Dar Williams Quotes

One of my beliefs is that there are certain institutions within a community which stand for the spirit and heart of that community, there's the church, the local football team, the local pub and the theatre.

It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.

People are always asking me what my favorite food is. I say, 'Food that tells me where I am.'

There is a certain sentimental vibe in my home town of Manchester, which you would sort of expect.

I always try to address where I am. I'll talk to the people and try to find out what it is about that particular place that makes it distinct from everywhere else.

The arts give us our identity as a community; they also draw new people, fresh visions, and renewable economic opportunity to our community.

Whenever people ask you where you're from and you say New Orleans, it's always going to create a conversation.

I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.

The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people.

Once you start turning over rocks and reaching out to help people, there's a whole avalanche coming right behind it. And it seems never-ending. But when you see the fruits of your labor, you feel like it's possible.

The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

The people in Miami are so different from anywhere else I've been in America. They're so down to earth, really friendly, and quite self-effacing, with a good sense of humor. I'm not saying other parts of America don't have a sense of humor, but Miami maybe has to have a really good sense of humor for lots of different reasons, and it works. It works for me.

Small town people assume you are a friend if you simply remember their names.

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.

The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.

I'm a pop enigma. I live and breathe every element in life. I rock a bespoke suit and I go to Harold's for fried chicken. It's all these things at once, because, as a taste maker, I find the best of everything. There's certain things that black people are the best at and certain things that white people are the best at. Whatever we as black people are the best at, I'ma go get that. Like, on Christmas I don't want any food that tastes white. And when I go to purchase a house, I don't want my credit to look black.

The real power of tribes has nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with people.

Norfolk would not be Norfolk without a church tower on the horizon or round a corner up a lane. We cannot spare a single Norfolk church. When a church has been pulled down the country seems empty or is like a necklace with a jewel missing.

The people who listened to rock 'n' roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn't listen to rock 'n' roll. That, of course, didn't work at all. Your taste in rock 'n' roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise.

Every people deserves to conserve its identity without being ideologically colonised.

I get tired of hearing it's a crummy world and that people are no damned good. What kind of talk is that? I know a place in Payette, Idaho, where a cook and a waitress and a manager put everything they've got into laying a chicken-fried steak on you.

Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: "He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community." A community is not an abstract ideal.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.