Town Quotations | Page 2

I was born in 1951 in Kalgoorlie, a prosperous mining town 370 miles east of Perth, Western Australia. Kalgoorlie was a gold rush town which sprang up in the desert after the Irishman Paddy Hannan struck gold there in 1892.

My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.

I grew up in a small town in West Virginia called Kenova. It's the city where the plane crashed from Marshall University. I watched the mountain burn, and my cousins were the volunteer firemen. I was 6 years old at the time.

A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.

There was no way to lock down, or tighten up, or Fail-Safe into Security Theater a race that covers 26.2 miles, a race that travels from town to town, a race that travels past people's houses. There was no way to garrison the Boston Marathon. Now there will be.

If someone said, 'You can go live in this little town in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks and all you've got to do is sing for us,' I would do that. That's more exciting to me than the prospect of going on some national tour, where you're going to play arenas or sheds every night, because of the crushing repetition of that kind of line.

If you're an Afghan village leader in a small town down around Kandahar somewhere, and you know that the footprint is getting smaller for your security, and the Taliban saying don't forget, I'm going to be back real soon, who is your loyalty going to go through?

My family is from a tiny town in Alabama. So all I wanted to do was get out of this town.

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.

People always want you to look pretty. I would like to live in the Midwest in a small town and never put makeup on. But they won't let you do that. Once I went through a period when I did do that, wore no makeup, wore my hair any which way, and people looked at me like I was a bum.

I was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, an ancient temple town in Tamil Nadu best known for its temple of Nataraja, the lord of dance.

We had extremely democratic town councils in medieval Italy which knew the value of working together, and every now and then, down the centuries, this spirit returns.

When we got down from the ambulances there were sharp cracks about us as bursts of shrapnel splashed down upon the Town Hall square. Dead soldiers lay outside and I glanced at them coldly. We were in search of the living.

I was in Kansas for about a month, and we worked most of the time in a very small town, so it felt like the production basically took the whole town over. In a way, we were the Martians in Kansas.

I grew up in a small town in Ireland and didn't know any actors. I never thought it was a viable job. It wasn't until I was on 'The Tudors' that I realised it was a possibility.

My parents are very humble people who have simple lives... they live in a pleasant little town in China.

Actually, I was born in Las Vegas. My parents moved to Utah when I was eight because, after 40 years in Vegas, they were tired of it. We ended up in Nephi, a really small town in Utah.

Well, I was born in Miami, and then I lived for a long time in Tallahassee, and before that, Winter Haven, which is a tiny town in Florida. I was not a city girl.

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

I was brought up in Florence, a beautiful medieval town whose rhythm is completely in antiquity.

I was born and raised in a small town in Maine, Waterville. I enjoyed living there - still do - and my goal in life was a fairly specific and focused one of practicing law in Maine.

I had a hard time when I came back to Sweden and started school, because I looked different. And we moved to a really small town on the west coast of Sweden, and there were no brown people around. It didn't really get any better until I started music school at about 10 years old.

I grew up in a small town that was absolutely a perfect embodiment of new urbanism.

The luckiest person in the world is somebody who is born into a small, shabby-genteel town on a major railway connection with 24,000 souls and a bird sanctuary and whose grandfather owns a farm and whose father owns a business -whose family is mildly prosperous but not rich, which means you can leave the town.

Because I came from a small town outside Glasgow, nobody from my school had ever gone into the acting profession. It was just something you didn't do. You joined the bank or became a teacher or whatever you did.

The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn't always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn't yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.

My experience growing up in a rough and tumble town in the blue-collar world of Western Pennsylvania in the 1970s was that anything a man did was always more important than anything a woman did.

There are three types of pitchers you have to deal with. Some, you just have to tell what town they're in, remind them where they are. Some, you remind them about mechanics, and some, you have to bust their tail. You have to make them your friend and have them trust you.

My home town is very small and very remote and we don't have a movie house.

The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.

Growing up, I never imagined a girl from a border town could one day become a governor.

I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.'

We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get 'The New York Times' and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that everyone has access to a distribution system to express themselves.

You know, when we get to a point in this country where dissent is extremism, we've turned, I think, a very dark page in our history. And I don't want us to go there. I encourage Americans and I'm - right now, to go to these town hall meetings, to - to talk to your Congressmen, the people that you elected.

I think Philly is arguably the best sports town - football town - in America.

I grew up in a small town where I went to the movies a lot and fell in love with all these people. I also fell in love with the movie business. So all I saw were actors on the screen so I thought, well, that's what I have to be if I want to be a part of the movie business.

I've been around the surf culture since I was a kid. I grew up in a beach town in Rhode Island. Then eventually I lived in Dana Point, Calif., a real surf hotbed.

These two girls start wanting the same thing because in this neighborhood, they know all the guys so well. It's a small town and all the guys are just really boring to them.

'Seconds' is grounded in the reality of this restaurant environment, and I did do plenty of research, so there's that. It takes place in a town that is like a kinder, gentler fairy tale version of reality. Then it takes off into a story that is very strange, very mental.

Returning to South Carolina meant getting a normal job in a normal town with normal people and marrying a normal person. I wanted the glamour and opportunity of the world.

Tyrone, I think they're taking to festivals. I don't know which festivals it will be at. It's like a buddy picture. It's a couple of guys driving across the country and they get to a small town and they hit a guy. The guy turns out to be a drug smuggler.

I enjoy coming to Scotland, and my favourite memory has to be my first Open at Carnoustie. Coming over from a small town and playing in something so big to golf and y'all.

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.

As an individual, and I have to say as a person of color, the thing about being an 'other' in America is I really feel like you're bilingual. I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, but even when I'm in New York and I'm working for MSNBC or CNN, you're used to being the only black person in the room.

I have visualizations where I'm living in a really cool place - probably outside of town - with a really dope studio where I can record music or film things. Just have my own mini production house. That's really the thing I'd love to end up with the most and only do gigs when I needed to and also amass a little bit of a crew around me.

I was the kind of kid who loved singing. I loved rapping; I loved attention. But for me, it was more about chasing the dream of being a superstar because of the town I was from and because of what I'd seen.

What I would do is a 10-minute short of some kind on video, and if it's good enough, you get it passed around town and just get some attention, so then they'll read what you have.

The band that changed my life was The Who. It's hard to pick just one album, but if I had to pick the one that really showed me how things could be done, it's 'The Who Sell Out.' They really went to town on that, doing something that no one had ever done before.

I grew up in Skaneateles, a small town in New York's Finger Lakes region, where parts of my family have lived for five generations. I can walk the streets there and point out my father's childhood home, the houses my grandfather built, the farm where my great-great-uncle worked after he emigrated from England in the 1880s.

New Yorkers may think they're on some cutting edge, but that's not especially true. It is, however, the most exciting heterogeneous mess of a town I've ever seen.

I lived for a couple of years when I was 9 years old on beautiful Aboriginal sacred land in a town of a thousand people in northwestern Australia. It's where the Aborigines are still very connected to their culture, the Dreamtime culture. It was really quite a special experience.

My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.

Minneapolis just embraced me. There are a lot of weirdos here. It's awesome, because I'm a weirdo. Thankfully, the city embraced me with open arms. A lot about Minneapolis helped carve my musicality and open my eyes. The whole town is so open-minded compared to like, you know, Texas.

One summer vacation, I carried water to the town market to sell it, and I used some of the money I made to help a neighbour.

At the Oscars, if you didn't vote for '12 Years a Slave,' you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say. I do have particular views and opinions that most of this town doesn't share, but it's not like I'm a fascist or a racist. There's nothing like that in my history.

I moved to Kentish Town from Chelsea in 1983, partly because I had a lot of friends already living in the area and because it took an hour off the journey to my house in Suffolk. It has a villagey feel, and it's still a very mixed community, which I like.

Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books - because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees.

I just love performing so much, and I threw myself into every musical theater production that was going in my home town and at school. And then, I went to the National Youth Music Theatre, which was really a galvanizing experience for me when I was 17.

I don't paint the town red. But when I do go out, people always want to touch my hair. It happens every time.

The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city.

At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they're there. It's a mistake to think that the blowhards who call in speak for the nation.

I grew up in a town with a great wrestling tradition. Then I was a team sport queen in high school; I played softball, volleyball, and soccer. Oh, and I also did ski racing.

My family is first-generation Nigerian, and we grew up in a very small, suburban town in New England, Massachusetts. So I do understand what it feels like to be an 'only' in that regard.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.

I grew up in a very small town in Massachusetts, and it goes without saying that there weren't many Nigerian families in that town, and a lot of people couldn't say Uzoamaka.

I didn't grow up in a small New England town like the one in 'The Sundial.' I was raised in an apartment building in Queens, not in a sprawling, slightly sinister mansion like the one where the Halloran family resides.

All these older kids here, and I'm the only one from a town that's so small, if everyone breathed at the same time, you'd run out of oxygen. Man, there is nothing there.

My parents were out of town and sent me to stay at my grandma's house. That's where I learned how to make pancakes. I served them to all the old ladies who lived on her block. After the meal, they each left a $5 bill next to their plates. I thought, 'Hey, I'm onto something here.'

I grew up in Georgia, in a small town in the southwest corner of Georgia, actually, called Sylvester.

You know what my earliest memories are? Going from one burlesque town to another. My father was in burlesque.

Oxford is a funny place, as it is a mixture of town and gown. You have the students at the main university and at Oxford Brookes, but there is also a big working-class community.

I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.

I grew up in New York City, a town with different races, religions, and peoples. It breeds tolerance.

I was born in Abbott, Texas, a little small town in central Texas, and I was raised by my grandparents. And my parents divorced when I was six months old, and my grandparents raised me.

I love entertaining people, I love playing music, and I love rocking like an animal. But at a certain point, you're playing gig after gig after gig, in town after town after town, and you're lying down, staring at another hotel-room ceiling, and it's like, 'I want to be home. I'm a dad. I've got kids.'

Sometimes, I wonder where my place in this town called 'Hollywood' is - and that can give you a really dull headache.

I like driving around town and listening to new records.

I moved back to Idaho when I was 6 or 7 and then lived in a little town called Twin Falls and then moved to Boise. So quite different from L.A. I'd been to Disneyland a couple of times, and that was the closest I'd been to L.A.

I grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out there by the fancy folks of Princeton University, I felt. I came away bruised and feeling rejected.

Few Americans have ever met their Congresspeople. They don't see them at the grocery store; they don't meet them at the bowling alley. They're more likely to see their representatives in photographs from the Daily Grill in Washington, D.C., than at a local town hall.

Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can't do a comedy unless you've just done a comedy.

My father always wanted to be 'Col-bear.' He lived in the same town as his father, and his father didn't like the idea of the name with the French pronunciation. So my father said to us, 'Do what you want. You're not going to offend anybody.' And he was dead long before I made my decision.

Special interests and opponents have figured out how easy it is to disrupt town halls and get their own message out. The days of the truly free-form town halls may be over.

I was from a little rinky-dink town - to be a model... it looked like a lot of fun. I'd look at the girls, and they always looked happy.

I did not grow up in a cosmopolitan environment. I grew up in a little town in the middle of nowhere, pre-Internet, pre-college radio.

I live in a town called Beerwah, right in the middle of Australia Zoo. It's not hustle and bustle and busy, so that's helpful. We travel all over the world, but I've always been able to come home and run around in the middle of the Australian outback.

The most memorable interviews for me are folks whose names I don't know: young civil rights leaders in the South, showing great courage as they walked into a town in the dark of night. A doctor working for 'Doctors Without Borders' in Somalia, operating by kerosene light in a tent. Those are the kinds of people that linger in your memory.

Shouting down and intimidating someone from speaking their mind is not exactly a Vermont town meeting value, nor should it be an American town meeting value.

You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn't have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.

My grandparents - both of my mother's parents - were actors, and they ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company, through the town of Reading, where I come from.

We've added interviews. We've added interviews on tape. We've added workout tapes that are available to all teams. It's like we've gone from a one-story motel in a small town in Montana to the Sears Tower. It's bigger and more elaborate.

There are certain areas where the rental market is being totally depleted. I would venture to say that a significant number of the Red Rock Station employees are going to be renters, where are they going to rent, we don't want people to live on the east side of town and work on the west side of town.

West Lowndes came to town looking for a big win, but the Tigers had other ideas.

We started getting calls from all over town that (Wheatley) was driving at over 100 mph, ... He passed the mayor (Larance Davis) near Davis Elementary School and the mayor said he was going well over 100.

When you walk through the site, you see the industrial side of it with all the buildings and just imagine how people worked there, and of course the company town part of it. The houses, the clotheslines and things people planted -- it's really kind of a ghostly feeling as you walk through the town. You can imagine what life was like.

We appreciate what the people in this town are doing,

There is no point having a festival in a town where you can't get the support needed to make it a success.

There is no pity for a man who moans about living in one town and does not move to another.

There is no one who cares more about Nevada City or works harder to make the town a success.