A Place Is Formed by Slow Accrual

"A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it -- have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef." Wallace Stegner