...but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar — you live next to the strange and the unlikely … - John Irving

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...but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar — you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Own Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe - yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat.