Rural Isolation Quotes

Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.

When I was a kid growing up, I lived in a little rural village called Woolton Hill, and the nearest town was Newbury. No bands played anywhere near us, so as much as I wanted to be on the grid and in the loop, I never was.

Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.

Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald's. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald's.

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock.

To tell the people in the West not to use their cars means that these people may never see another soul for weeks and weeks nor have a way of getting a sick person to a doctor.

We hadn't heard anything about registering to vote because when you see this flat land in here, when the people would get out of the fields, if they had a radio, they'd be too tired to play it. So we didn't know what was going on in the rest of the state, even, much less in other places.

Those days if you drove cross country and you broke down on the side of the road, and the sign says 200 miles to the next gas station, you knew you were so screwed.

I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys.

Young, gay and stuck in Arkansas? Sounds like a horror flick.

I grew up in a super small town in upstate New York; my nearest neighbour was really far away.

Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you.

I was from a tiny little island, which I always say is one corn field away from a horror film: it was, like, isolated, and everybody knew everybody, and you go to school with the grandkids of the grandparents that your grandparents went to school with.

We didn't have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12 my mom took me to New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it.

My object is to live in a place that does not call itself 'the community with a heart.' I want one of those godforsaken towns where all the young people leave and the rest sit on the porch with a rifle across their knees.

I grew up in a farm town in Indiana. In the early years I played by myself, because there were no other musicians around.

In West Yorkshire, I'd have to drive three quarters of an hour to go shopping.

I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.

When I was a child, I saw in the news that a person from Belitung had done well in sports in Jakarta, and I just couldn't imagine that it was possible for someone from here to become famous, and it's still very isolated out here.

I live on an island, and it's difficult to find.

Everybody seems to wonder what it's like down here. I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around. Everybody knows this is nowhere.

Being from New York, living in L.A., being in Chicago, you kind of get more of the big-city, melting-pot sort of thing. But when you drive through the country, there's so many small pockets of people that don't experience people of different backgrounds. So what they've seen on television is their baseline.

'Cunnamulla' is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.

In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.