Black Off Road Quotes & Sayings

The right road is rarely the easy road. And no war is ever fought without casualties."
"Is that what this is?" Sophie asked. "A war?"
"Unfortunately, yes. A quiet war to stop a louder one from raging. You may hate me for asking this of him, but this is the cold reality we all face. We cannot control the actions of others, nor stop them from disappointing us. We can only use the anger and pain to fuel us. To help us rise above. — Shannon Messenger

Everything had become song. The curve of the road beneath the clouds here, and there the strokes of dark earth, the green and the gray, the torn pink of clay and gravel under fingertips. The consonance was above all that of the muffled shadow and grass to the depths of sky, where a flutter of cheerful feathers quivered.

In these dreams there are also black walnut trees, and then a forest that opens in a breeze. Nothing. Nothing more than the obstinate sound of wind. — Deborah Heissler

She scuttled back from his approach and held up a hand. "No!"
Eversley stilled, his eyes widening at the words. "I beg your pardon?"
He was going to smell her. "Don't come any closer!"
"Why not?"
"It's not appropriate."
"What isn't?"
"You. Being here. So near. While I am abed."
One black brow rose. "I assure you, my lady, I've no intention of debauching you."
She had no doubt of that, considering her current situation, but she couldn't well tell him the truth. "Nevertheless, I must insist on the utmost propriety."
"Who do you think nursemaided you for the last day?"
Bollocks. He was right. He'd been close. He'd had to have noticed her odor. But it didn't mean he had to any longer. She straightened her shoulders, ignoring the twinge in the left. "My reputation, you see."
He blinked. "You were shot on the Great North Road while wearing stolen livery - — Sarah MacLean

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.

I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go. — Laurie Perez

By forty, is there anyone who hasn't had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? — Robin Black

The road was wet with rain, black and shiny like oilskin. The reflection of the street lamps wallowed like yellow jelly-fish. A bus was approaching - a bus to Piccadilly, a bus to the never-never land - a bus to death or glory.
I found neither. I found something which haunts me still.
The great bus swayed as it sped. The black street gleamed. Through the window a hundred faces fluttered by as though the leaves of a dark book were being flicked over. And I sat there, with a sixpenny ticket in my hand. What was I doing! Where was I going?
("Same Time, Same Place") — Mervyn Peake

Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure. — Simone De Beauvoir

As the children were sitting there eating pears, a girl came walking along the road from town. When she saw the children she stopped and asked, "Have you seen my papa go by?"
"M-m-m," said Pippi. "How did he look? Did he have blue eyes?"
"Yes," said the girl.
"Medium large, not too tall and not too short?"
"Yes," said the girl.
"Black hat and black shoes?"
"Yes, exactly," said the girl eagerly.
"No, that one we haven't seen," said Pippi decidedly. — Astrid Lindgren

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he'd spent the week on and knew so well he hardly need to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it. — Marilynne Robinson

We must admit that by approving multiculturalism in its current, misguided form, we are paving the road to White, Black, Indian and Asian genocide faster than the Sixth Mass Extinction. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

I think maybe bad things seem worse when people are alone. When they can turn that bad thought over and over in their head, polishing it like a stone, until it shines dark and black. Maybe the key to making things better is being with other people. Little by little, smiles and laughter and hugs can chip away at any dark stone, even if it's as big as a boulder to start. Then finally, bit by bit, it shrinks until it's no bigger than a pebble, something that even I could kick down the road. — Shannon Wiersbitzky

What cause then, to have me in hysterics of unknown kind?
Far-off the clandestine black where my road I cannot find,
What cause then, to submit me not here? — Mpho Leteng

Garraty thought that memories were like a line drawn in the dirt. The further back you went the scuffier and harder to see that line got. Until finally there was nothing but smooth sand and the black hole of nothingness that you came out of. The memories were in a way like the road. Here it was real and hard and tangible. But that early road, that nine in the morning road, was far back and meaningless. — Stephen King

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea. — Daphne Du Maurier

Whenever you leave cleared land, when you step from some place carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth, that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what's beneath. A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it. In the dead wood of another tree grow fungi black as devil's hooves. Overhead the canopy, tall pines that whistle and shudder and choke off light from their own lower branches. (from "Revival Road") — Louise Erdrich

And in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parent's house, where the porch light washed the night with honey. — Hanya Yanagihara

To what exactly had I felt entitled with Bill? There is an answer: Joy. Not happiness, which by that time seemed a fantasy one had to agree to give up in order to keep from going mad. By forty, is there anyone who hasn't had to recognize that happiness, as understood by youth, is illusory? That the best one can hope for is an absence of too many tragedies and that the road through the inevitable grief be, if not smooth, then steady? Daily life was a pale gray thing, it seemed, and to expect otherwise was to be a fool - at best. — Robin Black

It was getting dark by the time I went out, and nobody who knows the country will need to be told how black is the darkness of a November night under high laurel bushes and yew-trees. I walked into the heart of the shrubberies two or three times, not seeing a step before me, till I came out upon the broader carriage-road, where the trees opened a little, and there was a faint grey glimmer of sky visible, under which the great limes and elms stood darkling like ghosts; but it grew black again as I approached the corner where the ruins lay. ("The Open Door") — Mrs. Oliphant

And a ton came down on a coloured road,
And a ton came down on a gaol,
And a ton came down on a freckled girl,
And a ton on the black canal,
And a ton came down on a hospital,
And a ton on a manuscript,
And a ton shot up through the dome of a church,
And a ton roared down to the crypt.
And a ton danced over the Thames and filled
A thousand panes with stars,
And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shore
To the tune of a thousand scars. — Mervyn Peake

The sky was black and strewn with stars. I felt alone on the planet. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I didn't know where I was headed. I didn't know what to do with my life. I strained to look into my future, trying to picture the road ahead of me, searching for a glimpse of who I would become.
All I could see was the night sky and the stars above me. — Leslie Feinberg

A gurgling chuckle came from behind him; Jonas had heard it often enough to know that it signified something as close to laughter as the creature ever got. Yet you believe those things won't come if you serve your Lord? You know what they say about the road to Hell, Judas. — Kaine Andrews

He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned. Physically, he was built like a feather-weight, and he wore these thick, black Ronnie Barker glasses. He would say to me,'You might not have a good education, but good manners don't cost you anything.' And he practised what he preached: he'd always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road.
A good man. I really miss him. — Ozzy Osbourne

The road from white belt to black is long and arduous; most never reach the end. There are simply too many obstacles of daily life, and too much effort and attention required, for this to be something that the majority of practitioners achieve. This is why a black belt in Jiu Jitsu, especially from a reputable source, is the pinnacle of martial arts rank. It is valuable because of what must be traded for its achievement. — Chris Matakas

Close to the road a cow would stand knee-deep in the mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine in the starlight, and it would look at the black blur we were as we went whirling into the blazing corridor of light which we could never quite get into for it would be always splitting the dark just in front of us. The cow would stand there knee-deep in the mist and look at the black blur and the blaze and then, not turning his head, at the place where the black blur and blaze had been, with the remote, massive, unvindictive indifference of God-All-Mighty or Fate or me, if I were standing there knee-deep in the mist, and the blur and the blaze whizzed past and withered on off between the fields and the patches of woods. — Robert Penn Warren

On the final stretch of the road we passed three or four hammer-stones set on the verges to honour the thunder-god. Snorri checked for rune-stones around each, but found only a stray black pebble, river-smoothed and wide enough to cover his palm, bearing a single rune. Perhaps local children made off with the rest.
'Thuriaz.' He let it fall.
'Hmmm?'
'Thorns.' He shrugged. 'It means nothing. — Mark Lawrence

In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like heathen candles. — Cormac McCarthy

I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color. — Rick Bragg

I would spend my life on the road logging hundreds of thousands of miles and my story was always the same. . . man comes to town, detonates; man leaves town and drives off into the evening; fade to black. Just the way I like it. — Bruce Springsteen

I remembered a numeric code. He could have been using counters to help him write in it."
"Or," said Roshar, "your father will read the note, see one code when he expects another, and will send someone to the station, where there's a dead body."
"If so," Arin said, "then we're no worse off than we were before."
"Oh yes, we are. The general will know the letter's a ploy, and will do the opposite of what we want. He'll ignore the main road. He'll take back roads through the forests where our guns would be of dubious use and we wouldn't have the advantage of height. You know this."
Arin shut his mouth, glancing uneasily at Kestrel. Yes. He had known this, as had she. She felt worse for his effort to make her mistake seem smaller. He knew its true size.
Roshar leaned back in his creaking chair. His eyes slid from Arin to Kestrel, black as lacquer, the green lines around them fresh. "Can you tell me anything more cheerful than all this? — Marie Rutkoski

How bad will it hurt?" I ask suddenly as Cain pulls the car onto the road to head back to my house.
"How bad will what hurt?"
"The spankings, the torture, all the ways you want to punish me."
"I'm not a sadist, Evan. I don't get off on hurting women."
"So it won't hurt?"
"Oh, it will, but you'll love the way it hurts," he says, and as his words fall upon my ears in a harmony of exhilaration and foreboding, I think I'm beginning to understand. — Lilly Black

She could easily have remarked on the heavy skiing weather, or asked how he could even see the road, or complained about the town not getting its ploughs out
anything at all to show interest or pretend to show interest, the way people talk to make things a little more pleasant
but no, not Katri Kling. There she stood squinting through her cigarette smoke, her black hair like a mane shrouding her face as she leaned over the table. — Tove Jansson

The motorcycle's headlights cut through the darkness. Ahead the road was nothing but a black hole. She roared toward it. — B. J. Daniels

The two of them walked toward the road and the stone marker. Behind them, other cars were pulling out. A woman began screaming abruptly. Unconsciously, Garraty and McVries drew closer together. Neither of them looked back. Ahead of them was the road, wide and black. — Stephen King

There was something sly about his smile,
his eyes so black and sharp, his rufous hair. Something
that sent her early to their trysting place,
beneath the oak, beside the thornbush,
something that made her climb the tree and wait.
Climb a tree, and in her condition.
Her love arrived at dusk, skulking by owl-light,
carrying a bag,
from which he took a mattock, shovel, knife.
He worked with a will, beside the thornbush, beneath the oaken tree,
he whistled gently, and he sang, as he dug her grave,
that old song ...
shall I sing it for you, now, good folk? — Neil Gaiman

Tell them I'm like you," Gavriel said as they began to slow down.
Aidan laughed. "I think they can see you're not like us anymore."
"No," he said. "Tell them you know me. That I'm like you, one of you. From the party. Tell them."
"Wait," said Winter. "Wait. Is he saying he wasn't at the party? Did you meet him by the side of the road? Did you pick up a hitchhiker who coincidentally turned out to be a vampire?"
Gavriel fixed his gaze on Winter. "You know me," he said, and a chill went up Tana's spine. "You've known me since outside the rest stop, when I turned and the light hit my face."
"What does he mean?" Midnight asked.
"I don't know," Winter said in an odd voice. "Nothing. — Holly Black

There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states. — John Steinbeck

Everything started to move in slow motion. A vehicle was coming up the hill in the opposite direction, facing us but in its own lane. With vehicles parked on both sides of the road, this meant that there was just a narrow passage area for both vehicles to pass through. However, he had yet to reduce his speed, and now I knew which car he was going to hit. I was frozen stiff with fear in the front passenger seat, as I helplessly watched him slam into the back of a parked car. I was not wearing a seat belt, so upon impact my head crashed into the windshield. I was then slammed back into my seat, but with such force that everything went black. — Drexel Deal

two Florida Highway Patrol cars and a third, black car pulled up in front of the house, and several white men emerged, among them the deputies Campbell and Yates. "Where is the guy that was with you last night?" Yates asked Shepherd, and what began with that question led to the beatings he and Irvin endured on the deserted clay road outside of Groveland. "They must have beat us about a half hour," Shepherd told the lawyers, who were at once riveted and appalled by his testimony. After the beating, he and Irvin were shoved back into the patrol car. Irvin's shirt was drenched in blood, and when he reached his hand up to his head he felt "a big chunk knocked out of it." A patrolman told them to scoot up to the edge of the seat so their blood wouldn't drip onto the upholstery. — Gilbert King

Hayden McGregor glanced with contempt at the pitch-black road. "I do not fear the darkness. It fears me." He dismissed the approaching gloom with a narrowed stare. His steel gray eyes holding it back with a contemptuous regard. — Grace Willows

The universe dilated within him, above him. Something like joy stirred in Lancaster's being, a sublime ecstasy born of terror. His heart felt as if it might burst, might leap from his chest. His cheeks were wet. Drops of blood glittered on his bare arms, the backs of his hands, his thighs, his feet. Black as the blackest pearls come undone from a string, the droplets lifted from him, drifted from him like a slow motion comet tail, and floated toward the road, the fields. For the first time in an age he heard nothing but the night sounds of crickets, his own breath. His skull was quiet. — Laird Barron

Bakhchisaray was formerly the capital of the Crimean khanate and once an important crossroad of the Silk Road, where traders met from across the Black Sea, the steppes of Central Asia, Russia, and eastern Europe. — Tim Cope

I had more material on weather than anyone else, I guess, ... back when I was traveling a lot on the road as a standup comic, between airport security and the weather ... I just wanted to be prepared for sitting in the airport. — Lewis Black

Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn't afraid of him. I felt a hunter's exhilaration and a brotherly feeling. — Edward Hoagland

The dark swallowed him, but his dragging footsteps could be heard a long time after he had gone, footsteps along the road; and a car came by on the highway, and its lights showed the ragged man shuffling along the road, his head hanging down and his hands in the black coat pockets. — John Steinbeck

I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters? — Joe Carnahan

Then one day, from the window of a car (the destination of that journey is now forgotten), I saw a billboard by the side of the road. The sight could not have lasted very long; perhaps the car stopped for a moment, perhaps it slowed down long enough for me to see, large and looming shapes similar to those in my book, but shapes that I had never seen before. and yet, all of a sudden, I knew what they were; I heard them in my head, they metamorphosed from black lines and white spaces into a solid, sonourous, meangingful reality. I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing ourselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could turn bare lines into a living reality, I was all-poweful. i could read. — Alberto Manguel

We know the road of lack of recognition, of people telling us that we can't headline a movie because black women don't translate overseas, that every time we try to break the glass ceiling, people say no, people push back. And it's everything that people don't see out there. — Viola Davis

What do you think it is to be normal?'
Why in the world would you want to be?' she says.
I don't know. I guess that's the problem.'
I don't think normal is that great.'
But so many people choose it,' I reply.
I don't think that's it at all. I think most everyone is normal and some of us, for whatever reason, choose to reject that and wear ruby red slippers or old black hats.'
Well, why do we choose the hard road? — Patrick Jones