Barn Quotes & Sayings

So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood's barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up. — Herman Wouk

There's got to be some scientific study somewhere that proves your boyfriend's sweater will keep you warmer and cure you of any illnesses a lot faster, than some Pottery Barn blanket. — Adam Silvera

This'll keep me safe, Mother! I've the knowing of the sliding rule! I can tell the sine what to do, and the cosine likewise and work out the tangent of t'quaderatics! Come one, Mother, stop fretting and come wi' me now to t'barn. You must see 'er!' Mrs. Simnel, reluctant, was dragged by her son to the great open barn he had knitted out like the workshop back at Sheepridge, hoping against hope that her son had accidentally found himself a girl. — Terry Pratchett

The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words. — Paul Engle

The holiday season is a time for storytelling, and whether you are hearing the story of a candelabra staying lit for more than a week, or a baby born in a barn without proper medical supervision, these stories often feature miracles. Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you'd see, and this holiday story features any number of miracles, depending on your point of view. — Lemony Snicket

And when whatever happened in that barn happened, it was a moment I'll never forget. Like a missing key slid into a dusty old lock. Click. My world opened. — Jennifer Walkup

I should have hoped to have trained him, my lady, to understand the rules of discretion."
"Trained! Train a barn-door fowl to be a pheasant, Mr. Horner! That would be the easier task. But you did right to speak of discretion rather than honour. Discretion looks to the consequences of actions - honour looks to the action itself, and is an instinct rather than a virtue. After all, it is possible you might have trained him to be discreet. — Elizabeth Gaskell

He ducked down under the wooden slats used to separate the stalls in the barn and crawled into the adjacent stall where he began rubbing the belly of the chestnut mare.
"Lay down, Lady. Please ... it's awful cold tonight. Please lay down."
The mare complied as she always did to the soothing tone in his voice. Drawing the blanket up tightly around him, he lay down beside the horse, moving in close to her side. He was careful to place his frozen feet near enough to her for warmth, but not so near that she'd protest.
"They had a real purty tree, Lady, with candles. Bet it didn't look as purty from the inside, though. Weren't no snow on the inside."
He snuggled in closer to the warm beast. "Merry Christmas, Lady," he whispered.
The mare nickered and moved her head in closer to the boy as he drifted off to sleep, the scent of hay and livestock surrounding them. — Lorraine Heath

How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility. — Aldo Leopold

I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him, another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crepe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cow-feed. My kin are given to such phrases as, 'Let's face it. — Flannery O'Connor

The village of Wall watched the battle of wills with fascination, wondering what the outcome would be, for no one crossed Bridget Forester: she had a tongue that could, the villagers said, blister the paint from a barn door and tear the bark from an oak. — Neil Gaiman

A large red drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east. The evening star flashed and glittered in the dusk. The gray cat sneaked away toward the open barn shed and passed inside like a shadow. — John Steinbeck

"You're wearing your Seduction Hat. Why am I not surprised?"
He offers a pirate's smile. "Did you notice ... I've a new embellishment?" He makes a show of adjusting an owl's tail feather in the band.
I bite back a giggle. "Vegetarian barn owl, I presume?"
"Won't be bothering me again for some time."
"I can guarantee it's not the only one out there."
He loops my arm through his. "Good. I'm always up for a worthy chase." — A.G. Howard

My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dear God, I don't have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The barn was dark from the storm, and we couldn't find the harness, which no one had used in years. Old Jake, who had sprained his good foot falling off a horse and was hobbling around worse than ever, started getting panicky at the idea of the dam giving out and washing away the cattle, but I told him to hush his mouth. We all knew what was at stake, and if we were going to save the ranch, we needed clear heads. — Jeannette Walls

Our culture teaches us about shame - it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren't born craving perfect bodies. We weren't born afraid to tell our stories. We weren't born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren't born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us - from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate. — Brene Brown

Criticism is an alluring substitute for creation, because tearing
things down, unlike building them up, really is as easy as falling off a stump. It's blissfully simple to strike a savvy, sophisticated pose by attacking someone else's creations, but the old adage is right: Any fool can burn down a barn. Building one is something else again. — Martha Beck

The history of government regulation of food safety is one of government watchdogs chasing the horse after it's out of the barn. — David Aaron Kessler

I sighed at the spectacular realization that I had never really allowed myself to believe that real cowboys might actually exist, especially not one with brains and killer blue eyes, alive and breathing in my barn. This man was a real cowboy, not on the big screen, in my dreams or in my imagination, but here in my barn. — Carly Kade

Nobody had to say it; everyone could see it with their eyes and know it in their hearts. In a way all those afternoons down on the sandbar at Thompson Creek, late evenings of margaritas at Que Pasa, nights of pool parties and barn dances and Ronnie Morgan's campfires followed by pancakes and kitchen camaraderie, and church on Sunday morning--these things were like a levee the people of Starhill had spent a lifetime building together. Now, facing a catastrophe that felt like it had the power to wash them away, the levee was holding. — Rod Dreher

Tromping through the woods with yards of cloth swaddled around her was more work than tromping through a tangled field of dried cornstalks on the way to the barn. — Maeve Greyson

Tell me about Bryce, Sparrow." Effie bit into a cookie and aimed blue eyes her way.
She shrugged.
"What's to tell? He's the youngest of the Matheson brothers, but then maybe ye ken that since yer granddaughter is married to the eldest."
"No. Tell me about your relationship with him and how you ended up with his muddy hand prints on your boobs. I'm betting that story is a barn burner. — Vonnie Davis

The Prime Minister, a specialist in calling in the locksmith after the horses had fled - the whole herd in fact - and the barn in ruins, ended the week with a great raft of ethics proposals for cabinet, leadership candidates, backbenchers and lobbyists. I think it is more than fair to ask: Why wait for the middle of his third term to institute what the public would have welcomed at the beginning of his first? — Rex Murphy

Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time. — Meryl Streep

Nelson, do you remember the spring day when we climbed the barn gable so we could see the seagulls that mysteriously blew into our clay hills
swept from an ocean neither of us had ever seen though it was scarcely a hundred miles away, each bird a genuine miracle high above the green barley? The time we saw that panther in the sycamore tree and Maw said it was the sign of war? Nelson, I am sixty-three years old, the same age that both Maw and Daddy were when they died. I have written this in testimony. With this book, I presume to be done now with such remembrance. But somehow I suspect it will go on, this peering down old wells, this excavation of memory and its shades. — Joe Bageant

Were you raised in a barn? You don't just walk into someone's house." Ash laughed. "I have an open invitation to enter whenever I'm here." "Yeah, but what if he's naked or something?" Ash led him into the foyer. "I've known Kyrian for over two thousand years, and I can honesty say that I have never once caught him naked in his living room." The door closed behind them without Ash or Nick touching it- something that always unnerved Nick when Ash did it. "Besides, Rosa's still here. I know he's not walking around bare-assed with her on duty. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

When I speak of home, I speak of the place where in default of a better
those I love are gathered together; and if that place where a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding. — Charles Dickens

But Lucius was staring at the beamed ceiling of the barn, pacing around, hands clasped behind
his back, muttering to himself. "This is not going well. Not going well at all. I advised the Elders
that you should have been summoned back to Romania years ago, that you would never be a
suitable bride ... "
Whoa, there. "Bride? — Beth Fantaskey

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of ... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist ... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway. — Robert Penn Warren

I will be master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing. — William Shakespeare

Now that the barn has burned down, I can see the moon.
- Persian proverb — Samantha Combs

The promises of God are samples of what is promised; as a handful of wheat is of the barn. — Coventry Patmore

The sky has stopped
offering you reasons to live and your heart is the rock
you threw through each window
of what's deserted you, so you turn
to the burnt out building inside you: the scaffolding
overhead, the fallen beams,
the unsound framework;


according to the blue that's printed on the inside of your arms
you have no plans, no plans
uncovered, or uncovering: the offing is emptying,


the horizon empty


now that your sanity is
a tarp or a bedsheet
in the rough hands of the wind,


now that everything is hooded
in drop cloth.


It didn't happen
overnight. Or maybe it did:


your heart, the rock;
your soul, the Gothic barn. — Olena Kalytiak Davis

I, for one, thought this would be something good for Settlers to know from the get-go. With so much risk, why did SA feel the consequences of exposure were something to be concealed until there was not choice but to drag people like Monica and me into their secret beige meeting room and scare us half to death after we'd screwed up? It made about as much sense as extremely conservative parents not telling their daughters about the consequences of sex until after they were already pregnant. Shutting the barn door after the horse was loose, much?
But then, I was beginning to think SA wasn't nearly as smart as they believed themselves to be. Our remaining undiscovered for so long seemed due more to humanity's tendency not to see things they didn't want to see, rather than cleverness on the part of Settler's Affairs. — Stacey Jay

The audience is invisible and that's good. Somewhere my voice is drifting through a swine barn and the sound of it seems to perk up the sows' appetite. Or a lady is listening on headphones as she jogs along a beach, running to my cadence. Or a dog sits in front of the radio, head cocked, and the sibilants excite him in some mysterious way. A dog's humorist, that's me. — Garrison Keillor

All pomp and show." Anjali's glare at the house would've exploded bricks if she'd had superhuman powers. "A fat cow needs a big barn. — Nicola Marsh

With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. He neither inherited a barn nor a title, nor even a young wife. But in spite of these disadvantages, he had begun even in his father's lifetime to lay the foundations of a prosperous future. It was slow and painful. But he threw himself into it like one possessed. And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father's contemptible life and shameful death. — Chinua Achebe

Pa never told stories like Grandpa. Or treated the barn like family. Eli knew how Grandpa's own pa had built the barn by hand, hauling bluestone for the foundation behind a stubborn ox with horns as wide as a tractor. How the smell of the plank walls was like family and how you never washed your chore coat so the animals would smell that you were family, too. — Sandra Neil Wallace

I'm originally from Dallas, Texas, where Bonnie and Clyde were from, so when I was a little kid, my grandfather used to drive me past the Barrow Filling Station. At my elementary school, there was a barn outside that they used to say was a Bonnie and Clyde hangout. — Lane Garrison

I love Massachusetts for a number of reasons. I once loved a magical girl who lived in a magnificently converted barn, a half-hour or so from Boston. I love your winters. I love the snow. — J. D. Souther

I'm not thin, but I'm strong - plus my balance is such that I can navigate a flight of stairs with a basket of laundry and a stack of Pottery Barn catalogs, vaulting over cat-and-dog hurdles, never once spilling my coffee. — Jen Lancaster

In every creepy movie ever made, the barn is the prime nesting ground for the things you don't know you're looking for and always regret finding. — Rick Yancey

Don't panic, but there are three bears surrounding me in the barn. — Michele M. Reynolds

You still talk to your horses."
I jerked and Sackett shifted, not liking the spike of energy that shot through me or the fact that my fingers had yanked at his mane.
Moses stood silhouetted in the barn door, holding what looked to be a large canvas in his hand.
I hadn't realized I was still talking to Sackett, and I did a quick examination of what I'd just said. I believe I had just uttered an embarrassing rant on Moses not being allowed in Georgia. Oh, Lord, I prayed fervently, you can make the blind man see and the deaf man hear, so it shouldn't be too much to ask to make this man forget everything he's just seen and heard.
"What does Sackett think about those new, stricter laws in Georgia?"
I looked up at the rafters, "Hey, thanks for comin' through for me, Lord. — Amy Harmon

We always need to be prepared and work hard in practice so we can be just like the farmer who has put that fourth cutting of hay in the barn. After he does that, he can feel good about what is going to happen the rest of the winter. — Don Meyer

Ox Cart Man

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hoped by hand at the forge's fire.

He walks by his ox's head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire's light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year's ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again. — Donald Hall

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. — Henry David Thoreau

I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit ... when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis. — Kurt Vonnegut

In the shop, breathing the scent of dusty grease and oil; in the old house, staring into the living room where Dad and Jake used to take naps together on the couch; in the sheep barn, remembering the joy implicit in so much baaing life; in every inch of the farm, I recalled my father's presence. — Julene Bair

Oh, there are little rhymes a mage might use to remember the sequence of what must be done, but the words themselves don't do a thing. You could write every 'spell' as high as a man on the barn wall, but if you don't have the power to start with, all you'd have is a strange rhyme. And a bad one at that. — Gail Z. Martin

I felt like a champion because I was figuring shit out. I was a doer and a getter-doner, and it was okay to be identified by the neighbors as the little lady who had a dump truck of manure delivered, a load that made the entire neighborhood smell like a dairy barn for weeks. — Dee Williams

Bags hanging blue-veined and round with milk, like full moons caught between their legs. She was sore and tired, but knew she had to get out of the barn before the men arrived to do the milking. Glancing down, she realized that a miracle had come to pass: the blood-soaked hay was fresh now, except for a small stain beneath her own bottom. And the two things she'd been holding when she fell asleep - the scissors — Jodi Picoult

He can't hear you." Alex sighs. "You aren't the sharpest sheep in the barn, are you?"
"That's not even the right metaphor," I snap, my attention still focused on Richie. "It's the sharpest pencil in the box."
"Right." Alex nods. "Except you are a sheep. I'm not stupid, I just adjusted the metaphor to fit your persona-"
"Oh, shut up. Richie!" I scream again. Alex shakes his head. — Jessica Warman

People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn't. Not really. He wasn't even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house, an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It's not my body, really, and maybe not even my head. He — Christina Baker Kline

A child's brain is like fly paper that hangs from a barn ceiling: it doesn't get to choose which memories fly away free and which memories stick to death. — Helen Peppe

Our sister Alma was the best hitter in the family. We used to soak corn cobs in water so they wouldn't fly so far when we hit 'em. Alma was the first to hit one far enough to break a window in the barn. — Lloyd Waner

July had come, and haying begun; the little gardens were doing finely and the long summer days were full of pleasant hours. The house stood open from morning till night, and the lads lived out of doors, except at school time. The lessons were short, and there were many holidays, for the Bhaers believed in cultivating healthy bodies by much exercise, and our short summers are best used in out-of-door work. Such a rosy, sunburnt, hearty set as the boys became; such appetites as they had; such sturdy arms and legs, as outgrew jackets and trousers; such laughing and racing all over the place; such antics in house and barn; such adventures in the tramps over hill and dale; and such satisfaction in the hearts of the worthy Bhaers, as they saw their flock prospering in mind and body, I cannot begin to describe. — Louisa May Alcott

He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can. — Eric Spitznagel

We folded up newspapers and made them into boats. We'd see whose would float the longest before it got bogged down, soggy, and sank. My father gave us a few pennies each day, which we'd toss and try to land on rocks.We'd wade in and get them again and again.Then we'd flip them in one final time to make a wish. Bliss and I could keep ourselves entertained for hours, but of course we became more and more aware that the whole forest was right there -- waiting for us to explore.
We didn't go far at first, not beyond where we could hear Mom call for us from the back door of the barn, but it gave us a whole new playground. We found a fallen log that we walked like a plank. There was a tree with a low straight branch that we could dangle and swing from. We gathered pine cones and tossed and batted them with twigs. — Riel Nason

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. — Julian Barnes

Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illness. An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again. — Stephen King

When I'm working in the barn or house I often think of all the errors I've made in my life. But then I quickly put that behind me and think of water lilies. They will always eradicate unpleasant thoughts. Or goslings are equally comforting in their own way. — Tasha Tudor

Templeton was down there now, rummaging around. When he returned to the barn, he carried in his mouth an advertisement he had torn from a crumpled magazine.
How's this?" he asked, showing the ad to Charlotte.
It says 'Crunchy.' 'Crunchy' would be a good word to write in your web."
Just the wrong idea," replied Charlotte. "Couldn't be worse. We don't want Zuckerman to think Wilbur is crunchy. He might start thinking about crisp, crunchy bacon and tasty ham. That would put ideas into his head. We must advertise Wilbur's noble qualities, not his tastiness. — E.B. White

The next morning was very cold. Benny did not want to get up at all. "No," he said, "it is so cold that I'm not going to get out of bed." Henry looked out at the ocean. "I have an idea," he said. "It's too cold outside today. Let's all stay inside and paint our birds." "Fine!" agreed Jessie. "I'll light the stove and we'll shut the barn door. It will soon be warm. — Gertrude Chandler Warner

Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously. — John Steinbeck

But Jackal gave a low, humorless chuckle. 'Oh you bastard.' He smiled, shaking his head and staring up at the barn. 'That's cute. Let's see if you're as funny when I'm beating you to death with your own arm. — Julie Kagawa

Waiting turns men into bears in a barn, and women into cats in a sack. — Robert Jordan

Twoleg den with cows and a dark, hay-scented barn where she and — Erin Hunter

The Japanese poet Masahide once wrote,"The barn has burnt down - now I can see the moon." I now understand what that means. Life can truly begin after a fire when all is seemingly lost. All of the unnecessary has been burned away. — Kenn Bivins

He's magnificent!" Maureen sighed, walking to the window and watching Brevan saunter toward the barn.
"He is not a horse, Maury," Genieva reminded. — Marcia Lynn McClure

I'd like to see you think the roof back on that barn," Call said. — Larry McMurtry

His fingers gouged into my leg harder. "My sister was in that cafeteria," he said. "She saw her friends die, thanks to you and that puke boyfriend of yours. She still has nightmares about it. He got what he deserved, but you got a free pass. That ain't right. You should've died that day, Sister Death. Everyone wishes you would have. Look around. Where is Jessica, if she wants you here so bad? Even the friends you came here with don't want to be with you."
"Let go of me," I said again, pulling on his fingers. But he only pinched tighter.
"Your boyfriend isn't the only one who can get his hands on a gun," he said. Slowly he eased himself up to standing again. He reached into the waistband of his jeans and pulled out something small and dark. He pointed it at me, and when the moonlight hit it, I gasped and pressed myself against the barn wall. — Jennifer Brown

The first slap-jack given me for dinner was a cake of flour, partially fried in a pan of fat bacon. I nibbled about the brown edges and threw it, unbaked, against a barn door, where it stuck for days. — James Smith

Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up. — Jane Smiley

Seventeen times against the wall or in the barn: You move or scream or say anything I will kill them all. In front of you. First I will torture them and then I will kill them. Her eyes as dead as she can make them. Her arms as limp as she can make them. Her heart as hidden as she can make it. A soldier's cock entering the thin white flesh of a girl, into the small red cave of her, the fist of her heart pounding out be-dead, be-dead, be-dead.
Counting. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

In Scotland, I have a huge barn full of woodworking tools. I love working with my hands. I basically just make myself bleed a lot. I'm very accident-prone. — Greg Wise

I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all ... and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil.
Lady Alice Rowhedge — Norah Lofts

A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not a ... turkey ... in the barn-yard but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; and certain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing and roasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflecting fowl living. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Farm country
you know, hay, horses, cattle. It's the ideal situation for me. I like the physical endeavors that go with the farm
cutting hay, cleaning out stalls, or building a barn. You go do that and then come back to the writing. — Sam Shepard

If someone as blessed as I am is not willing to clean out the barn, who will? — Ross Perot

Church comforts the lonely, those who've lost, those who grieve. It is a weekly ritual that never changes, never goes away. You can go to mass anywhere around the world -- Waseca, North Dakota, Poland, Ireland -- and the only difference would be the language. Church provides us something to cling to, the rope line tied from the barn to the house during a blizzard. No matter what swirls around you, you cannot become lost. — Rachael Hanel

My mom grew up with horses, and when I turned 14, 15, she's like, 'Do you want to take a riding lesson?' I thought, 'Oh, gross, dirty.' She was like, 'Okay.' And then I did, and now I'm the one cleaning those damn stalls out. You can't get me away from the barn now. It shocks even me. — Kaley Cuoco

We might do well to stay home a few days and walk over the fields, or to stand in the shelter of the barn door and reflect upon the relentless and yet benevolent forces of Mother Nature. The laws of nature are relentless. They can never be disobeyed without exacting a penalty. Yet they are benevolent, for when they are understood and obeyed, nature yields up the abundance that blesses those who understand and obey. — Wheeler McMillen

Wyatt was, in fact, finding the Christian system suspect. Memory of his fourth birthday party still weighted in his mind. It had been planned cautiously by Aunt May, to the exact number of hats and favors and portions of cake. One guest, no friend to Wyatt (from a family "less fortunate than we are"), showed up with a staunchly party-bent brother. (Not only no friend: a week before he had challenged Wyatt through the fence behind the carriage barn with - Nyaa nyaa, suckinyerma's ti-it-ty ... ) Wyatt was taken to a dark corner, where he later reckoned all Good works were conceived, and told that it was the Christian thing to surrender his portion. So he entered his fifth year hatless among crepe-paper festoons, silent amid snapping crackers, empty of Christian love for the uninvited who asked him why he wasn't having any cake. — William Gaddis

My decorating and renovation skills are nil - indeed, I once used a shower curtain from Pottery Barn as 'window dressing.' — Candace Bushnell

And he still had those two big nuts in his pocket that he'd picked up from the Purdys' barn workshop, the one with the green-and-yellow overspray on the floor, a green-and-yellow spray that didn't match the hard green and yellow of the John Deere, but did match the green and yellow of fair fire hydrants . . . and those nuts in his pocket. Why would you need a whole bag of big nuts, but no bolts? You wouldn't - unless they were shrapnel. And that nagging intuition he'd had by the Varied Industries building: he'd been walking by fire hydrants all morning, the same yellow and green as the overspray on the Purdys' barn floor. A bomb. The Purdys had built a bomb. The farm kid who'd been brain-injured by IEDs in Iraq had built himself an IED. A bomb disguised as a fire hydrant that was probably standing on the Concourse, right where the candidates would be marching by, right on the curb. — John Sandford

Texas sharpshooter fallacy: Imagine that you are driving down a country road in Texas. You see a barn that has six targets painted on it, and a bullet hole at the very center of each target. "Yes sir," says the owner of the barn, "I never miss." "That's right," says his spouse, "there ain't a man in the state of Texas who's more accurate with a paint brush." Got it? He fired the six shots, and then painted the targets around them. — John V. Guttag

My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn't pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn ... If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinquency would be cut in half in a year's time. — Bob Feller

I want people to be excited about cooling towers and megasheds; they're as much part of our history as the rural barn. — Antony Gormley

Why did you come back? 'Tis not safe." "I came back to finish what we last started." Did he mean their near embrace in the barn? Before Pa came in? His mouth was warm against her ear, his fingers stroking her hair, which frayed at the touch of his callused hand. "I came back to ask you to be my wife." The words, so long wished for, were every bit as sweet as she'd hoped they'd be. But here in this shadowed corner, with Pa so ill ... "Do you love me? Or do you feel pity for me, alone, almost fatherless?" "Not pity, Morrow. Love. The love between a man and a woman." Her lips parted in a sort of wonder. "Have you ever been in love?" "Not till now ... not till you." "Then how can you be ... sure?" "I know my mind, my heart. — Laura Frantz

I started toward the barn and was grateful that the wind was still. About halfway up the drive, my heart began to beat an irregular rhythm as I caught sight of Cricket coming toward me. My breath caught in my throat. This girl. This tiny little girl had such incredible power over me with her big, blue, round, sad eyes. Her unusual face, her unusually striking face. Her pert nose. The faint laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. And I didn't know her, didn't really even know if she and I were anything alike but that didn't stop me from wishing we shared a future ... even if she did belong to someone else. — Fisher Amelie

Each year they threw open the grounds of the manor house for a party attended by children from some of the roughest districts of Birmingham. They built a large hall known as The Barn in the park to provide tea and refreshments for up to seven hundred children. George Sr., with his love of nature, believed strongly that every child should have access to playing outside in clean air. Games were organized in the open fields, but the star attraction was the open-air baths. More than fifty children could bathe at any one time, and for the young visitors, most of whom had no access to a bath, it was thrilling. The sun on their backs, the sparkling water always inviting, the boys from the inner cities had no desire to leave and would stay in all day, until they were blue and shivering and cleaner than they had been in years. — Deborah Cadbury

...a single tongue of flame shooting out the side of the O'Learys' barn.
(Where the fire started) — Jim Murphy

Take care, you fair lassies!" In full Scottish brogue, James pulled the sleigh up beside the porch stairs. "A wicked storm's a brewin'!" Molly's train of thought derailed as he climbed the icy stairs and slipped an arm around her none-too-tiny waist. She felt about as big as a barn these days. "You best hang on to me for all you're worth, Molly girl!" He winked. "With both hands, if you'd like." Giggling, Rachel raised a discreet brow as if to say, "Friendship?" "You be careful taking her home, James. — Tamera Alexander

Saudi Arabia is, of course, the keystone of OPEC. Saudi Arabia has had the distinction of remaining stable through all the escalating tumult of recent decades, reliably pumping out its roughly 10 million barrels a day like Bossy the cow in America's oil import barn. — James Howard Kunstler

On hearing that she was to continue to act as Malcolm Sage's secretary, Miss Gladys Norman had done a barn-dance across the room, her arrival at the door synchronising with the appearance of Malcolm Sage from without. It had become a tradition at Department Z that "M.S." could always be depended upon to arrive at the most embarrassing moment of any little dramatic episode; but it was equally well-known that he possessed a "blind-side" to his vision. They called it "the Nelson touch. — Herbert Jenkins

But as poet Mizuta Masahide wrote, "Barn's burnt down / now / I can see the moon. — Brene Brown

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn. — Wendell Berry

Len Colter sat in the shade under the wall of the horse barn, eating pone and sweet butter and contemplating a sin. — Leigh Brackett