Thus looked at from outside, these guests --in this dead-and-alive dining room, of this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town--in grey, dead winter of the deadliest part of the most deadly war in history--thus seen from a detached point of view, they presented an extraordinary spectacle.

Every town has its stories. Stories that have been told so many times by so many different people they've worked themselves into the collective consciousness as truth.

You and I have been friends long enough to know how to treat each other . . . I'm leaving for college. I think I've outgrown the rules.

Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

He thought moving to a small town would allow him to find a way to get along to some extent but people were just plain idiots.

There's a big difference between want and need," she muttered to herself, picking her pad and pen back up. "I mean I want a bikini body, but I need chicken nuggets.

...the villagers had decided that 'practical' meant 'extremely magical and full of interesting objects' and had officially subtitled themselves, Winesap: A Pracktical Towne.

Well sue me for staring. I'd be willing to scrub away my shame on his washboard abs.

You're kind of... distracting.Am I?Yes. In the best way.

Can dimples wink? Because I felt like his just did.

A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met.An illuminated road sign flashes by: CAUTION! MAIN STREET AHEAD - SLOW UP The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant.The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by.With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by. ("Jane Brown's Body")

It wasn’t as if she’d thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn’t always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want.

But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought.

Living in a small town [in India] was like living in a glass house!

Everybody's always doing the same old things--- you know, doing unto others before they can do unto you.