#neighbors

Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad. ↗

— Harper Lee

#death

I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137) ↗

— Stephen Clarke

#bed #cannonball #cartoon #cartwheel #ceiling

The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles. ↗

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

#friends #habits #neighbors #beauty

And besides, I'm so in Dutch with my neighbors here that I thought that was better than getting them all upset with what might be a fake bomb scare where they'd have to clear out the whole neighborhood. ↗

— Ernst Zundel

#better #bomb #clear #dutch #fake

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors. ↗

— Quentin Crisp

#diseases #having #health #neighbors #same

It has to do - I think - with growing up in an apartment, with my aunt and my cousins right next door to me, with the door open, with neighbors walking in and out, with people yelling at each other all the time. ↗

— Larry David

#aunt #cousins #door #each #growing

The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has touched me deeply to see so many thousands of families, neighbors and friends celebrating together in such a happy atmosphere. ↗

— Elizabeth II

#attended #been #celebrating #deeply #diamond

For me, Los Angeles, New York, where I don't know my neighbors, where people don't necessarily care if they know their neighbors, I'm missing things that truly fed my soul when I was younger, the exchanges between people, the caring and the shared history with people. ↗

— Sela Ward

#between #care #caring #exchanges #fed

In the case of Iraq, notwithstanding the violence there at the moment, the very fact that a hideous regime - responsible for genocide, for the use of chemical and biological weapons, aggression against two neighbors - has been removed in itself is a positive development. ↗

— Jose Ramos-Horta

#aggression #been #biological #biological weapons #case

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much. ↗

— Zora Neale Hurston

#enough #everybody #find #i #impress