Yard Quotes

“I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting.
It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned.”

— Lee Goldberg

“We also pass a farmer in his yard, power-washing a donkey with a high-pressure hose.”

— Simon Armitage

“And they shook hands, hit each other on the
shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and
nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile
Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a
yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling
new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as
he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off.”

— Annie Proulx

“The fan was spinning and as the shadows passed over the white ceiling I let my eyes unfocus until all of it looked like a universe being born or a planet unraveling, some creation or catastrophe depending on which way gravity was going and where you were standing. So instead of Elizabeth Taylor I thought about stars and how little I knew about them, and how if I was an explorer and I had to sail a boat across the ocean without rador or an electronic compass I'd be screwed because the only constellations I knew were the Big Dipper and Little Dipper and I always got them confused. And even though I knew I'd never have to sail that boat I still wished I knew more about stars and other things. And I wished I could remember lying in the back yard as a kid with my hands locked behind my head, looking up at the night sky and dreaming. But I couldn't, because it wasn't something I ever did. It would have been a nice memory though”

— Paul Neilan

“The blazing sun beat down on the concrete of the museum's front yard- Reverend Ryu Yosop felt as if the heat were sucking up all the moisture in his brain and heart. What different colors he and his brother Yohan must have used as each of them painted their own picture of home, of the carnage. These people have constructed yet a different vision of their own, Yosop thought to himself, but it all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together.”

— Hwang Sok-yong

“They might have been all-right people doing the best they could, but I got to tell you, you got a dead cat lying in your yard you ought to bury it. That's my motto.”

— Joe R. Lansdale

“Marry an outdoors woman. That way, if you have to throw her out into the yard for the night, she can still survive.”

— W.C. Fields

“It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!”

— Hans Christian Andersen

“You guys like to tell jokes and giggle and kid around, huh? Giggling like a bunch of young broads in a school yard. Well, let me tell you a joke: Five guys sitting in a bull pen, San Quentin. Wondering how the fuck they got there. What'd we do wrong? What should we've done? What didn't we do? It's your fault, my fault, his fault. All that bullshit. Finally, someone comes up with the idea, wait a minute, while we were planning this caper, all we did was sit around and tell fucking jokes. Got the message?”

— Quentin Tarantino

“I tried to turn my heart to the living, to the place I was, but putting seed in land not owned by me or my family seemed alien. The sandy, gray-white soil looked like dirty beach sand, not fit for growing anything. It smelled like dust. Yet weeds and trees and wildflowers grew along the roads. When we drove into town, we passed dense, impenetrable woods and fields of corn, peas, and peppers. Such new combinations of seemingly poor soil and happy flora puzzled me. Everywhere I went, I picked up the dirt, examining it for clues. Bringing anything out of such soil would require a whole new language on my part. I imagined there must be something richer and darker under the gray sand, or some trick the farmers all knew. Trick or no trick, what I had always been able to do well now seemed inaccessible. Still, I searched the yard around our house for the best spot to plant my fall garden.”

— Rhonda Riley

“She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.”

— Lisa Genova

“A daffodil bulb will divide and redivide endlessly. That's why, like the peony, it is one of the few flowers you can find around abandoned farmhouses, still blooming and increasing in numbers fifty years after the farmer and his wife have moved to heaven, or the other place, Boca Raton. If you dig up a clump when no one is nearby and there is no danger of being shot, you'll find that there are scores of little bulbs in each clump, the progeny of a dozen or so planted by the farmer's wife in 1942. If you take these home, separate them, and plant them in your own yard, within a couple of years, you'll have a hundred daffodils for the mere price of a trespassing fine or imprisonment or both. I had this adventure once, and I consider it one of the great cheap thrills of my gardening career. I am not advocating trespassing, especially on my property, but there is no law against having a shovel in the trunk of your car.”

— Cassandra Danz

“You may not have the greenest yard, but you can take the shit you're given and fertilize your grass into something beautiful!”

— L.M. Fields

“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise-for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of rounds-the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Then the one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream.”

— Alice Munro

“I left Kiki in the yard, and fetched my pick and brushes.
She lifted her leg and I dislodged the stone then pulled the shedding blade through her copper hair. After a while, I removed my cloak. When I finished, clumps of horse hair clung to my sweaty clothes.
You're beautiful and I need a bath, I said to her. Pasture or stall?
Stall. Nap time.
And what about your snooze before I groomed you?
Pre nap.”

— Maria V. Snyder

“If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“I go out and walk around the yard. Sometimes I'll cut grass.”

— Patty Loveless

“Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown.”

— Ross Perot

“I vaguely remember we had an air-raid shelter in our yard. We lived in a semi-detached house with a small garden in the suburbs of Salford, a couple of miles from the docks.”

— Robert Powell

“I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells; a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and often, when there is nothing in the world at the bottom, besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half under ground, it shall pass however for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.”

— Jonathan Swift

“A 'For Sale' sign in your yard during the holidays is like a 'kick me' sign. You are telling buyers you are a distressed seller.”

— Ray Brown

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.”

— Anne Lamott

“It makes Faith think of a hammock in their yard, a web of rope that she thought would unravel the first time she leaned back on it, but that managed to support her all the same.”

— Jodi Picoult

“Give the enemy an inch, he'll take a yard.”

— Monica Crowley

“I'm not the head of Scotland Yard," said Mrs. Oliver, retreating from dangerous ground. "I'm a private individual -"
"Oh, you're not that," said Rhoda, confusedly complimentary.”

— Agatha Christie

“I knew we were going to marry someday, but I was absolutely surprised when he actually proposed. And surprised he had bought a ring. I ran around the yard screaming.”

— Jennifer Garner

“My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

— Dave Van Ronk

“I started by hacking around the back yard in Richmond.”

— Jennifer Wyatt

“The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a town of tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids.”

— Don DeLillo

“Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.”

— John Knowles

“I buried a lot of my ironing in the back yard.”

— Phyllis Diller

“Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.”

— Robert Frost

“God damn there is nothing better tasting in the whole damn world than warm brains when you were shot the hell up, like a cold beer after a long hot day of working in the yard.”

— Diana Rowland

“The world's most bada** Viking yard gnome is on the counter by the cash register using a dinner plates as a shield and a steak knife as a sword”

— Libba Bray

“There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.”

— Kenneth Grahame

“There have been times during my life when I have wish to be a boy again, not to have the energy and perfect health of youth, but know once more the innocence and the delight in even the smallest of things that we often fail to feel full strength as the years drift by. What is easy to forget, however, until you apply yourself to the task of memory, is that childhood is a time of fear, as well; some of those fears are reasonable, others irrational and inspired by a sense of powerlessness in a world where often power over others seems to be what drives so many of our fellow human beings. In the swoon of childhood, the possibility of werewolves is as real as the school yard shooter, the idea of vampires as credible as the idea of a terrorist attack, the neighbor possessing paranormal talents as believable as a psychopath.”

— Dean Koontz

“I don't want to be one of these filmmakers that hit you over the head with my agenda or my opinion. I just want to take you down the 50-yard line and let you form your own opinion of what the controversy [of a movie] is about.”

— Ric Roman Waugh

“Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.”

— Khaled Hosseini

“And there is something profoundly humbling about knowing God. I'm not talking about the trinket God or the genie-in-a-lamp God. I mean the God who invented the tree in my front yard, the beauty of my sweetheart, the taste of a blueberry, the violence of a river at flood. There are a lot of religious trends that would have us controlling God, telling us that if we do this that and the other, God will jump through our hoops like a monkey. But this other God, this real God, is awesome and strong, all-encompassing and passionate, and for reasons I will never understand, he wants to father us.”

— Donald Miller

“Where the hell are you!?" Finn screamed in my ear. "We've been looking everywhere for you!"
I winced at his voice blaring out at me. "I'm fine. I'm back at the train yard. LaFleur jumped me behind the Pork Pit and decided to take me for a little drive tonight."
"Well, I hope that you had the good sense to kill her for interrupting your evening," Finn sniffed. "And for making us worry.”

— Jennifer Estep

“I still subscribe to the minority view that all horses are offensive weapons and not to be trusted a yard.”

— M.M. Kaye

“One of the grandest figures that ever frequented Eastern Yorkshire was William Smith, the distinguished Father of English Geology. My boyish reminiscence of the old engineer, as he sketched a triangle on the flags of our yard, and taught me how to measure it, is very vivid. The drab knee-breeches and grey worsted stockings, the deep waistcoat, with its pockets well furnished with snuff-of which ample quantities continually disappeared within the finely chiselled nostril-and the dark coat with its rounded outline and somewhat quakerish cut, are all clearly present to my memory.”

— William Crawford Williamson

“There isn't a ruler, a yard stick or a measuring tape in the entire world long enough to compute the strength and capabilities inside you.”

— Paul J. Meyer

“You go where the work is. It can be in my own back yard, Israel, Spain, or Yugoslavia. We may have the greatest technical efficiency in the world, but our artistic values are not necessarily the best.”

— Lee Van Cleef

“Watch the indolent butterfly playing on the tall flower in the yard and think about the sun going down. It always does you know.”

— Rod McKuen

“As for me ... I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scares.”

— Alex Garland

“Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.”

— Alexander Smith

“Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it's the latter, how do you deal with it?”

— James Lee Burke

“Bluebeard, who said to Scottland Yard, How do I know how many wives I've killed? I'm not an accountant! Never got a dinner!”

— Red Buttons

“The generals have a saying: "Rather than make the first move it is better to wait and see. Rather than advance an inch it is better to retreat a yard." This is called going forward without advancing, pushing back without using weapons. There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your enemy. Underestimating your enemy means thinking that he is evil. Thus you destroy your three treasures and become an enemy yourself. When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield.”

— Laozi