Williamsburg Quotes

“Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.”

“It was one of the links between the ground-down poor and the wasteful rich. The girl felt that even if she had less than anybody in Williamsburg, somehow she had more. She was richer because she had something to waste.”

“During my childhood, my father, a Southern Baptist minister, and my mother, a teacher, made sure I took educational trips to cities such as Washington, D.C., Williamsburg, Va., Philadelphia, and Boston to learn about America's history.”

“For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of like-minded, and savoring teachers who seemed to be ambassadors from other, richer, writer worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg "the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.”

“This is the book, then , and the book of Shakespeare. And every day you must read a page of each to your child--even though you yourself do not understand what is written down and cannot sound the words properly. You must do this that the child will grow up knowing of what is great---knowing that these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world."Katie: " The Protestant Bible and Shakespeare.”

“[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.”

“If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.Your school wasn't on fire, you were.”

“The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.”