will drag you along the hell's way.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

If the woman has the physical fitness and the meritorious luck to bear his children, the family was a fortunate one. Villagers always looked at sterility with a squinted eye, and its fault and the misfortune lay solely on the woman's part. As such, a childless woman often became culprit for her entire life.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Physical beauty or sexual attraction in a woman was not a criterion in deciding, strengthening, or the survival of such relationships of these villagers.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Maggie was ten years younger than him. Being cross-cousins, they lived in the same compound, in the same two houses that still existed. When their parents told him to take her for his wife, there was nothing for him to think deep into the matter. They simply obeyed their parents. Accordingly, she came over to sleep in his house. In this, manner they remained as man and wife for a period of over thirty years.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Carolina protected her so that Suneetha should remain a virgin until her wedding night. The worth of such purity in character was immeasurable in this society and culture. Therefore, she never even allowed Suneetha to go with other village girls when they went to the desolate cinnamon gardens to gather firewood.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

The villagers considered it lucky to make the New Year's first money transaction with her because she was a prosperous person.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

When he had accompanied his father on drumming errands he noticed how high caste men and women treated them as inferior. They had to enter from the back door and wait near the kitchen or at a side veranda and sit on low benches or reed mats. They were never offered a decent seat. At meals times they were never invited to eat at the main table with the family or other guests. Instead, they had to eat the food served to them on the reed mat. This they ate in silence while the patrons sat at a lavishly laid table and enjoyed their food amidst chat and cheer.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Her heart filled with boundless love that surged anew for her father. She felt like rushing to him and planting a quick kiss on his cheek the way she used to when she was a small girl. However, these villagers are not in the habit of kissing their offspring after they grow up. They show their love and affection by stroking their heads, addressing them in endearing words and blessing them.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

According to the Buddha's doctrine that they believed in, it was not the caste that defined a person high or low. It was one's deeds that mattered.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

A new movement reinforced by activists such as Buddhist monks, physicians who practised traditional medicine, teachers, farmers, and laborers brought Prime Minister Bandaranaike into the political helm. The leaders of the Davulawatta community considered this election a personal achievement. They saw this as a people's government and appreciated its genuine interest in fulfilling the needs of the common people. They trusted that the present government would eradicate poverty and the caste discrimination, and work to promote self-esteem.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Village life gently swirled around them, with the perpetual ebb and flow of people, scurrying in every direction. The village was a living, organic entity, with blood flowing through its veins, and with a definite pulse and heartbeat. It had its own distinct personality and its own dark caustic humour, and was constantly processing and regurgitating information through its winding, meandering streets.

Leonardo Donofrio

i bring my kiasu friend to the airportleavings are never easy, not for longand though we both saw blur along the waymemories flooded present tensions.in the curry of his life no lemak remainedso now the predictable exit signalledthe end of his roundings, his bombings–he can bluff like hell, ma, he got style–and left me thinking about home, my kampong.

Kirpal Singh

Live life so well that, even if you die, the empty seats behind you will tell the story that, "yea, this soul did what God sent him/her to do". Give life and hope into your family, village, community, country, continent and the world at large. You can do it!

Israelmore Ayivor

Whatever dream God gave to you is for the comfort of those God keeps around you!

Israelmore Ayivor

Your dreams can change the environment which was not conducive for it at first! However it is a good initiative for the dreams that would change one society to be nursed in another environment, before being transplanted to strive in its original environment for the change process to begin!

Israelmore Ayivor

God gave us ground we created a city, God gave us time we need to create a future.

Amit Kalantri

I will build the best Potemkin village for you, my love!

Ljupka Cvetanova

A man that has not dealt with his foundation cannot deal with another man's foundation.

Steven Chuks Nwaokeke

In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know howhigh is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, inChina there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world isa small village, with how many morons should we have to cometo terms on the territory of this stupid planet. It's the same theworld over, or the world is the same wherever you go!

Carl William Brown

Technology has transformed the world into a global village. And communities, families, friends, etc., into local islands.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I have outlived a few of the kids that I grew up with in Knowsley Village, Liverpool, UK. Two dropped dead at eighteen years of age from heart attacks! They lived across the road from each other and played together. I wonder if it was some exposure that was common to them? Curiously, an entire family of three ladies all got breast cancer just round the corner from them, it killed my friend! A little further up the road another friend dropped dead of brain cancer in her thirties. Always seemed like far too much premature death in such a small area.

Steven Magee

If their horoscopes are not compatible, this marriage is out of the question.

Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

Back at the cottage we explored the topography of my body; twigs in my hair, calves striped red and my skirt smudged in meadowtones. The forest underlined me, accentuated me, illustrated me. I felt alive in that midnight village whose dark places left their signatures on my skin, whose bites still hummed around my wrists. I didn’t notice till then the thousand nettle stings rising like pearls; burning bracelets that my love kissed and rubbed with dock leaves; a folk remedy painting my pulse points green; honorary stalks.

Jalina Mhyana

Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy.

Laurens van der Post

traditional folk music and dance in India ,specially women oriented . every folk music has a homely story where women are portraits as house wife within four walls ,who has only knowledge about her husband and households activities. world is for men . though this is changing now .

litymunshi

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".

David James Duncan

The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.

Tahir Shah

Nature doesn’t need knowledge, because nature is knowledge, knowledge manifest.

Martin Pretchel

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

Catherynne M. Valente

Village Quotes

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