“He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk's tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit up in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.” PeopleHumansCommunitySolitudeSingingSongs Book:Arcadia Source: Arcadia
“It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.” IfsWarSeemsIndividualCommunityHalfCenturyTug Of War Author:Lauren Groff
“The trouble is that America's become a utopia accessible only to some people. Others get trampled on. Perhaps it's a problem of size. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist, once gave the ideal number of a given community as 148. That seems about right to me. There's something idealistic about that - in a group of 148 people you can get to know everybody.” PeopleProblemCommunityTroubleUtopia Author:Lauren Groff
“Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.” PeopleMenMotherFatherCommunityMarriedDaughterLovelyOld ManCreepy Author:Lauren Groff
“Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.” WayWantCommunity Book:Arcadia Source: Arcadia
