Small Towns

The Small White Churches of Small White Towns

The twangy, off-key hymns of the poor,

Not musical, but somehow beautiful.

And the paper fans in motion, like little wings. –Donald Justice

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t be. --Alexander Woolcott

As for future generations and whether they will have roots, I'm sure they will. Urbanization doesn't change that. People don't tolerate loneliness very well, and when they leave home and family, they form new families ---- they fasten onto people in their line of work, or neighbors, or people at church, and weave whole new complicated networks. We can't be too sentimental about small towns ----- they're only as good as the people who live in them, and they certainly have been the source of considerable cruelty and bigotry and also boredom. And boredom is the only explanation for the high incidence of alcoholism and drug addiction in rural America. –Garrison Keillor

Tony Hillerman grew up in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, a place where “life was not complicated by any possibility of getting rich.”

I knew it was going to be a docile town because I seen a dog chasin’ a cat, and they were both walking. –Jerry Sloan, Hanston, KS

Bobby told Lucy, “The world ain’t round.

It drops off sharp at the edge of town.

Lucy, you know, the world is flat.

People leave town, they never come back.” –Hal Ketchum, “Small Town Saturday Night”

(the motto of Lake Wobegon High School) Summus Quod Summus: We are what we are. –Garrison Keillor

These men [the founders of Benzonia] were intensely logical. They believed in the perfectibility of human society, and a man who held that belief must of course do what he could to bring perfection about. It was not enough to exhort people to lead a better life; you had to lead a better life yourself, and do it in such a way that all men would see it. If society was to lift itself by its bootstraps, your place to begin was with your own bootstraps. Life in a community dedicated to this belief is apt to be rather special, and it was so in our town. Growing up in Benzonia was just a bit like growing up with the Twelve Apostles for next-door neighbors. You never could forget what you were here for. –Bruce Catton

Being a poet in the United States has meant for me years of confusion, blundering, and self-doubt. The confusion lies in not knowing whether I am writing in the American language or the English or, more exactly, how much of the musical power of Chaucer,
Marvell, and Keats can be kept in free verse. Not knowing how to live, or even how to make a living, results in blunders. And the self-doubt comes from living in small towns. –Robert Bly

Freeport, New York, where her ancestors settled in the years after the Revolutionary War, is the kind of place Garrison Keillor deadpans about, but whose complexities Thornton Wilder truly understood. –Sridhar Pappu

The main business of Bailey Building and Loan was financing the first new suburban subdivisions of the automobile age. In one of the movie's major set pieces, George Bailey opens Bailey Park, a tract of car-dependent cookie-cutter bungalows, and turns over the keys to the first house to the Italian immigrant Martini family. Had the story continued beyond 1946 into, say, the 1980s, (with George Bailey now a doddering Florida golfer), we would have seen the American landscape ravaged by suburban development, and the main street towns like Bedford Falls gutted and left for dead. That was the perverse outcome of George Bailey's good intentions. –James Howard Kunstler

When I wake up at night and can’t sleep, I think of Grand Rapids. –Pres. Gerald R. Ford (in the last year of his life)

[Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1969] You’d just go out on your front steps and holler when it was dinnertime. You’d have no idea where they were. There wasn’t much traffic. The kids were like a flock of pigeons that flew back and forth from one lawn to another. –Pat Churchland