Beaten Track Quotes & Sayings

We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries. — Eugene Delacroix

I've made it my mission to discover that which is off the beaten track. Somewhere in the undergrowth of the impossible. — Fennel Hudson

When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person ...
What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking
whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.
And what good is all this to Black people? — Octavia E. Butler

If I do go to the beach there have to be certain rules: it can't be a pebbly beach, there has to be some shade and there has to be a beach bar. I don't want to go off the beaten track. — Jenny Eclair

It's important to have people who will say to you that you're really off the beaten track. — Liz Phair

Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do, you will be certain to find something you have never seen before. — Alexander Graham Bell

Born in a generation that thinks cynical and disenchanted is cool,
sometimes I'm a little off the beaten track. — Karen Marie Moning

I had a brilliant trip to Mexico with my friend Ellie during my gap year. We thought we were being really cool and going off the beaten track while all our friends went to Thailand and Australia. The first beachside bar we walked into - there were two girls from my sixth form in there. — Emily Berrington

Sixties folk rock was my original muse and the folk audience-people who listen to music off the beaten track-fostered my career. I definitely don't want to abandon the genre but I also need to make sure I'm Dar Williams first. — Dar Williams

What tender and devoted mother wouldn't be dismayed and ill with terror at her son's or daughter's stepping even one hair's breath off the beaten track. No, better let him be happy and live in comfort without originality, is what every mother thinks when she rocks the cradle. The only person among us who can fail to reach the general's rank is the original man - in other words, the man who won't be quiet. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre. — Charlotte Bronte

In many cases, ignorance is a good thing : the mind retains its freedom of investigation and does not stray along roads that lead nowhither, suggested by one's reading. I have experienced this once again ... Yes, ignorance can have its advantages; the new is found far from the beaten track. — Jean-Henri Fabre

I've been lucky to have made a number of travel programmes with the BBC, the object being to see places off the beaten track. As a result, I've often had a guide who's been able to show me things that you wouldn't see with a tour group. — Michael Palin

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track. — Emile Zola

Or this: - that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I don't give a rat's warty ass she's dead. It only means she's a dead cunt."
"That's a strong opinion."
"And the only kind worth having. I threatened to shove a stick up her twat and light it on fire just yesterday. Maybe the day before. I lose track as there was rarely a day that went by she didn't make me want to strangle her with my bare hands after I'd beaten her in the face with a rusty shovel. — J.D. Robb

By the very nature of his art, which depends on invention and innovation, a story teller must depart from the beaten track and, having done so, occasionally startle and disagree with some of his associates. Healthy disagreement we must have. — Preston Sturges

The Long Hill
I must have passed the crest a while ago
And now I am going down
Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,
But the brambles were always grabbing at the hem of my gown.
All the morning I thought how proud I should be
To stand there straight as a queen,
Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me
But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.
It was nearly level along the beaten track
And the brambles caught in my gown
But it's no use now to think of turning back,
The rest of the way will be only going down. — Sara Teasdale

I really love travelling to places where I get to learn something new about a new group of people or a new place. Learn some history, contemplate some business ideas, and sort of get off the beaten track a little bit. — Leila Janah

Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen. — W. Somerset Maugham

Oppenheimer's theorizing was so startlingly original - so far in advance of the corroborating observations and so far off the beaten track of astrophysical research - that his colleagues' ignorance cost him the recognition he deserved. — Algis Valiunas

When it came to spankings, my dad never used a belt. One time he grabbed a piece of my Hot Wheels race car track. In my mind I'm thinking, 'Great, now I'm being beaten with my own toys ... ' Thank God I didn't get that wood burning set I wanted. — Scott Wood

I don't think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things,' he said gravely. He hesitated. 'It's very difficult to put into words. The moment you try you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself: "Who am I that I should bother myself about this, that, and the other? Perhaps it's only because I'm a conceited prig. Wouldn't it be better to follow the beaten track and let what's coming to you come?" And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun,and he's lying dead; it's all so cruel and meaningless. It's hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there's any sense to it or whether it's all a tragic blunder of blind fate. — W. Somerset Maugham

I'd like to go on a hardcore safari in Africa, something off the beaten track with anti-poaching people and camping out in the savannah. — Dominic Monaghan

What is to be done with millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I live a reasonably simple life, off the beaten track. — George Lucas

True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it. — Mahatma Gandhi

Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought. — Alexander Graham Bell

What appalled Schiller about these libraries was that they featured nothing off the beaten track: no tattered paperbacks; no evidence of distinctive personal interests; no tokens of long intellectual detours passionately explored. — Brian Morton

When given the chance to see China off the beaten track, definitely take it. — Larry Herzberg

It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables, and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. — Ouida

Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer. — Theodore William Richards

The next day the German police picked them up, loaded them onto an armored truck and took them back to Colditz. Alexander was badly beaten by the German guards and taken to solitary, where he spent so long he lost track of time. With Pasha's death came the death of faith. Release me, Tatiana, release me, forgive me, forget me, let me forget you. I want to be free of you, free of your face, free of your freedom, free of your fire, free, free, free. The flight across the ocean was over, and with it all the warmth of his imagination. A numbness encroached on him, freezing him from the heart out, the anesthetic of despair creeping its tentacles over his ten-dons and his arteries, over his nerves and his veins until he was stiff inside and bereft of hope and bereft of Tatiana. Finally. But not quite. — Paullina Simons

He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. — Henry David Thoreau

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. — Henry David Thoreau