Provincialism Quotes

“Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' (“A Provincial Tale”)”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“The illusion that freedom is the prerogative of one's own particular race is fairly widespread.”
― Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death

“Mert a provincializmus csak a provinciában érdekes. Mert érdekeltek vagyunk. Az itteni pletykák és cinkosságok fontosak: nekünk; a mi bőrünkre megy. Saját nívótlanságunkhoz elérzékenyülten ragaszkodunk.”
― Péter Esterházy, Az elefántcsonttoronyból

“Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations...He was sensitive to nuances in a way that Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions.”
― David McCullough, Truman

“It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. A provincial is always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-sufficient.”
― Patrick Kavanagh

“If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”
― Carl Sagan

“in the 1970s people still referred to my mother as a Communist because she had a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly,”
― Haven Kimmel

“The philosophy of the province is a philosophy of a closed circle that does not allow an apostasy, without which there is no creativity. The philosophy of the province is a normative and normalizing, suprapersonal and impersonal philosophy, it shuts out all aspects of life, education, sport, nutrition, nature, love, work, language, religion and death (which is far from being the death of an individual) replacing life with rigid forms of the normative which apply to all.”
― Daša Drndić, Belladonna

“Sitting next to a woman at a dinner party recently, she had explained how stifling she found the attitude in her hometown. 'On the [Danish] west coast, anyone who even slightly broke with convention, or or showed that they had any ambition, was frowned upon,' she told me. 'People really didn't like it. Everyone knew your business, everyone had an opinion about what you should be doing. I had to get away. I came to Copenhagen as soon as I could, and don't often go back.' It is common to have such feelings about one's hometown, I suppose, but they do often seem to be particularly keenly felt by people from Jutland.”
― Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

“Urdimos tramas, dibujamos caricaturas, parodiamos, para encontrar algo de vida entre los muertos. Cantamos en un idioma que ignorábamos, y dos o tres palabras y toda la melodía y el ritmo y la intensidad nos suministraron historias mucho mejores que la original, casi siempre distintas, pero no equivocadas; intuíamos la canción, y las palabras contenían legendarias resonancias, parecían estar dichas para uno. Éramos minúsculos, provincianos pero también adivinos.”
― Francisco Casavella, El idioma imposible

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that ... there's no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. And people who prefer misfortune out here to misfortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can't be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget.”
― Wolfgang Hilbig, The Tidings of the Trees

“I would say that it is an advantage to belong to a small country. We are apt to be less provincial in scholarly undertakings. We don't have enough literature in various problems - we must always look on the whole world. No country can be so provincial as a big country. The United States is, in my opinion, the most provincial country I have lived in - an I'm afraid that England and France don't come very far behind.”
― Gunnar Myrdal

“She was even at fault for having brought a wringer-mop from England, complaining loudly that such a simple thing was unprocurable in "this God-forsaken country".”
― Peter Graham, Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century