Community Shift Quotes

My father bought a house in Panther Hollow. We were the first Italians in the neighborhood.

In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger - and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.

I've lived through a lot of different neighborhoods.

We don't feel part of the country scene any longer, it can't be our home any more... So we now consider ourselves part of the big Rock 'n' Roll family.

Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.

When there was a disaster, it used to be that people went to church and all held hands. Now the minute anything happens they run to CNN.

When I grew up on the south side of Chicago, it was kind of a rough neighborhood, and when my parents saw the prospect of my older sister going to middle school, high school, they decided that we would move to the north side of Chicago, Highland Park, and for me, that was a whole new ballgame.

There are no pimps, no whores, no transvestites - gone. Now that's more the culture I'm comfortable in ... I don't like it in the house, you know what I mean, but I like it somewhere around.

I've been going to the same grocery store for 13 years, and all of a sudden one day everybody was like, 'Oh, my God.

Public opinion in the United States has shifted significantly, not just outside but also within the Jewish community.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

Religion is no longer a connection point for most people. Our communities were built on coming together in physical locations once a week or twice a week. These institutions have dissipated.

Old wives' tales are not enough in a day when old wives and old men, too, are constantly moving away from their labours.

Very few people live in the same house they move into when they're married or the same neighborhood when they're married. Very few people certainly live in the neighborhood they grew up in.

I remember how often some of us walked out of the darkness of the Lower East Side and into the brilliant sunlight of Washington Square.

As a kid growing up and seeing so much strife taking place in society, and particularly on Blacks and people of color, I had an opportunity as a young man to witness the change that was taking place in Harlem, the exodus of white folks leaving Harlem, which I thought was a very cohesive situation. But they felt that they needed to leave.

People used to grow up in small communities where folk wisdom was passed down. But we don't live there anymore. We can't go next door to your aunt and ask her for the answers.

This place aint the same. It never will be. Maybe we've all got a little crazy. I guess if everbody went crazy together nobody would notice, what do you think?

One other fact is significant: the domestic feasts and sacrifices of single families, which in David's time must still have been general, gradually declined and lost their importance as social circles widened and life became more public.