Quotes & Sayings About Backyards

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their backyards at 3 A.M. — George Will

Everything in L.A. is - it's just an easy place to live in. The houses are nice, the backyards are nice, you got the ocean right there and the mountains behind you; there's an idealised easiness to the way you live and the whole environment. — Spike Jonze

It is instilled in thousands of American males from an early age that one of their requirements is to be able to both dish out and take a lot of pain. They are taught the rules of this road in gyms, rings, backyards and fields all over America. — Henry Rollins

We're never going to have respectful and reverential relationships with the planet- and sensible policies about what we put in the air, the soil, the water - if very young children don't begin learning about these things literally in their houses, backyards, streets and schools. We need to have human beings who are oriented that way from their earliest memories. — Elise M. Boulding

With Die Hard it was just something that I, you know, I grew up with those movies. I made a Die Hard movie with my friends in my backyard during high school. It was terrible. — Len Wiseman

There is a core of loneliness. It's partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn't metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards. So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself - I lived through the radio and through my imagination. — George Carlin

I grew up in L.A. I actually grew up in the Valley, which was a pretty amazing place to grow up because everybody has nice, big backyards, and I was kind of a little nature being. — Banks

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did. — Richard Lamm

Did you talk to Terry Wilcox?"
"Yes."
"How'd that go?"
I had lifted my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun so I could look at him. During my questioning, Lee was looking beyond me to the alley and into the backyards of my neighbors. When he answered, his eyes shifted to me.
"I gave him your excuses for missing dinner on Wednesday."
"What were those?"
"You'd be with me and I'd be fucking your brains out."
My vagina went into spasm and my knees went week.
"How'd he take that?" I asked, trying to pretend I wasn't about to collapse.
"He wasn't pleased. — Kristen Ashley

We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing, the fences of our own backyards, and have stood amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, every limb of the dead oak feathered black; and I cut the engine let the river grab the jon boat and pull it toward the tree ... Then as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time its soft countenance the raw fleshy jowls, wrinkled and generous like the faces of the very old who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, reluctant, looking back at their roost, calling them what they are- transfiguring angels who pray over the leaf graves of the anonymous lost with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings. — David Bottoms

Our community of rebels, of humble truth seekers, wants to turn our culture around. We don't despise our country. We don't desire failure. We desire light, a beacon to show the world that our wealth need not show the way to more rapid destruction, but can be leveraged to heal more acres, more backyards, more communities faster than any civilization on the right path has ever done it. — Joel Salatin

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind. — Mark Haskell Smith

I was in a sketch group in L.A., and we were playing, like, backyards in Glendale and stuff. It was pretty ugly because we didn't have any money. — Bill Hader

Small steps taken by many people in their backyards add up. — Nancy Knowlton

Today's gardens have become far more than things of beauty. And today's generation is fast finding out that backyards can be an extremely resourceful and powerful tool in not just providing food for the family but also a brilliant way of connecting children with the natural world. — Jamie Durie

As we try to change society to fit our standards and bring about the sense of peace we long for, it is only when we turn inwards, clean our own backyards and serve as a source of inspiration that society will improve on its own. — Dana Gore

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida. — Karen Russell

People's backyards are much more interesting than their front gardens, and houses that back on to railways are public benefactors. — John Betjeman

But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way
a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in
separate backyards. — Lionel Shriver

Having a Southwest Green in my backyard is a huge advantage for me on tour. I am pleasantly surprised just how true the ball rolls and reacts to chip and pitch shots. I love my Southwest Green. — Jim Furyk

There are golfers everywhere who may never get a chance to play a links course in Scotland, a tree-lined course in America or the sand belts of Australia. Hopefully I can bring some of those elements into their backyards. — Tiger Woods

For far too long the world's poorest people have seen no benefit from the vast natural resources in their own backyards. It is time to end the injustice where ordinary people are silent witnesses, left to suffer without basic services, as the profits from their countries' assets are hidden and plundered by corrupt regimes. — Nick Clegg

Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it's something that starts in people's heads. So when these clowns start shouting "Stop the ruin!" - I laugh!' 'I swear to you, I find it laughable! Every one of them needs to hit himself on the back of the head and then when he has knocked all the hallucinations out of himself and gets on with sweeping out backyards - which is his real job - all this "ruin" will automatically disappear — Mikhail Bulgakov

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you're a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet. — Megan Abbott

We're in the Chicago suburbs, ruling our 'hood and the streets that lead here. It's a street war, where other
suburban gangs fight us for territory. Three blocks away are mansions and million-dollar houses. Right here,
in the real world, the street war rages on. The people in the million-dollar houses don't even realize a battle is
about to begin less than a half mile from their backyards. — Simone Elkeles

Peace begins in the kitchens and pantries, gardens and backyards, where our food is grown and prepared. The energies of nature and the infinite universe are absorbed through the foods we eat and are transmuted into our thoughts and actions. — Michio Kushi

Backyards are as Australian as the Hills Hoists they host, and as individual as those who work and play in them. Whether haven, pantry or playground, they all tell a story. — Pete Munro

To those of us who believe that all of life is sacred every crumb of bread and sip of wine is a Eucharist, a remembrance, a call to awareness of holiness right where we are.
I want all of the holiness of the Eucharist to spill out beyond church walls, out of the hands of priests and into the regular streets and sidewalks, into the hands of regular, grubby people like you and me, onto our tables, in our kitchens and dining rooms and backyards. — Shauna Niequist

Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington
it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston ... This is your victory. — Barack Obama

Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools. Desegregation was a primary cause of the proliferation of private swimming pools that occurred after the mid-1950s. By the 1970s and 1980s, tens of millions of mostly white middle-class Americans swam in their backyards or at suburban club pools, while mostly African and Latino Americans swam at inner-city municipal pools. America's history of socially segregated swimming pools — Jeff Wiltse

Going beyond one's backyard grants one perspective. — Sara Genn

When the homebrewers stop entering the profession, and the backyard breweries are squeezed out, then it will become stagnant. — Greg Noonan

I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings. — Caroline B. Cooney

At the same moment when massive global institutions seem to rule the world, there is an equally strong countermovement among regular people to claim personal agency in our own lives. We grow food in backyards. We brew beer. We weave cloth and knit blankets. We shop local. We create our own playlists. We tailor delivery of news and entertainment. In every arena, we customize and personalize our lives, creating material environments to make meaning, express a sense of uniqueness, and engage causes that matter to us and the world. It makes perfect sense that we are making our spiritual lives as well, crafting a new theology. And that God is far more personal and close at hand than once imagined. — Diana Butler Bass

My biggest fear is that a paparazzi or someone ... is going to come in my backyard and see me when I get in my pool. That would be very unfortunate. — Viola Davis

We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. — Norman Mailer

Corn is at the core of modern agribusiness, the most important food crop in North America. In no other crop are the values of modern commercial agribusiness as thoroughly embedded. There is nothing we can do that is ultimately subversive - there is no act of gardening that is so profound a rebellion, there is no act of eating that is so potent a blow for food quality and food system sanity - as to take back the corn crop in our own backyards, and grow, breed, eat, and save seed of corn based upon an entirely different set of values. — Carol Deppe

When sociobiologists start shitting in their backyards with dinner guests in the vicinity, maybe their arguments about innateness over culture will start seeming more persuasive. — Laura Kipnis

I grew up in Canada, man - we all had rinks in our backyards because we'd ice down the grass with a hose and build a skating rink. — Tatiana Maslany

People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite. — Amy Stewart

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard. — John Tukey

Nature surrounds us, from parks and backyards to streets and alleyways. Next time you go out for a walk, tread gently and remember that we are both inhabitants and stewards of nature in our neighbourhoods. — David Suzuki

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany. — Christian Wiman

At a distance, we see a need and ignore it. We judge it, condemn it, forget it. We don't think about it, because if we practice ignorance long enough, we don't notice the need anymore. It goes underground, and we're content with the surface of life as we know it - unwilling to break deeper ground. If all appears to be well on the outside, that is good enough for our consciences.
... If we are willing to dig deep, to find Calcutta in our own backyards, we will find the poor. But we will also find God. And He may just open our eyes, so that we can see the need and not soon forget. So that we can hear their cries and not grow deaf. So that we can smell the stench of human need and awaken our hearts to compassion. — Jeff Goins

That optimist of yours is always ready to turn hell's backyard into a play-ground. — Mark Twain

How else could people exist in a world of good and evil, where wicked atrocities abound in backyards, yet somehow still be capable of experiencing joy and love? Surely Darius was not the only survivor of evil, not the only one who longed to see good in the world. He had just focused on the wrong thing, allowing it to consume him. — Madison Thorne Grey

There are many gods ... gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards, but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones
... The god of the church is a jealous god; he cannot live in peace with other gods. — Rudolfo Anaya

He'd figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors' backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you'd ever be hassled for going too fast. — Christopher McDougall

One of Ronald Reagan's fantasies as president was that he would take Mikhail Gorbachev on a tour of the United States so the Soviet leader could see how ordinary Americans lived. Reagan often talked about it. He imagined that he and Gorbachev would fly by helicopter over a working-class community, viewing a factory and its parking lot filled with cars and then circling over the pleasant neighborhood where the factory workers lived in homes "with lawns and backyards, perhaps with a second car or a boat in the driveway, not the concrete rabbit warrens I'd seen in Moscow." The helicopter would descend, and Reagan would invite Gorbachev to knock on doors and ask the residents "what they think of our system." The workers would tell him how wonderful it was to live in America. — Henry Kissinger

I believe in my heart that faith in Jesus Christ can and will lead us beyond an exclusive concern for the well-being of other human beings to the broader concern for the well-being of the birds in our backyards, the fish in our rivers, and every living creature on the face of the earth. — John Wesley

Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of "playing". A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which "neighborhoods" have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of "neighbor childrens" houses or play in "backyards". In the absence of sidewalks in newer "gated" coummunities, children cannot "walk" to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A "playdate" is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.
In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been awaiting. — Joyce Carol Oates

There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic. — Gore Vidal

Anytime a person has Disney World in their backyard, you know they're thinking big. — Rodney Jerkins

My dad never pushed me but the big thing is that he helped me by going out in the backyard and playing with me. — Bart Starr

I'll fight somebody in my backyard for free, just to see if I'm better than him. — Chuck Liddell

It is true [the risk for travel is greater] for we now operate in a global market. Business travelers are conducting business all over the world as if they are conducting business in their own backyards. — Mark Hall

We look in our own backyard and say, 'How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?' — Melinda Gates

I'm going to take you out of here ... I'm going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning. — Haruki Murakami

My weekends are spent hidden in the woods, and then I have to come back and pretend to be this very upper-crust insurance investigator. But, I mean, duality's nice. You never get bored. You can't say the grass is always greener if you're in both backyards. — Hilarie Burton

I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese. — Paul Auster

By the time we got to the store on our pre-Independence Day shopping trip, I had counted no less than twenty-four deer actively engaged in demolishing people's gardens. Twenty-four deer aligned along a walk of one mile! I pointed out to Gabriel that this was a rather ridiculous situation on our way to lay down hard-earned dollars for deer meat. However, we hadn't even gotten to the punchline yet. When we went inside the store and found the venison, the back of the package was labeled PRODUCT OF NEW ZEALAND. Apparently modern Americans find it more palatable for their meat to have a seven-thousand-mile carbon footprint than to come from their own backyards. — Sarah A. Chrisman

I'm out there having as good a time as I did in the backyard since I was five-years-old. — Philip Rivers

If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with — Tony Kushner

Trent pumped his arm as if he'd just hit the jackpot. "Thank God. If I had to hear about one more incident with that squirrel-shifter, I was going to shoot myself."
"Squirrel-shifter? Are you fucking kidding me?" Jace raised an eyebrow in a look that said, Do I even want to know?
"Some half squirrel, half man has been showing up naked in people's backyards out in the suburbs. Soccer moms tend to be a little alarmed when a nude man nibbling on acorns is perched near their child's window. I'm not sure whether he's a shifter who's unable to hold his animal form for long or just a garden variety nut. — Kait Ballenger

The world of your photography is limitless-just like your backyard. — Nick Kelsh

God's great love and purposes for us are all worked out in messes in our kitchens and backyards, in storms and sins, blue skies, the daily work and dreams of our common lives. God works with us as we are and not as we should be or think we should be. — Eugene H. Peterson

Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire, he is still only a whisker away from the wilds. — Jean Burden

In the Church, when we talk about 'the world', we often create an us and them situation and end up planting the seeds of all that we feel wrong with the world in the soil of our own backyard. — Steve Scott

If our culture is to be transformed, it will happen from the bottom up - from ordinary believers practicing apologetics over the backyard fence or around the barbecue grill. — Charles Colson

People who dislike budging from their homes or walking beyond their own backyards
and they are always and everywhere in the majority
treat Herodotus' sort, fundamentally unconnected to anyone or anything, as freaks, fanatics, lunatics even. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Don't believe you have to travel far and wide to discover opportunities. The best opportunities will always be found in your own back yard, and not half way around the world in someone else's backyard. You have to look for them, however. — Ernie J Zelinski

I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards. Were you still installed in my kitchen, slathering crunchy peanut butter on Branola though it was almost time for dinner, I'd no sooner have put down the bags, one leaking a clear vicious drool, than this little story would come tumbling out, even before I chided that we're having pasta tonight so would you please not eat that whole sandwich. — Lionel Shriver