Quotes & Sayings About Barns

barns. Hinged on their sides and latched in the center, the old garage doors swung open into the alley. No electric door openers, no remote controls. Drivers parked in the alley, got out and opened the swinging doors, then returned to their cars to pull inside. Beside each garage were garbage cans, waiting for the garbage trucks that still rumbled down the cinder alleys. Molded plastic garbage cans, some with small plastic wheels, had replaced the dented sheet metal cans that our parents had used. The plastic cans lasted longer, and they didn't rust, but you lost — Tom Robertson

This means that they are bound by law and custom to plough the fields of their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, and perform all manner of tasks of this kind. — Jean Froissart

God's people are not to accumulate stuff for tomorrow but to share indiscriminately with the scandalous and holy confidence that God will provide for tomorrow. Then we need not stockpile stuff in barns or a 401(k), especially when there is someone in need. — Shane Claiborne

These days, we've got booksellers in cities, in deserts, and in the middle of a rain forest; we've got travelling bookshops, and bookshops underground. We've got bookshops in barns, in caravans and in converted Victorian railway stations. We've even got booksellers selling books in the middle of a war.
Are bookshops still relevant? They certainly are.
All bookshops are full of stories, and stories want to be heard. — Jen Campbell

Certain ramshackle aspects of Dellarobia had also gone undercover, it seemed, just like the snow-covered barns. Some defects lurked, but for now her way seemed clear. She'd made plans. — Barbara Kingsolver

I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's what you sow that multiplies, not what you keep in the barn. — Adrian Rogers

I have the barn, it's just kind of like a studio. Almost all artists have la studio to work in, and that's really what it is. A place to get away. I'll spend maybe four days out there if I can, just completely immersed - like where I don't bathe or brush my teeth for a few days, just get up and make coffee and experiment until the sun goes down. — Andrew Bird

Cattle did not have to be led to water. They came eagerly to the trough and drank while Almanzo pumped, then they hurried back to the warm barns, and each went to its own place. Each cow turned into her own stall and put her head between her own stanchions. They never made a mistake.
Whether this was because they had more sense than horses, or because they had so little sense that they did everything by habit, Father did not know. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

I pause in garages, sheds and roofless barns touching things, identifying objects once secretly coveted. — Tom Gillaspy

the cow crossly shook her head and craned her neck, mooing plaintively, and beyond the black barns of Meliuzeievo the stars twinkled, and invisible threads of sympathy stretched between them and the cow as if there were cattle sheds in other worlds where she was pitied. Everything — Boris Pasternak

I'd rather do manual labor than sit behind a desk. And as my grandparents got older, I'd fly out there and help out around the farm. We'd tear barns down; we'd build barns. I'd rather be outside rolling hay or driving the tractors. — Kellan Lutz

There really is no such thing as failure. There is only the rearrangement of plans and surrender of ego. — Suzanne Falter-Barns

Ants do no bend their ways to empty barns, so no friend will visit the place of departed wealth.
[Lat., Horrea formicae tendunt ad inania nunquam
Nullus ad amissas ibit amicus opes.] — Ovid

Nova Scotia is a box bass and a fiddle and German sourdough and scotch eggs. And the air, all heavy and bracing and wet. When you're driving, you wave to the old guy walking along the side of the road in the plaid flannel shirt and he waves back, because it's just what you do. This is an extraordinarily hospitable and musical place. You've got to haul wood in the winter and batten down hatches during hurricanes, and there are bagpipes and banjos and weathered old barns and whales offshore and abandoned fishing boats sleeping on the beach. — Kate Inglis

The appeal of the cat lies in the very fact that she has formed no close bond with [man], that she has the uncompromising independence of a tiger or a leopard while she is hunting in his stables and barns: that she still remains mysterious and remote when she is rubbing herself gently against the legs of her mistress or purring contentedly in front of the fire. — Konrad Lorenz

I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music. — Tod Machover

There is probably no greater anxiety in life than going home to visit your mother for Christmas. — Suzanne Falter-Barns

Since I was in flight from religion, I assumed that my classmates had to be in flight from religion too, albeit in a quieter, savvier way than I had as yet been able to discover. Only today do I realize how mistaken I was. They were never in flight at all. Nor are their children in flight, or their grandchildren. By the time I reached by seventieth year, I used to predict, all the churches in the world would have been turned into barns or museums or potteries. But I was wrong. Behold, new churches spring up every day, all over the place, to say nothing of mosques. So Nietzsche's dictum needs to be amended: while it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home. — J.M. Coetzee

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? — Henry David Thoreau

The greatest of all our human concepts is the immortality of the personality and the eternal glory of the human soul. Throughout eternity you will be yourself and I will be myself, with quickened senses amplified powers of perception, and vastly increased capacity for reason, understanding, love, and happiness, all of which are qualities we may develop now. Our machines wear out, our barns fall down, and our substance goes back to the dust, but our finest collection of personal qualities will have eternal life. — Sterling W. Sill

I was obsessed with livestock barns, cattle and hogs. I still love that, and I still do that as a hobby.So I'm a strange person. — Larry The Cable Guy

I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;
then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees.
The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth. — Erich Maria Remarque

I compare myself to a good barn. You can have a good barn, and if you paint it, it looks a little better. But if you take the paint off, it's still a good barn. — Dolly Parton

This is the way it was in Yates County. Bald Girls. Wild boys formed from math. Geniuses all around, just waiting to be discovered, or waiting to rot in trailers behind their parents' barns, die penniless, mourned only by the Amish from whom they bought all those eggs. — Lydia Netzer

Hated France when I first got over here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first exotic whiff of garlic from my traveling companions, and the untrained stomach its first attack of French dysentery. But still, these were the only differences. I asked myself finally what exactly did I expect France to look like? No answer. — Elaine Dundy

That's my dream to be old enough and mature enough that I won't be considered an "old lady" if I have a house with a barn. Because I already do needlepoint. — Emmy Rossum

No one is born a Communist ... in the Soviet Union farmers keep on looking in the barn for their horses even after they have given them to the collective. — Nikita Khrushchev

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you'd left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth. — Wendell Berry

Disturbed and upset, Mrs. Pritchet gazed mutely out the window of the car and systematically abolished various categories. Old farmhouses with tottering windmills ceased to be. Ancient rusty automobiles vanished from this version of the universe. Outhouses disappeared, along with dead trees, shabby barns, rubbish heaps and poorly-dressed itinerant fruit-pickers. "What's — Philip K. Dick

Experience is truly the only thing that makes experts so expert. — Suzanne Falter-Barns

The principle factor in my success has been an absolute desire to draw constantly. I never decided to be an artist. Simply, I couldn't stop myself from drawing. I drew for my own pleasure. I never wanted to know whether or not someone liked my drawings. I have never kept one of my drawings. I drew on walls, the school blackboard, odd bits of paper, the walls of barns. Today I'm still as fond of drawings as when I was a kid - and that was a long time ago - but, surprising as it may seem, I never thought about the money I would receive for my drawings. I simply drew them. — Winsor McCay

It's as if the whole notion of growing soil is something only lunatics would think about. But why not grow soil? Does anything make more sense than growing soil? Isn't that more important than tractors, trucks, silos, barns, county fairs and country music? Of course it is. And yet to the lion's share of American farmers, the very notion of growing soil is just plain silly. — Joel Salatin

We must be unafraid to be utterly honest, to honor our gut feelings, and to say and do the unpopular when necessary. We have to give up our addiction to other people's opinions and surrender to the freedom of acting with strength and courage. — Suzanne Falter-Barns

I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.
The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother-'Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat. — Geraldine Brooks

You can't beat sex outdoors, but there are not many places I haven't done it. Forests, barns, in swimming pool changing rooms, on top of hills, you name it. — Katie Price

Few artists are able to accurately assess just how valuable and great their work is - or how much it will be appreciated by its audience. In other words, insecurity is the name of the game. — Suzanne Falter-Barns

When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night. — Alice Hoffman

The year is getting to feel rich, for his golden fruits are ripening fast, and he has a large balance in the barns, which are his banks. The members of his family have found out that he is well to do in the world. September is dressing herself in show of dahlias and splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand reception. — Oliver Wendell Holmes

And slowly the snow began to melt. First, doing a number on children's constructions; Then retreating to the foundations of barns and other buildings. Mangy grass poked through the receding snow. Patches of white were swallowed up in the till of the fields. New shapes emerged. Areas of the forest became INACCESSIBLE now that the snow no longer weighed down the weeds and brier ... Nothing fits together anymore. — Craig Thompson

...from the big tobacco barns there welled forth a fragrance that was for these Kentuckians, the soul of autumn. Oozing out into the sunshine from every crack in the great structures, it exhilarated like an elixir, like a long draught of some rich, spicy wine. — Edith Summers Kelley

To go with, not against the elements, an inexhaustible vitality summoned back each day to do the same tasks, to feed the animals, clean out barns and pens, keep that complex world alive. — May Sarton

These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Weariness of Men

My grandmother said when she was young
The grass was so wild and high
You couldn't see a man on horseback.

In the fields she made out
Three barns,
Dark and blown down from the weather
Like her husbands.

She remembers them in the dark,
Cursing the beasts,
And how they would leave the bed
In the morning,
The dead grass of their eyes
Stacked against her. — Frank Stanford

Americans who visit Tuscany or Umbria love the landscape: the silvery olive groves, the fields of sunflowers, the vineyards, the stone houses and barns. — Anthony Lewis

Collaboration is how most of our ancestors used to work and live, before machines came along and fragmented society. Time to plant the fields? Everybody pitched in and got it done. Harvesttime? The community raced to get the crops in before the rains came. Where were those crops stored? In barns built by teams of neighbors. In the cities, the same spirit applied. Anonymous craftsmen spent their lives building cathedrals that wouldn't be completed for generations. — Twyla Tharp

I wouldn't touch Chimbonda with a barn door — Alan Brazil

Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, 'Have no care for tomorrow. Don't worry about whether you're going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don't you think he'll do the same for you?' In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, 'Hell no!' Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering into barns. — Daniel Quinn

Some of the domestic evils of drunkenness are houses without windows, gardens without fences, fields without tillage, barns without roofs, children without clothing, principles, morals or manners. — Benjamin Franklin

I'll pour gasoline on everything Dad built and we can just leave the Barns behind. — Maggie Stiefvater

Prayer: Father God, I can't thank You enough for all that You have given me. I have so much to be thankful for. My barns are overflowing, and grain is spilling out over the top. Thank You. Thank You. Amen. Action: Take a risk and say "Thank You" in God's presence. Today's Wisdom: For three things I thank God every day of my life: thanks that he has vouchsafed me knowledge of his works; deep thanks that he has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to - a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song. - HELEN KELLER — Emilie Barnes

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed. — Wolcott Gibbs

He was, as I'd expected, sitting on the most precarious slope of the roof, knees drawn up, arms around them, his expression unreadable as he gazed out over the stonewalled pastures, the barns and byres and cottages, to the smoke gray and velvet green and misty blue of the forest. Not so far away the waters of the lake glinted silver. The breeze was quite chill, catching at my skirts as I came up the slates and settled myself down next to him. Finbar was utterly still. I did not need to look at him to read his mood, for I was tuned to this brother's mind like the bow to the string. — Juliet Marillier

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

The more the wicked abound, so much the more must we suffer with them in patience; for on the threshing floor few are the grains carried into the barns, but high are the piles of chaff burned with fire. — Pope Gregory I

Waves of despair rolled over him. He hadn't expected any of this: not the caved-in barns or crumbling fences, not the rotting wheat in the unplowed fields. It was as if the life had been punched right out of this place. — Christine Brodien-Jones

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? — Sojourner Truth

How many of us give up along the way because we'll never be the expert that so-and-so is? — Suzanne Falter-Barns

26"Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? — Phil Robertson

That is the way Connecticut goes, in a series of Marcelle waves; and Lock Willow Farm is just on the crest of one wave. The barns used to be across the road where they obstructed the view, but a kind flash of lightning came from heaven and burnt them down. — Jean Webster

Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutter's land, Guerrero' s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.
The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land. — John Steinbeck

The problem with having the name Wyeth is that immediately, when people hear the name, they all of a sudden see weathered barns in a field or something. — Jamie Wyeth

In my family we got up in the mornings around three o'clock and went out to the barns to bring the cows in and milk. In high school I milked about twenty cows every morning and about twenty in the afternoon when I got home. I have wonderful memories from those early days when my parent's influence was so strong. — Billy Graham

Worst fears: That God was not good. That the earth you stood upon shifted, and chasms yawned; that people, falling, clutched one another for help and none was forthcoming. That the basis of all things was evil. That the beauty of the evening, now settling in a yellow glow on the stone of The Cottage barns, the swallows dipping and soaring, a sudden host of butterflies in the long grasses in the foreground, was a lie; a deceitful sheen on which hopeful visions flitted momentarily, and that long, long ago evil had won against good, death over life... in the glow of the sun against the stone walls, as well as in the dancing of butterflies- that in this she had been mocked. — Fay Weldon

A border collie named Orson inspired me to buy a 110-acre farm with four barns and a sheep. That led to a series of books about Bedlam Farm and about dogs, rural life, lambing and herding sheep. — Jon Katz

It will not always be summer; build barns. — Hesiod

Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art. — Paul Di Filippo

I definitely straddled the line and hung out with high-school dirtbags. I'd tell my parents I was spending the night at my friend's but actually go to Philly and see a show at Starlight Ballroom. I would drink and do all that stuff, but I didn't set any barns on fire. — Daughn Gibson

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

Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn. — Don DeLillo

I do mostly Southern landscapes. I do beautiful old barns that are falling down, and beautiful trees reflecting in the water. My lovely wife Dorothy and I travel quite a bit, so I take pictures of different things that inspire me to come home, when I come home here in North Carolina, into my art studio and paint these things. — James Best

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn. — Sylvia Plath

When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. — Donald Hall

Poor worms, they hiss at me, whilst I at home Can be contented to applaud myself, ... with joy To see how plump my bags are and my barns. — Ben Jonson

Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached. — Leonard Cohen

When a performer goes out on a stage, they may feel the audience is judging every aspect of them and their life. In fact, all that poor audience is doing is waiting to be entertained a little. — Suzanne Falter-Barns

God, I'm tired."

"So sleep."

Gansey gave him a look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid to think that sleep was just a thing that could be so easily acquired.

Ronan said, "So let's drive to the Barns."

Gansey gave him another look. It was a look that asked how Ronan, of all people, could be so stupid as to think that Gansey would agree to something so illegal on so little sleep.

Ronan said, "So let's go get some orange juice."

Gansey considered. He looked to where his keys sat on the desk beside his mint plant. The clock beside it, a repellently ugly vintage number Gansey had found lying by a bin at the dump, said 3:32.

Gansey said, "Okay."

They went and got some orange juice. — Maggie Stiefvater

We're a young species; We're only 175,000 years old. On the evolutionary scale, life on this planet is 4 billion years old. We're 175,000 years old. So we're trying something out. Who wouldn't think it would be better to have the most stuff to take as much as you could? As we do that, we see why the moral prophets come along and say, don't even store into barns, right? It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We've seen we plunder nature. We plunder our neighbor. We create enemies because we're against each other. — Tom Shadyac

Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on the slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die. — Jenny Offill

The God-fearing, churchgoing farmers are all gone. Now they all have TVs on their roofs and orgies in their barns. The flux, Fly, man, the flux of time. If everything goes tits up, there's always the farm and the cows ... — Rawi Hage

Before them an indifferent house, standing low, and hemmed in by the barns and buildings of a farm-yard. — Jane Austen

THIS WOULD BE the first tricky part, they knew. They'd come in on the south side of the fairgrounds, between the swine and sheep barns. There would be cops all over the place - though fewer at night - and they wanted to get to the machinery grounds, where there were always a number of pickups parked. While they had the truck pass, it wouldn't stand a real check. If somebody called in the pass number, it'd show up as lost or stolen. — John Sandford

Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan. Strangely enough, Ronan belonged here, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father's world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn't known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him.
The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he'd been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him. — Maggie Stiefvater

Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard ... The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees ... He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought. — Bobbie Ann Mason

You know, sometimes you can't just take an armadillo, put it in the barn, light it on fire and expect it to make licorice. — Dana Carvey

He was jingling his keys in the pocket of his coat
one of those barn coats described as rugged and classic and four hundred dollar that were usually worn by people who spend more time in Land Rovers than barns. — Maggie Stiefvater

You cannot become a master until you actually take the leap, do the work, make several thousand mistakes, and live to tell about it. — Suzanne Falter-Barns

I've never understood the point of ecstasy. I think if I wanted to get dehydrated and jump about with a load of people I've never met before I could go to a Methodist barn dance. — Victoria Wood

The undulating terrain was cloaked in lush abundance, the vineyards like garlands of deep green and yellow, orchards and farms sprouting here and there, hillocks of dry golden grass crowned by beautiful sun-gilt houses, barns and silos. And overhead was the bluest sky she'd ever seen, as bright and hard polished as marble.
There was something about the landscape that caught at her emotions. It was both lush and intimidating, its beauty so abundant. Far from the bustle of the city, she was a complete stranger here, like Dorothy stepping out of her whirling house into the land of Oz. Farm stands overflowing with local produce marked the long driveways into farms with whimsical names- Almost Paradise, One Bad Apple, Toad Hollow. Boxes and bushels were displayed on long, weathered tables. Between the farms, brushy tangles of berries and towering old oak trees lined the roadway. — Susan Wiggs