A Country Boy Quotes & Sayings

A one-armed bunk master sets forth rules in a belligerent torrent. "This is your parade uniform, this is your field uniform, this is your gym uniform. Suspenders crossed in the back, parallel in the front. Sleeves rolled to the elbow. Each boy is to carry a knife in a scabbard on the right side of the belt. Raise your right arm when you wish to be called upon. Always align in rows of ten. No books, no cigarettes, no food, no personal possessions, nothing in your locker but uniforms, boots, knife, polish. No talking after lights-out. Letters home will be posted on Wednesdays. You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation. You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets - you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation." Do — Anthony Doerr

Late in the evening, someone in the White House decided to vent to Ben Smith: 'A senior White House official just called me with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkansas. "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."'

Boy, good thing for this source there's no member of Obama's staff who's known for blowing his stack and venting furiously at political defeats. I'll bet he was pounding the desk like a battering Rahm and that he threw out the E-manual on how to talk to the press when he did it. — Jim Geraghty

I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.
I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America. — Kiese Laymon

It was to the small serious boy that he turned for his enjoyment. He had bought the child some cheap wooden blocks, and with these the little one played endlessly and intently, with a purpose obscure to the adult mind, but completely absorbing. — Alan Paton

You told some human kid?"
I coughed, buying time. "He's Neph, too."
Jonathan LaGrey went rigid and his ruddy cheeks paled. I squirmed as his eyes bored into mine.
"Which one's his father?" he asked through clenched teeth.
"Richard Rowe. I guess you'd know him as Pharzuph." Oh, boy. He wasn't pale anymore.
"You came across the country-"
"Shhh!" I warned him as people looked over. He lowered his voice to a shouted whisper.
"-with the son of the Duke of Lust?! Son of a- — Wendy Higgins

As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space. — Naveen Jain

Frankly, out in America, you get the feeling that America is dying. And along its highways and byways, the country seems less ready to leap into the future than it is already clinging to a sepia-toned past when America stood as the unencumbered Big Boy in a Manichean world of good and evil, capitalists and Commies. Even the neon oasis-pods of the interstate - the perpetual clusters of Wendy's, McDonald's, Denny's, and Burger King - are crowded with people strangely reclaiming bygone days, connecting themselves to some prior eating experience, reveling in the familiar. We gas — Michael Paterniti

And what did I see? I saw people who are elegant, open-hearted, intelligent; I saw an elder statesman who was kind and attentive to a boy like me; I saw people who are capable of understanding and forgiving, good-natured Russian people, almost as good-natured and warm-hearted as those whom I met back there, almost as good as them. So you may imagine how happily I was surprised! Oh, permit me to say this! I had heard a great deal and was very much of the conviction that in society all is style, all is decrepit formality, while the essence has dried up; but I mean, now I can see for myself that it cannot be so in our country; it may be like that in other countries, but not in ours. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they're doing. — Kurt Vonnegut

Dear friends, he began, there is no timetable for happiness; it moves, I think, according to rules of its own. When I was a boy I thought I'd be happy tomorrow, as a young man I thought it would be next week; last month I thought it would be never. Today, I know it is now. Each of us, I suppose has at least one person who thinks that our manifest faults are worth ignoring; I have found mine, and am content. When we are far from home we think of home; I, who am happy today, think of those in Scotland for whom such happiness might seem elusive; may such powers as listen to what is said by people like me, in olive groves like this, grant to those who want a friendship a friend, attend to the needs of those who have little, hold the hand of those who are lonely, allow Scotland, our place, our country, to sing in the language of her choosing that song she has always wanted to sing, which is of brotherhood, which is of love. — Alexander McCall Smith

There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl. — Agnes Repplier

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. — Douglas Adams

I am just an old country boy in a big town trying to get along. I have been eating pretty regular and the reason I have been is because I have stayed an old country boy. — Will Rogers

I'm a country boy. — Willard Scott

When I was a boy during Thatcher, you watched elections and wept in disbelief as the whole country turned blue, Scotland turned red, and we still got the Tories. — John Niven

I had set about trying to make myself more polished than a country boy would be. — Charles M. Blow

Peace in every home, every street, every village, every country - this is my dream. Education for every boy and every girl in the world. To sit down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right. To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish. — Malala Yousafzai

In what neighborhood - town or city, rural area or village in the country - could I raise a brown boy and believe that no harm could ever come to him, where — Ana Castillo

I've spent a lot of time in the States, and the Big Country elates and irritates me simultaneously. It is a big boy child that frequently needs a hug: sometimes needing the prissiness of the world to remind it that its voice is not the only one. Africa is older and wiser, a poor grandmother, a pillaged woman, but still a strong woman. She knows she is a daughter of Earth. There are the sexy aunts of Asia and Europe, and of course, the fussy, once histrionic mother that is Britain. But it was Africa taught America the lesson of liberty. — Sean J Halford

They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was "embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians" (Barbier). It robbed Voltaire of his optimism. In the huge waves which engulfed the town, in the chasms which opened underneath it, in volcanic flames which raged for days in the outskirts, some 50,000 people perished. But to the courtiers of Louis XV it was an enormous joke. M. de Baschi, Madame de Pompadour's brother-in-law, was French Ambassador there at the time. He saw the Spanish Ambassador killed by the arms of Spain, which toppled onto his head from the portico of his embassy; Baschi then dashed into the house and rescued his colleague's little boy whom he took, with his own family, to the country. When he got back to Versailles he kept the whole Court in roars of laughter for a week with his account of it all. "Have you heard Baschi on the earthquake? — Nancy Mitford

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation's literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth. — David Halberstam

Edilio is in hiding," Astrid snapped. "Edilio has to worry about being kicked out of the country. Our Edilio."
"He's got a volunteer lawyer - "
But Astrid wasn't done. "They should be putting up statues to Edilio. They should be naming schools after that boy - no, no, I'm not going to call him a boy. If he's not a man, then I'll never meet one."
Lana nodded approvingly, obviously enjoying and sharing in Astrid's outrage. — Michael Grant

When old Bobby does Elvis, you swear it's the real mccoy. Another Friday night in the life of a country boy. — Kenny Chesney

I dare to imagine a country where every child I hold in my hands, are all God's children, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of whether they're boy or girl, regardless of religion, regardless of rich or poor, that every child I hold in my hands, will have the same chance to reach her full potential or his full potential. That is the goodness of our country. That is the essence of the American dream. — Paul Wellstone

In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from. — Ernest Gaines

This is the story of a girl who fooled a thousand boys, a boy who fooled an entire country, a partnership that would change the fate of realms, and a power to challenge the greatest tyrant the world had ever known. Expect magic. — Sherry Thomas

I believe that this was God's Will - to send a boy into the Reich, to let him become its Leader, in order to bring his home country into the Reich. Otherwise one must doubt Providence. — Adolf Hitler

Little girl, little boy
If love has a way
Fill their fields with laughter
And scatter the sun on their day
And if it should happen to rain
Make their raindrops kisses
Straight from heaven above
That touch their hands and faces
And that fill them with love
And make the moon reflect their smiles
And their stars plenty
And, above all, keep them together
And hold them as you may
Forever and ever
Until their last day. — Laura Miller

With the country moving toward inclusion, the leaders of the Boy Scouts of America have instead sent a message to young people that only some of them are valued. They've chosen to teach division and intolerance. — Chad Griffin

I rolled over and picked up Us Weekly magazine off the floor. The cover had a picture of Angelina, Brad, and their little Eskimo son, Maddox. I saw staring at the photo, wondering why this little boy looks so pissed off in every picture.
At first I thought he was just pissed about his Mohawk, but then I realized he's probably furious. Maddox must have thought he hit the jackpot when some A-list celebrity rescued him from third-world Cambodia, only to discover that she was going to shuffle him back and for the to EVERY other third-world country in the universe. He's probably like, 'When the fuck are we gonna get to Malibu, bitch? — Chelsea Handler

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me. — Dave Eggers

Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years? — Donna Leon

You have to understand, now, I'm a momma's boy. I'm from the south. My way of being raised is totally different than the big city life. I truly was a country boy. — Terry Bradshaw

How do I love Tim McGraw? Let me count the ways: I love that he's a country boy with a city sensibility. I love that he refuses to be pegged, and his duet with Nelly proves it. And I really love that he had the brains to marry Faith Hill. — Gayle King

You talk about vengeance. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you or my boy to me? I forgo the vengeance of my son. But I have selfish reasons, my youngest son was forced to leave this country because of this Sollozzo business. All right, now I have to make arrangements to bring him back here safely cleared of all these false charges. But I'm a superstitious man and if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he's struck by a bolt of lightening, then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room, and that I do not forgive. But, that aside, let me say that I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren, that I will not be the one to break the peace we have made here today. — Mario Puzo

I was 18, at art school, and saw this cute boy playing banjo. I was obsessed. I taught myself how to play. I listened to a lot of country and just messed around. The second song I wrote on the banjo was 'Good to Be a Man.' That what's got me signed. — Elle King

Every boy in a free country ought to be instructed in boxing, wrestling, and the use of weapons. Every young man ought to be drilled. Every householder ought, at least, to have a right to own a rifle, and should know how to make cartridges. — John Boyle O'Reilly

I learned lots of things those first few weeks. First and foremost, I learned what it meant to be a refugee. From the moment I stepped into Kakuma, I became a boy without a country. A refugee camp is a kind of no-man's-land. No one lives there by choice. You end up in places like Kakuma when you have no better option. Everyone who lived there just wanted to go home. — Lopez Lomong

In chess the most unbelievable thing for me is that it's a game for everybody: rich, poor, girl, boy, old, young. It's a fantastic game which can unite people and generations! It's a language which you'll find people "speak" in every country. If you reach a certain level you find a very rich world! Art, sport, logic, psychology, a battlefield, imagination, creativity not only in practical games but don't forget either how amazing a feeling it is to compose a study, for example (unfortunately that's not appreciated these days but it's a fantastic part of chess!). — Judit Polgar

When I was about 14 or 15, and running in a pretty muddy cross country race, one of my shoes stuck in the mud and came off. Boy, was I wild. To think that I had trained hard for this race and didn't do up my shoelace tightly enough! I really got aggressive with myself, and I found myself starting to pass a lot of runners. As it turned out, I improved something like twenty places in that one race. But I never did get my shoe back. — Robert De Castella

I do think I am a country boy at heart. I love the buzz of towns and going out with friends and sitting with them drinking and whatever - it's fun - but, at the same time, I like space and freedom. — Prince William

If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago, her father used to say, 'she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

The gateway to freedom ... was somewhere close to New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I'd been told my great grandfather had lived way back up in the woods among the evergreens in a log cabin. I revived the era with a song about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode. My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'coloured boy' and changed it to 'country boy'. — Chuck Berry

Hans?" the Fairy Godmother said. "Can you remember what made you happy when you were a young boy?" It didn't take him long to remember. "Places like this promenade," he said. "Why?" she asked. "It's a place of unlimited possibility," he said. "At any moment, anyone or anything could appear. A parade could march through the field, a flock of birds from a tropical land could fly across the skies, or a king from a distant country could sail through the waters on a massive ship. I suppose any child is happiest wherever his imagination is stimulated." "Interesting," she said. — Chris Colfer

SOON, he replied, which makes better sense under the rules of that country than ours. VERY SOON! he added, clasping my hands; then, unable to keep from laughing, he pushed off from the rock like a boy going for the first cold swim of spring; and the current got him. The stream was singing aloud, and I heard him singing with it until he dropped away over the edge. — Leif Enger

And I want you all to remember - that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of - something he can work and fight for. — Lois Lowry

She couldn't think of anyone else who remotely resembled him. He was complicated, almost contradictory in so many ways, yet simple, a strangely erotic combination. On the surface he was a country boy, home from war, and he probably saw himself in those terms. Yet there was so much more to him. Perhaps it was the poetry that made him different, or perhaps it was the values his father had instilled in him, growing up. Either way, he seemed to savor life more fully than others appeared to, and that was what had first attracted her to him. — Nicholas Sparks

I don't like crying. I'm a country boy, and we're the product of our upbringing. As a boy, I was told that men don't cry. — Andrea Bocelli

Ask any school-boy up to the age of fifteen where he would spend his holidays. Not one in five hundred will say, "In the streets of London," if you give him the option of green fields and running waters. It is, then, a fair presumption that there must be something of the child still in the character of the men or the women whom the country charms in maturer as in dawning life. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I'm a country boy. I hate New York. But that's where things happen, so I use it as a base for stories, I know enough about it. But I have to keep going back there. — Mickey Spillane

This is the ultimate bad-boy date, isn't it? Breaking into a different country."
"Hey, it makes a change from hot-wiring cars together."
"Been there, done that ... Alex seriously, are you sure no one's going to shoot us? — L.A. Weatherly

I'm a country boy who hasn't really been exposed to city living, and it throws me. — Randy Moss

When I removed into the country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house, which had no piazza - a deficiency the more regretted, because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sunburnt painters painting there. — Herman Melville

You cannot tell a poor boy from a small country town on the plains of South Dakota who has had the opportunity to be a teacher, a mayor, a senator, and a vice president, that America is not a nation of promise. — Hubert H. Humphrey

Come on fathers, don't hesitate, send them off before it's too late. Be the first one on the block to have your boy come home in a box. — Country Joe McDonald

Colonel Sanders as played by Hot Daddy Harrison Ford, cracking the whip on some island plantation, topping every native boy, stopping only long enough to enjoy a refreshing Coca Cola. Because every white guy is a blonde, Aryan top. All of us are the Christian Soldiers of Capitalism that flew TWA into your country, depositing AIDs in your brothels and IMF loans in your banks. — Tom Cardamone

If she'd had any doubts he was a real deal country boy, they disappeared when he unabashedly stripped down to nothing - the sun had kissed his arms to mid-bicep, although his torso wasn't without a faint tan. She'd thought lazily that maybe he had a pond. She'd like to go skinny dipping with him. Leap onto his back and wrap her legs around his lean hips. Hold on to his broad shoulders and press her naked breasts into his back and drift into the cool water together.
As he opened his button-fly jeans, revealing snug briefs underneath, she'd whispered for him to stop. He was hard and sinewy in all the right places, with shadows and valleys she wanted to explore with her mouth and hands and eyes, but her touch first went to the line where dark faded to light on his arm, neatly following the curve of his muscles. Nice farmer's tan. — Zoe York

Most nervous I've ever been is probably the 2007 Walker Cup. I was a little boy playing with these 8 or 9 other guys that were the best amateurs in the country. — Rickie Fowler

[My grandfather] returned to what he called 'studying.' He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life's burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. — Wendell Berry

I'm really just a country boy. — Steven Tyler

'Dear Mr. Henshaw' came about because two different boys from different parts of the country asked me to write a book about a boy whose parents were divorced, and so I wrote 'Dear Mr. Henshaw,' and it won the Newbery, and I was - it's been very popular. — Beverly Cleary

I grew up as a country boy. — Ian Somerhalder

I shook my head. "You know I ain't never going to be good enough for her. She can't fall in love with me, you know as well as I do that nothing good is going to come of her staying with me."
"Then why do you stay with her? Why, if you seem to think that this is a bad idea, do you stay with her?"
I raked my fingers through my hair. "I don't know! Maybe I'm stupid? A glutton for punishment."
Jackson pointed his beer at me. "Or maybe you love her too and that scares the shit out of you. — Magan Vernon

The boy stood on the highest knoll of the low country in the Western Kingdom of the Ring, looking north, watching the first of the rising suns. As far as he could see stretched rolling green hills, like camel humps, dipping and rising in a series of valleys and peaks. The burnt-orange rays of the first sun lingered in — Morgan Rice

The departure of our boys to foreign parts with the ever-present possibility that they might never return, taught the real value of photography to every father and mother. To many a mother the photograph of her boy in his country's uniform was the one never-failing consolation. — Louis Fabian Bachrach Jr.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep
all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. — Aravind Adiga

When God gets ready to shake America, He may not take the Ph.D. and the D.D. God may choose a country boy ... God may choose the man that no one knows, a little nobody, to shake America for Jesus Christ in this day, and I pray that He would! — Billy Graham

I'm a country boy. I grew up kicking around the woods, riding dirt bikes, playing football, climbing rocks and all that good stuff, so that's always been fun. — Taylor Kinney

Call had never thought much about age. Charlie Goodnight liked to talk about it, but Call found the talk tedious. He was as old as he was, like everyone else; as long as he could still go when he needed to go, age didn't matter much. He was still able, within reason, to do what he had a mind to do. But he'd had a mind to kill the large doe, and he hadn't. Of course, he wasn't an exceptional shot. He had missed mule deer before, but the fact that he had missed this one just when he had, was troubling. They were just coming into the home country of the young bandit, a boy with a keen eye and a German rifle with a telescope sight. Getting a knuckle stuck in a trigger guard would not be wise, in a contest with Joey Garza. — Larry McMurtry

And the whole thing is that you're treated like a step-child. Here it was down here, everything in the black, because they were stealing, basically. Stealing from us old country boys down here. — Waylon Jennings

It's a big change for a country boy like me, to be in the limelight in New York City. It was most definitely a tough adjustment. — Brandon Jacobs

For a country boy, poor as I was, whose constant worry was to be able to have enough to eat, the Army guaranteed one's survival. — Mo Yan

I was definitely very much a country boy. — Edmund Hillary

I love my country. I love my guns. I love my family. I love the way it is now, and anybody that tries to change it has to come through me. That should be all of our attitudes. Cause this is America, and a country boy is good enough for me, son. — Charlie Daniels

One boy's a boy; two boys be half a boy, and three boys be no boy at all', ran the old country saying. — Flora Thompson

IT (The country) IS HEADED TOWARD OVERSIMPLIFICATION. YOU WANT TO SEE A PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE? TURN ON ANY TELEVISION ON ANY SUNDAY MORNING - FIND ONE OF THOSE HOLY ROLLERS: THAT'S HIM, THAT'S THE NEW MISTER PRESIDENT! AND DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF ALL THOSE KIDS WHO ARE GOING TO FALL IN THE CRACKS OF THIS GREAT, BIG, SLOPPY SOCIETY OF OURS? I JUST MET HIM; HE'S A TALL, SKINNY, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY NAMED "DICK." HE'S PRETTY SCARY. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM IS NOT UNLIKE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TV EVANGELIST - OUR FUTURE PRESIDENT. WHAT'S WRONG WITH BOTH OF THEM IS THAT THEY'RE SO SURE THEY'RE RIGHT! THAT'S PRETTY SCARY - THE FUTURE, I THINK, IS PRETTY SCARY. — John Irving

The child cannot too early learn to be a good citizen? I think this is questionable: citizenship is an adult affair. Let school and home teach the child to respect the laws and institutions of his country. For the time being that should suffice. To use the juvenile novel or biography to turn the child into an internationalist or an advocate of racial tolerance may be high-minded, but I would suggest that the child first be allowed to turn into a boy or girl. Pious Little Rollo is dead; the Good Little Citizen is replacing him. The moralistic literature of the last century tried to produce small paragons of virtue. How about our urge to manufacture small paragons of social consciousness? — Clifton Fadiman

We don't take kindly to troublemakers in these parts." I drawled it out, hoping he got the picture: I'm a country boy and I will light you up if you hurt this woman. Thunder — Vivienne Savage

At the end of the day, I remain a country boy inside. — Tahar Rahim

As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic. — Jesse L. Martin

And one day, very soon in fact, Adi would be an adolescent. An adolescent son of a clerk. A miserable thing to be in this country. He would have to forget all his dreams and tell himself that what he wanted to do was engineering. It's the only hope, everyone would tell him. Engineering, Adi would realize, is every mother's advice to her son, a father's irrevocable decision, a boy's first foreboding of life. — Manu Joseph

If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it. — Adolf Hitler

My father sits at the head of a table before the carcass of an enormous American turkey. What he is ashamed of is the one act of decency I have yet encountered in all the tales of our family's past. A young boy with a dead father and a dead friend bends down before a country dog and feeds it his butter sandwich. And I know that sandwich. Because he has made it for me. Two slices of that dark, unbleached Russian bread, the kind that tastes of badly managed soil and a peasant's indifference to death. On top of it, the creamiest, deadliest of American butter, slathered in thick feta-like hunks. And on top of that cloves of garlic, the garlic that is to give me strength, that is to clear my lungs of asthmatic gunk, and make of me a real garlic-eating strong man. At a table in Leningrad, and a table in deepest Queens, New York, the ridiculous garlic crunches beneath our teeth as we sit across from each other, the garlic obliterating whatever else we have eaten, and making us one. — Gary Shteyngart

I am a country boy at heart. — David Cameron

I'm a real big country boy. — Tom Felton

A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs. Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and pinched by his cousin Dudley ... He couldn't know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: To Harry Potter - the boy who lived! — J.K. Rowling

I thought you were from a civilized country," he said. "How have you come to look more like Carthya's whipping boy than its king?"
"I have a habit of irritating some of our less civilized people," I answered. "But you seem like a civilized ... pirate. I'd much prefer it if you didn't have me whipped."
"And why shouldn't I?"
With some effort, I forced a smile to my face. "Because it will hurt. — Jennifer A. Nielsen

You're so bloody cute, he whispered, his voice all low and yummy.
Blood whooshed through my body. A Kai buzz. Oh, he was totally using the bedroom eyes ... all heavy lidded and seductive. I don't even think he was trying. I suddenly felt shy. Even from the other side of the country, this boy was dangerous. — Wendy Higgins

You convey too great a compliment when you say that I have earned the right to the presidential nomination. No man can establish such an obligation upon any part of the American people. My country owes me no debt. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor. In no other land could a boy from a country village, without inheritance or influential friends, look forward with unbounded hope. My whole life has taught me what America means. I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay. — Herbert Hoover

My country owes me nothing. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor. — Herbert Hoover

He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy's breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood. — Flannery O'Connor

I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do - amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real. — Josh Turner

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives. — Robert Baden-Powell

Rich kid," Shiva yelled, "you don't know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you
you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind! — Salman Rushdie

Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house. I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes - a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker - varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it alone the Say. Sticklebacks in jars,. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? — David Mitchell

If I'm working with you for several months on things, if I have a relationship with you, and I decide one day I'm going to sue you, I'm a country boy at the end of the day. I'm going to pick up the phone and tell you I'm going to sue you. — Tim Cook

You know, the heroes in my romance novels always say that. Scout's honor. But they all later admit to never being a Boy Scout. — Rachel Harris

Bush is a frat boy in the White House but we've had that before. But I wasn't one of those people that was threatening to leave the country. By the way none of those people have left the country. Alec Baldwin is still here. — Harry Shearer

No, my eldest brother. He was named after our father. Our parents died when the Romans first invaded, and Stephano then became the "head of the family". " She grimaced. "He and I are like oil and water. Or we were. We get along well enough now, though." She grinned. "But boy did he pitch a fit over the concubine thing. He even called in Uncle Lucian to deal with me."

Harper's eyebrows rose. "I'm surprised Lucian bothered to intervene."

..."Yes, well..." Drina grimaced. "I'm afraid while I was een as a concubine, I was really playing puppet master with my lover and kind of ruling the country though him. At least until Uncle Lucian caught wind of it and came to give me hell. — Lynsay Sands

Elvis Presley, you can't define him in a couple of sentences, but he was a country boy and he was very respectful. — Jerry Leiber