Quotes & Sayings About Farmhouse

AFTER I DELIVERED VELVET BACK to the farmhouse that night, I entered the condo and walked over to my Minotauromachia. And as I stood before it, it was crystal clear to me that the terrible monster was doomed in the face of the powerful little girl. — Wally Lamb

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. — Dylan Thomas

I pray like a robber asking alms at the door of a farmhouse to which he is ready to set fire. — Leon Bloy

When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape. — Kate Atkinson

We gazed back over the fields to the farmhouse. Its white walls, faded wooden shutters and terra-cotta tiled roof peeped sleepily over the deep green domes of the orange trees, while the mountains looked benignly on - secure, solid and serene. Without exchanging a word, we both knew that this was going to be our new home. — Peter Kerr

When it comes to making decisions, I will come down on the side of Nebraska every time. If I have to choose between the White House and the farmhouse, I choose the farmhouse. — Ben Nelson

It was like hundreds of roads he'd driven over - no different - a stretch of tar, lusterless, scaley, humping toward the center. On both sides were telephone poles, tilted this way and that, up a little, down...

Billboards - down farther an increasing clutter of them. Some road signs. A tottering barn in a waste field, the Mail Pouch ad half weathered away. Other fields. A large wood - almost leafless now - the bare branches netting darkly against the sky. Then down, where the road curved away, a big white farmhouse, trees on the lawn, neat fences - and above it all, way up, a television aerial, struck by the sun, shooting out bars of glare like neon. ("Thompson") — George A. Zorn

All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses - fix your bayonets boys - gentlemen, synchronize your watches - in ten seconds time the barrage starts, ... a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years. — Peter Ustinov

Where's Lucy?" I asked the others.
"At the farmhouse," Nicholas said with grim satisfaction.
"How'd you manage that?"
"She's in a closet." Solange rolled her eyes.
I stared at Nicholas. "You locked your girlfriend in a closet? Smooth."
"She's going to eviscerate him," Quinn said cheerfully. — Alyxandra Harvey

The farmhouse was ample in size and very well kept, the presence of two separate clotheslines and dozens of garments in various sizes the only outward indication that a family of seven lived inside. A smaller home situated slightly to the right was where Esther's grandparents lived. Claire knew from their many conversations that elderly members of the community did not go into nursing homes. Rather, they turned the family farm over to their children and assisted in ways their increased age allowed. — Laura Bradford

US special forces are closing in on Saddam Hussain but they're afraid to go in. He's hiding out in Tony Martin's farmhouse. — Patrick Kielty

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture - its only value to provide shade for the livestock - but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor - especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer's day - could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic. — Graham Swift

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years. — Larry McMurtry

On the farm, in our first-floor bedroom, my sister and I were sheltered in the essence of normal. We were not hidden, but unseen. The orange farmhouse was our castle, our kingdom the fields around, and the shallow creek that bisected our property the sea we crossed to find adventure. — Lori Lansens

A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief. — Joel Salatin

Some young Hollywood starlets remind me of my grandmother's old farmhouse
all painted up nice on the front side, a big swing on the backside, and nothing whatsoever in the attic. — Bette Davis

Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE'S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, "I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?"
"Prevail on Dale," I repeated to Swede.
"To make a sale," she added.
"And if we fail, we'll whale on Dale
"
"Till he needs braille!"
"Will you guys desist?" Dad asked. — Leif Enger

I have a 60-acre farm in North Carolina, and I have a tractor and a farmhouse. As soon as I groom the land, I want to put cabins around and have a place where people can write and hang out. It'll be either that or an all-black nudist colony. — Zach Galifianakis

She lived upstairs in the farmhouse; guests and visitors occupied the B&B rooms downstairs. She kept crates tucked all over the house, in which herding dogs-border collies and shepherds-slept while waiting to work, exercise, or play.

These working dogs, I'd come to learn, led lives very different from my dogs'. Carolyn let them out several times a day to exercise and eliminate, but generally, they were out of crates only to train or herd sheep. While they were out, Carolyn tossed a cup of kibble into their crates for them to eat when they returned. I asked her once if she left the lights on for the dogs when she went out, and she looked at me curiously. "Why? They don't read...

Still, they were everywhere. If you bumped into a sofa it might growl or thump. Some of her crew were puppies; some were strange rescue dogs. — Jon Katz

So what were you [Sonea] and Dorrien discussing before?' Akkarin asked.
She turned to regard him. 'Discussing?'
'Outside the farmhouse when I was buying the food.'
'Oh. Then. Nothing.'
He smiled and nodded. 'Nothing. Amazing subject, that one. Produces such fascinating reactions in people. — Trudi Canavan

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. — John Updike

I write in an old-school paneled study in the middle of a large farmhouse in rural Iowa. I have pine floors, a big cherry desk, and a small window. The room is cluttered with papers and books and gifts from friends. — Dean Bakopoulos

I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin'. I came up in a time when men were men. — Joe Frazier

I am not a cowboy with a ranch and cattle, but I have this stable with some of the most beautiful horses in the world. I am not a farmer with a hundred-year-old farmhouse and acres of crops, but I have an island with acres of fertile land. I am not a mechanic with grease under my fingernails, but I know how to fix a flat tire. I am not your everyday average guy. I do not know if I can be one. But if you marry me, I will do my best to make your life as ordinary as you'd like. — Melissa McClone

To me there is nothing more fraught with mystery & terror than a remote Massachusetts farmhouse against a lonely hill. Where else could an outbreak like the Salem witchcraft have occurred? — H.P. Lovecraft

Beyond the field my eyes studied a long wall of pine trees, a windbreak of sorts that stretched from the road back toward an old farmhouse and an older barn surrounded by low brush. Through the binoculars, I could just make out the top of Carney's Impala parked in the side yard by the house. From a long way off you could see that the white house paint was blistered or gone to bare clapboard. The roof of the barn looked like it had been hit by lightning at some point. There was a charred, gaping hole on one corner. The whole structure sagged left. — James Patterson

In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable gray of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet"-and the light shineth in the darkness. — Viktor E. Frankl

The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking that things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.) — Stella Gibbons

But this was no ordinary clothesline. It had been strung right through the trees, on up to the porch of Frost's cabin--and at the top end was tied a bell. When someone down below tugged hard, the bell rang right outside the cabin. This was a signal to Frost that it would be worth his while to walk on down the hill. But as Frost got well into his seventies, he sometimes did not hear the bell. Gillie did, though. At its ting-a-ling, the dog would stretch and get to his feet, then go and find his master. Gillie would tug gently at the toe of Frost's sneaker. When Frost got the dog's signal, he would start down to the white farmhouse. — Doris Faber

Evie hadn't always felt that way. For a year after James had died, she'd cupped his half-dollar pendant between her pressed palms and prayed fervently for a miracle, for a telegram that would say GOOD NEWS! IT WAS A TERRIBLE MISTAKE, AND PRIVATE JAMES XAVIER O'NEILL HAS BEEN FOUND, SAFE, IN A FARMHOUSE IN FRANCE. But no such telegram ever arrived, and whatever possible faith might have bloomed in Evie withered and died. Now she saw it as just another advertisement for a life that belonged to a previous generation and held no meaning for hers. — Libba Bray

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching? The highway's edges may not be postcard perfect. But for a century, children's early understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat: the empty farmhouse at the edge of the subdivision; the variety of architecture, here and there; the woods and fields and water beyond the seamy edges
all that was and still is available to the eye. This was the landscape that we watched as children. It was our drive-by movie. — Richard Louv

This is an old house. Among the oldest in the area, a white clapboard former farmhouse built in 1748. Fart on the porch and it rattles a floor board in the attic. -Dice (Swoon) — Nina Malkin

(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods. — Truman Capote

I'm the seventh child of George and Leona Douglas, and I don't ever remember a time when my father didn't work two jobs. When my mother was going to the grocery, or going to Mass, or trying to take care of seven kids in a run-down farmhouse. — Michael Keaton

I absolutely love Ireland. It's one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and I have strong ties here. Both my grandmothers are from Ireland, and I have spent every summer in Bantry since my father, who is an artist, had the romantic idea 20 years ago to buy an old farmhouse on the west coast and renovate it. — Emily Ratajkowski

When you're the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all. It's a small thing, you might think; and maybe it depends upon your temperament; maybe for some people it's a small thing. But for me, in that cul-de-sac outside Aunt Baby's, with my father and aunt done dissecting death and shuffling off to bed behind the crimson farmhouse door, preparing for morning mass as blameless as lambs and as lifeless as the slaughtered - I felt forsaken by hope. I felt I'd been seen, and seen clearly, and discarded, dropped back into the undiscriminated pile like a shell upon the shore. — Claire Messud

The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had painted a mandala on the wall just inside the door with fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through, again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall. — Marjorie Hudson

309Knee-high by the Fourth of July. So it must be June. Every farmhouse in its cloud of trees. There is a way trees stir before a rain, as if they already felt the heaviness. It all just went on and on, the United States of America. It was so easy to forget that most of the world was cornfields. — Marilynne Robinson

Fact: Somewhere around 2 a.m. on January 3, 1985, a person or persons killed three members of the Day family in their farmhouse in Kinnakee, Kansas. The deceased include Michelle Day, age ten; Debby Day, age nine; and the family matriarch, Patty Day, age thirty-two. Michelle Day was strangled; Debby Day died of axe wounds, Patty Day of two shotgun wounds, axe wounds, and deep cuts from a Bowie hunting knife. — Gillian Flynn

Until I had turned the car around and was on my way back up the lane. I looked back at the farmhouse in my rearview mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky above it, like a pair — Neil Gaiman

Everything already in place: the retired hit man currently sleeping with Maura; his supernatural-obsessed ex-boss currently sleeping in Boston; the creepy entity buried in rocks beneath the ley line; the unfamiliar creatures crawling out of a cave mouth behind an abandoned farmhouse; the ley line's growing power; the magical sentient forest on the ley line; one boy's bargain with the magical forest; one boy's ability to dream things to life; one dead boy who refused to be laid to rest; one girl who supernaturally amplified 90 percent of the aforementioned list. — Maggie Stiefvater

Standing at the point where these photographs were taken, you're immersed in the most unbelievable quiet. It's like being at the bottom of the sea except instead of a rusted shipwreck there's an ancient farmhouse. Even the thoughts in my head sounded loud, and sometimes I found my heart beating hard for no reason except as a reaction against the silence. — Tom Rob Smith

I kept thinking of an old Robert Mitchum cowboy movie where he goes back to see the farmhouse where he was born and finds the house falling apart and an old man living in it by himself. "Lonely place," Robert Mitchum says. The old man says, "Nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it's private. That's why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain't private." That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don't have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you gave up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you're just screwed. — Rob Sheffield

She just wanted to go home. And not home to the farmhouse where all the ghosts lived, but home to Tai, and to an earlier time, when raising Eli was a no-brainer. Easy. As easy as raising an infant. — Jennifer Scott

tree in bloom, a white farmhouse - potted basil in the kitchen — Nancy Reisman

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse. — Andre Leon Talley

In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives - a "harem," Locke called it - six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and "had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays." (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolitionist movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.) — Matthew Goodman

And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells. — Marisha Pessl

Given that media has become fast-paced, readers now want books that show the action and don't just tell you what is happening. Modern readers don't want three pages of descriptions of a farmhouse. They want to hear the door's creak quiet the chirping of crickets out in the cornfield, they want to feel the cool air drift through the house, then they want to see the shadow of a man, gun drawn, standing over the bed of his disloyal lover. — Jennifer Arnett

They enrolled me in a group for troubled kids. We would meet each week in an old farmhouse owned by the university and talk about our problems getting along ... They didn't teach me to get along, but I did learn that there were plenty of other kids who couldn't get along any better than me. That in itself was encouraging. I realized that I was not the bottom of the barrel. Or if I was, the bottom was roomy because there were a lot of us down there. — John Elder Robison

There's a fortune of Authentic Vintage French Linen Tea Towels on every clothes line. These are the exact kind of linens that specialty shops in America sell for top dollar to affluent customers who pay dearly to add that touch of French Farmhouse Fabulousness to their million-dollar McMansions.


Flaubert is so wrong.

Even wash day in Normandy is achingly chic. — Vivian Swift

Positive. In other news, Marcie's throwing a Halloween party here at the farmhouse."
Patch smiled. "Grey - Millar family drama?"
"The theme is famous couples from history. Could she be any less original? Worse, she's roped my mom into this. They went shopping for decorations today. For three whole hours. It's like they're suddenly best friends." I picked up another apple slice and made a face at it. "Marcie is ruining everything. I wanted Scott to go with Vee, but Marcie already convinced him to go with her." Patch's smile widened.
I aimed my best sulky look at him. "This isn't funny. Marcie is destroying my life. Whose side are you on anyway?"
Patch raised his hands in surrender. "I'm staying out of this. — Becca Fitzpatrick

I once had a leather jacket that got ruined in the rain. Why does moisture ruin leather? Aren't cows outside a lot of the time? When it's raining, do cows go up to the farmhouse, "Let us in! We're all wearing leather! Open the door! We're going to ruin the whole outfit here!" — Jerry Seinfeld

But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world. The earth itself shouldn't be able to abide it. — Ron Rash

...Violet followed her friend into the massive kitchen with its Restoration Hardware fixture and faux-weathered, farmhouse-style cabinets. Its perplexed Violet, the way people tried to make the insides of new homes look old. — Susan Gloss

As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. — Julie Gregory

The sun was already behind the western hills, and the light was failing. Two of Maggot's sons and his three daughters came in, and a generous supper was laid on the large table. The kitchen was lit with candles and the fire was mended. Mrs. Maggot bustled in and out. One or two other hobbits belonging to the farm-household came in. In a short while fourteen sat down to eat. There was beer in plenty, and a mighty dish of mushrooms and bacon, besides much other solid farmhouse fare. The — J.R.R. Tolkien

See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead ... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,
and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia. — Henry David Thoreau

We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds. — Jane Hamilton

I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side. — Meghan Daum

My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard ... I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it ... I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered. — Claude Monet

Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is. In the north I have eaten my lunch in pastures rank with ferns and junipers, all under fair skies with a wind blowing. — E.B. White

I wore a white tank and jeans, shooting for "sexy casual." Hoping it wasn't "left farmhouse, got lost. — Kathy Reichs

When the hour of departure drew near, the maternal anxiety of Mrs Morland will be naturally supposed to be severe ... Cautions against the violence of such nobleman and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farmhouse, must, at such a moment, relieve the fullness of her heart ... But Mrs Morland knew so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their general mischievousness, and was wholly unsuspicious of danger to her daughter from their machinations. — Jane Austen

The Drake farmhouse was like the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo when feeding time was late.
You know, if all the chimpanzees were undead.
And insane. — Alyxandra Harvey

Other priests, he knew, found an intense pleasure in the raw, salty dialect of peasant conversation. They picked up pearls of wisdom and experience over a farmhouse table or a cup of wine in a workingman's kitchen. They talked with equal familiarity to the rough-tongued whores of Trastevere and the polished signori of Parioli. They enjoyed the ribald humor of the fish market as much as the wit of a Cardinal's dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves. — Morris L. West

It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a man. And I hear that our intellectuals have a longing for the land and want to acquire farms. But it all comes down to the six feet of land. To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life
it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit. — Anton Chekhov

Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. — Henry David Thoreau

How funny is it that so many professors labeled Tea Partiers as terrorists, while kissing the asses of real, bona fide terrorists? It's not funny, really. But it's the result of a simple equation: One is cool, and the other isn't. Own a gun and keep it by your bed in your remote farmhouse? You're a redneck. Purchase guns that end up killing a judge? Priceless. As long as you cling to cool, progressive beliefs that deem America evil, whatever you do is cool. And if you do it under a big fuzzy 'fro? Even cooler. Hell, if you 'fro is big enough, you could nuke an orphanage and still get tenure. — Greg Gutfeld

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future. — Paul Muldoon

Every day at about four o'clock, I would go up to a farmhouse - or whatever kind of house was around - and knock on the door and say, "Hi, I'm biking across Canada, and I'm wondering if I could pitch my tent on your land." And sometimes people slammed the door in my face, but the vast majority of the time they said, "Of course," and then they said, "Come for dinner," and then they packed me food the next day and fed me breakfast and sometimes they got out the bottle of wine they'd been saving for a special occasion. — Pam Houston

We stand and gaze. The farmhouse, the remnants of the wood, the heights, the trenches on the sky yonder, - it had been a terrible world and life a burden. Now it is over and will stay behind here; when we set out, it will drop behind us, step by step, and in an hour be gone as if it had never been. - Who can realize it? — Erich Maria Remarque

Many criminologists believe that the source of the state's pacifying effect isn't just its brute coercive power but the trust it commands among the populace. After all, no state can post an informant in every pub and farmhouse to monitor breaches of the law, and those that try are totalitarian dictatorships that rule by fear, not civilized societies where people coexist through self-control and empathy. A Leviathan can civilize a society only when the citizens feel that its laws, law enforcement, and other social arrangements are legitimate, so that they don't fall back on their worst impulses as soon as Leviathan's back is turned. — Steven Pinker

This music ebbs and flows, irregular, sad. It reminds me, weirdly, of watching the ocean during a bad storm, the lashing, crashing waves and the spray of sea foam against the docks; the way it takes your breath away, the power and the hugeness of it.
That's exactly what happens as I listen to the music, as I come up over the final crest of hill, and the half-ruined barn and collapsing farmhouse fan out in front of me, just as the music swells, a wave about to break: The breath leaves my body all at once, and I'm struck dumb by the beauty of it. For a second it seems to me like I really am looking down at the ocean - a sea of people, writhing and dancing in the light spilling down from the barn like shadows twisting up around a flame. — Lauren Oliver

I want out of each and every one of you is a hard target search, of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. — Tommy Lee Jones

Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you
catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an
instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But
if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just
barely for a few moments. — Haruki Murakami

The storm was resting. It didn't want to be, but it was. It had spent a fortnight understudying a famous anticyclone over the Circle Sea, turning up every day, hanging around in the cold front, grateful for a chance to uproot the occasional tree or whirl a farmhouse to any available emerald city of its choice. But the big break in the weather had never come. — Terry Pratchett

On my first evening in the back country, I skipped down the porch steps of the farmhouse-leaving my father inside and the radio playing and my small suitcase decorated with neon flower stickers unpacked-and wandered towards the upside-down school bus I'd spied from an upstairs window. — Mitch Cullin

I left New York in 2009 when I fell in love with someone who had a farmhouse in New Hampshire ... Portland, Maine, felt like the inevitable place for us. — Kate Christensen

When the ramp leveled off, he was met by a scarred farmhouse table surrounded by a mishmash of twenty chairs, scattered at all angles as if a seated crowd had sprinted into the night. Past the dozens of half-finished wine bottles. Past the coffee cup ashtrays. Past dried-out lime wedges, empty bottles of stronger spirits, and fruit-flyed glasses. Past the residue of drugs, the residue of nights. Past it all was the wonder of what could be hidden if this much was left to be found. — Will Chancellor

A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side. — John Darnielle

Everyone knew that Jim's creative coup d'etat came from a suggestion from his great-uncle Max, who lived on a farm in Iowa. According to Jim [Jackers], his uncle had Mexicans running the farm while his days were spent in the farmhouse basement reconstructing a real train car from scratch, which was the only thing he had shown any interest in since the passing of his wife. He traveled to old train yards collecting the parts. When someone asked him at a family function why we was doing it, his answer was so that no one could remove the train car from the basement after he died. When it was pointed out to him that the boxcar could be removed by dismantling it, reversing the process by which he had constructed it, Jim's great uncle replied that no Jackers alive was willing to work that hard at anything. — Joshua Ferris

Lucy said, her nose pressed to the window. "Misunderstanding. No big deal."
Solange quirked a half smile. "You might try complete sentences, Lucy."
"Can't. Busy."
I was curious despite myself. "What are you doing?"
"Drooling," Solange explained fondly.
"I totally am," Lucy admitted, unrepentant. "Just look at them."
Lucy moved over to give me space. She was watching five of the seven Drake boys repairing the outside wall of the farmhouse, under our window. — Alyxandra Harvey

Maybe Jethro, Claire, and I can live together in harmony. Maybe she can be my sister wife. Yes. That was the answer. She could have her pretty farmhouse and custody of Jethro on Sundays. I could have him the rest of the week. And if she touched him, I would claw her eyes out. Perfect. — Penny Reid

Oh. Yes. There would be someone, wouldn't there? Of course there would be a person. Ask at the farmhouse did not mean that you addressed your questions to the front porch. She had not thought it through. — T. Kingfisher

To look out of a car in Scania, you see a painting on the horizontal - one windmill, one tiny farmhouse, acres of beet or grass. — Kenneth Branagh

Why did you come back here, then? Why risk it? Couldn't you find a place where you wouldn't have any other Packs to deal with?"
He cupped my face in his hands, his thumb gently brushing a snowflake from my eyelashes.
"You know why I came back."
My heart started beating against my ribcage as if it was trying to break free. "The fried chicken they serve at The Farmhouse?"
"I came back for you, Scout."
I had to say something. Something clever. Something dazzling. Something to make this moment perfect.
"I hope the snow sticks. — Tammy Blackwell

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. — Bram Stoker

My wife Ann and I had been digging during the day, transplanting lilies from the front of this abandoned farmhouse back down the road to where we live. We finished. She was tired and laid in the grass. I took a picture. The house is now gone. The walnut trees have been bulldozed and burned. I saw this picture the other day for the first time in years and realized how photographing life within a hundred yards of my front porch had helped me focus on everything I cared about. — Larry Towell

Good luck, Oretsev. Find the firebird, and when this is over, I'll see you well rewarded. A farmhouse in Udova. A dacha near the city. Whatever you want."
"I don't need any of that. Just ... " He dropped Nikolai's hand and looked away. "Deserve her. — Leigh Bardugo

This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome - there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. — Edward Abbey

Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: 'Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.' Explain your emotion. — Walker Percy

A traveling salesman was driving in the country when his car broke down. He hiked several miles to a farmhouse and asked the farmer if there was a place he could stay overnight. "Sure," said the farmer, "My wife died several years ago, and my two daughters are twenty-one and twenty-three, but they're off to college, and I'm all by myself, so I have lots of room to put you up."
Hearing this, the salesman turned around and started walking back toward the highway.
The farmer called after him, "Didn't you hear what I said? I have lots of room."
"I heard you," said the salesman, "but I think I'm in the wrong joke. — Thomas Cathcart

You look at the crime and you look at the criminal. If it's a dope dealer who guns down an undercover narcotics officer, then he gets the gas. If it's a drifter who rapes a three-year-old girl, drowns her by holding her little head in a mudhole, then throws her body off a bridge, then you take his life and thank god he's gone. If it's an escaped convict who breaks into a farmhouse late at night and beats and tortures an elderly couple before burning them with their house, then you strap him in a chair, hook up a few wires, pray for his soul, and pull the switch. And if it's two dopeheads who gang-rape a ten-year-old girl and kick her with pointed-toe cowboy boots until her jaws break, then you happily, merrily, thankfully, gleefully lock them in a gas chamber and listen to them squeal. It's very simple. Their crimes were barbaric. Death is too good for them, much too good. — John Grisham