Quotessence
Home / Authors / Christine Jennings

Christine Jennings Quotes

Banker

Filter quotes by topic

AllPeopleCommunityUtopianThinkingWorldIdeasVisionKindWarWritingWholeCasesCritiqueDifferentFourierHas BeensHumansIfsMovingReligious

Famous Christine Jennings Quotes

“I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.”

PeopleIdeasCommunityCenturyExtremesAlternativesSurprisingShocked20th Century19th CenturyUtopianAdoptingCommunesCommunalism
Author:Christine Jennings
Create image

“There are two instances I studied in which a community moved, amazingly, into an preexisting village built by other, earlier communalists. The Rappites were a German millenarian sect I mostly leave out of the story, even though they are fascinating, because they're focused on salvation and retreating from the world, as opposed to transforming it, like the other groups I write about.”

WorldWritingTwoStoriesCommunityGroupsBuiltMovedSalvationFocusedInstanceFascinatingVillageTransformingSects
Author:Christine Jennings
Create image

“There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.”

PeopleThinkingWorldWantWritingWellsLittlesForceCommunityExistenceLaughingCenturyGardenFeministDrivingInnocenceCooksGood TimesFarmsThinkerInward20th CenturyHaving A Good TimeHarvardDriving ForceAbolitionistGradFree ThinkersCommunalism
Author:Christine Jennings
Create image

“The biggest names in the Transcendentalist literary circle visited the community regularly, and supported it, but they couldn't live there happily. Hawthorne [who was briefly a resident] left for reasons I'm sure make sense to you; he couldn't get enough writing done in a house full of people playing music, and arguing. It was too busy.”

PeopleWritingReasonDoneEnoughHouseNamesLeftCommunityBusyArguingCirclesMake SenseToo BusyPlaying MusicResidentsHawthorne
Author:Christine Jennings
Create image

“Margaret Fuller was already a celebrity, travelling around the world. Emerson, who was the axis around which that whole community turned, just didn't like Fourier's ideas very much. He thought it was all too rigid and programmatic. He said, "Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely life." He thought it was an inhumane system - the day is scheduled too precisely. He didn't think it would work, and he was right.”

ThinkingWorldSaidIdeasWholeFactsCommunityAround The WorldAxesInhumaneFourier
Author:Christine Jennings
Create image

“The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch.”

PeopleWorldWayIdeasWholeCausesCommunityFeminismReformNew WorldScratchesPursuedPerfectionistParticipatingUtopian
Author:Christine Jennings
Create image

“The thought was, 'We're going to go to California, where the soil is black and ten feet deep, and there are no rocks, and there's gold in the hills.' The West becomes the surface onto which people project their fantasies, where once the future had been the place they projected their fantasies. So it's not just the war that ends the utopian communities, but what follows.”

PeopleWarEndsBlackCommunityFantasyFeetRocksTenProjectsGoldWestSurfaceHillsCaliforniaSoilUtopian
Author:Christine Jennings
Create image