Tom Bodett Quotes

I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life. Where country life is safe and enjoyable, where many of the conveniences and appliances of the town are joined to the large freedom and large benefits of the country, a high state of civilization prevails.

I suppose more than anything, it's the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.

I prefer the country life. I live in Kingston, but there is lots of trees.

In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers' markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.

But instead of that stuff you get relationships with people and neighbors that you would never get in a city. People in small towns are a lot more open.

I'm all about small towns. I think it's a great place to grow up.

City people make most of the fuss about the charms of country life.

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.

A lot of times, L.A. is desaturated, and cement and freeways, and downtown.

I'm a country girl. I have to be in nature, so my daughter is exposed to it a lot.

If you live in a squalid environment, then of course you are going to want to get out of it, you are probably going to want to get into the country, because that's what it does.

I hate small towns because once you've seen the cannon in the park there's nothing else to do.

I'm not attacking the idea that people live in conglomerations of houses in proximity to one another, sharing the same water mains and the same newspaper delivery boy and so forth. I'm not objecting to that. That could happen with or without homeownership.

Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike.

I remember very much there in Falls Church there was a creek that was flowing down into 4 Mile Run. I believe it's now covered up where it goes under Columbia Street. I found a whole family of weasels down there.

Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species.

I was brought up in Scotland and have always been a country person, although the town means a great deal to me, too.

In Canada, we have so much land, so much space, and so few people.

It was remarkable to see from space how predictable people are. Our homes and towns are almost all in places with moderate temperatures, and they generally have the same shape - a thinly occupied outer blob of suburb surrounding a densely populated core, all based around a ready source of water.

The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.