Richard Russo Quotes

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

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.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

We are increasingly open to understanding how we are all connected and that if we sink the ship that we are all on, we all drown. However, we have simultaneously become so focused on our own life experiences that we think we are alone.

There's something about being with a group of people who become like family that must be needed in society.

Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.

The destiny of the well-to-do is not separate from the destiny of the ordinary people.

When I go home to Iowa, people assume I live in this very big anonymous place where no one knows each other or wants to. Truth is, I know my neighbors better in Brooklyn than I ever did in Iowa.

To say, my fate is not tied to your fate, is like saying your end of the boat is sinking.

We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.

All of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone.

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

How spiritually blind are men that they fail to see that we are bound together. We rise or fall together; we are dwarfed or godlike, free or chained, together.

Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.

The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other.

All the nations they had to deal with, had the same fate.

We grow up with this idea that we're all individual agents. We work, make our money, have our place to live and our satellite TV. But whether you like it or not, you need family or community.

My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Independence ... is middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

Like it or not, we are all in this together now, rich nations and poor alike …

For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before..