Our family life, before figure skating turned it upside down, seemed normal. Our town of Riverside, Connecticut, was part of Greenwich, and we had the advantage of their wonderful community, with great beaches and beautiful parks.
Living in a small Italian hilltown, and having lived in a small town in south Georgia, I understand that you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking.
A lot of those ideal towns are all starting to look the same, the specifics are starting to disappear. So we need to retain a love for life, a love for one's family, a love for where one's really from.
It sounds like a cliche, but it... you do sing about what you know about. And I grew up in a small town, and I grew up in a place where your whole world revolved around friends, family, school, and church, and sports.
A major part of being prepared is having a plan. Local calls don't always work in the immediate vicinity of a disaster, so it's important to have an out-of-town contact with whom the entire family can check in.
When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.
I look forward to a time when my career in a place where I can get out of Los Angeles and find a nice small town like I grew up in to raise my family.
That's the trouble with the suburbs: it's not a city, so you're not anonymous, and it's not a small town, so that people really care about you, but everybody kind of knows each other's business, so you're very judged.
Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.
I don't want to lie. I dislike dishonesty. And I work in Hollywood, a town and a business that relies on a lot of falsehoods with people hiding behind different facades. I don't want to be a part of that.
Los Angeles is such a town of show business, and I'm a terrible celebrity. I find it difficult - it's the beast that must be fed. There's this big wheel of pictures and articles that goes around, and you get pinned on it.
Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere.
As a person who came from a small town and had dreams of becoming an actor, I know what it's like to have no support system for what it is that you want to do. A lot of people think you don't have a chance.
Gradually I became aware of details: a company of French soldiers was marching through the streets of the town. They broke formation, and went in single file along the communication trench leading to the front line. Another group followed them.
All of Africa's resources should be declared resources of the state and managed by the nation. Our experience in Bolivia shows that when you take control of natural resources for the people of the town and village, major world change is possible.
Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.
I'm originally from Fort Lauderdale: that's my home town in Florida. So when I'm on location, I just get the packets from schools in Florida. And when I go to Florida, I go to Christ Church School.
Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home.
I'm always struck when I go somewhere I've never been before, especially if it's in my home town, by just how different the atmosphere can be, and how disorienting it can be - especially if there's any kind of trouble.
Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.
