Our Town Quotes

It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

Gosh, I'd like to direct Our Town on stage.

Smart writers never understand why their satires on our town are never successful. What they refuse to accept is that you can't satirize a satire.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

Just getting out of your town seems to be a pervasive thing in England. But I don't want to keep grinding the axe forever, it's boring.

There were two kinds of people in our town. The stupid, and the stuck.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?

See others as yourself. See families as your family. See towns as your town. See countries as your country. See worlds as your world.

I run into people from the Lehigh Valley and Allentown all over the world, and they're obviously doing pretty well. They say, "Oh, it's pretty nice there now and there's a lot of new businesses that have come into the area." Nobody's telling me, "Yeah, I left." Everybody says, "You know, I'm there. It's great. It's really nice there, and you made our town famous."

I don't know about the press, but I know in the town where I live everybody was aware that I was in Africa, because I remember after I got back some of the people told me that Mayor Dura of our town said he just wished they would boil me in tar.

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.

Let's say you want to do a job, and you want to be really successful. You want to rise really high in that career. But where you live, that job doesn't exist. Your town's too small. Or maybe the business is your town, but even if you reach the pinnacle there, because it's a small town, it's not nearly as high as you could go. If you're unwilling to move, well, that's all on you. That's a limitation you're placing on yourself. Now, that's fine if that's what makes you happy.

There were only two kinds of people in our town. ―The stupid and the stuck- ―The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. Everyone else finds a way out.

In our town, the most popular way out was joining the service. So my three best friends joined the Navy to get out. I didn't.

Is it okay to go the roof of the tallest building in your town and jerk off into the street?

Terrorize the jam like troops in Pakistan, swingin' through your town like your neighbourhood spiderman!

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

We didn't have a phone when I was a kid, and I was too shy to smash any public phones, and our town didn't have a pool hall either, so I had to hang out at the public library - and anyway, I told myself stories.

For He hath prepared for them a City! Hallelujah? He's got a City for you & me where you're not going to have any passport nor visa problems, they're not going to have to make sure you've got enough money to stay there awhile, it's YOUR town, your Hometown in Heaven, praise God? And they're all going to be your people! We're just going to be one nationality of one nation, ...we just haven't found the place yet, we haven't gotten there yet!

The beginnings of my studies also came to me from my father, as well as from the Rabbinical Judge of our town. But they were preceded by three tutors under whom I studied, one after the other, from the time I was three and a half till I turned eight and a half.

This is Halloween, everybody make a scene Trick or treat till the neighbors gonna die of fright It's our town, everybody scream In this town of Halloween.

When we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the world. ... We now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance.

In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.

EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.

What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging ... in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set, 'Laramie' often brings to mind 'Our Town,' the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire.

Can you think of anything that can get better if we crowd more people into our cities, our towns, into our state our nation or on this earth?

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

Casper Wyo., population 18,000 when I was born, was large enough to hold the surprises of civilization, but small enough that the prairie was close by - for some in our town, right out the front door - stretching on forever, under the great curving sky.

My campaign is based upon the proposition that the answers to the problems which currently plague our cities, our towns, and our homes, are not to be found in the decisions in Washington. They are instead to be found in the hearts, minds and resources of our own people here at home.

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.

That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

Here's a new 'Blessing' for our time -- 'May Anderson Cooper never be sent to report on your town!

If you're a white kid growing up and you see a Black player and he's got the name of your college or your town across his chest, that means something.

Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of thehighest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

If you want to have world peace - peace in your family, peace in your town and peace in your own bedroom - you simply begin with whatever creates peace within yourself. This vibration will go out from you in waves, and these waves have a very positive impact on the world.

Our family life, before figure skating turned it upside down, seemed normal. Our town of Riverside, Connecticut, was part of Greenwich, and we had the advantage of their wonderful community, with great beaches and beautiful parks.

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Borrowing money on what's called 'easy terms,' is a one-way ticket to the Poor House. If you think it ain't a Sucker Game, why is your Banker the richest man in your Town? Why is your Bank the biggest and finest building in your Town? Instead of passing Bills to make borrowing easy, if Congress had passed a Bill that no Person could borrow a cent of Money from any other person, they would have gone down in History as committing the greatest bit of Legislation in the World.

High School: Oh, man. This is where boys and girls go from tweens to teens and become complicated and cruel. Girls play sick mind games; boys try to pull each other's penises off and throw them in the bushes. If you can, buy the most expensive jeans in a two-hundred-mile radius of your town and wear them on your first day. If anyone asks how you could afford them say that your father is the president of Ashton Kutcher. When they are like, 'Ashton Kutcher has a president?' answer, 'Yes.' Everyone will be in awe of you and you won't have to go through a lot of pain and cat fights.

It costs lots of money to make records. It costs lots of money to generate artwork and manufacture and then ship things to people. If it keeps getting stolen, then the band has less ability to come to your town and perform. And that is ultimately what all of us want to do.

Each hamlet or village or town should be a place, its own place. This is not a matter of fake historicism or artsy-craftsy architecture. It is a matter of respect for things existing, subtle patterns of place woven from vistas and street widths and the siting and color and scale of stores, houses, and trees... If the countryside is to prosper, it must be different from city or suburb... The difference is in part the simple business of containing our towns and giving them boundaries.

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN

I was always moved by all of the music. As a young man, Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, Count Basie and all these great musicians would come through our town of Memphis. There wasn't adequate hotels, so these musicians - the lady who ran the theater knew my mother, who had a large house, and many of them would stay with us. So that was another great blessing, so I'm always around these great geniuses, and to realize their humanity is such a touching thing.

Basically, I have found that people who have tried to start communities out of good feelings or hippie-dippie abstract concepts of love - it doesn't work. But if you just concentrate on what is the identity of your town - its waterfalls, its battles, its notable mill strike or those things - you dig into what your town is from its rock formations to its history to its food. Then this thing called community happens all the time.

People a thousand years from now - this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our living and in our dying.