Quotes & Sayings About Fences And Life

No map to help us find the tranquil flat lands, clearings calm, fields without mean fences. Rolling down the other side of life our compass is the sureness of ourselves. Time may make us rugged, ragged round the edges, but know and understand that love is still the safest place to land. — Rod McKuen

I think the play offers (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans For instance, in 'Fences' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things- love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives. — August Wilson

The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer. — C.J. Cherryh

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you're overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can't understand them for the life of you, even though you've tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you're the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don't have to tell me your name. You don't have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you're finding life to be the one thing that's trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back. — Henry Rollins

My life is hard. No one would rob me of that. The clothes I am wearing came out of a knotted up black plastic trash bag from a resale shop downtown. And not the downtown where shiny cars wink at you in the sunlight. If a car winks at you in this area it's being driven by a person you would be best to avoid.
My side of downtown is crumbling and skirted by chain link fences.
Rocky Evans — Gwenn Wright

All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children ... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out. — Anne Sexton

The regime of control tightens inexorably in our schools, many of which now have video cameras, police patrols, chain-link fences, random unannounced locker searches, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, networks of informants, undercover police posing as students, and a comprehensive system of passes so that there is a record of each student's authorized whereabouts at all times. What a perfect preparation for life in a prison or a totalitarian society! — Charles Eisenstein

How often ... do we pass by a need, a life that could be changed with the smallest bit of effort? And it's not that we don't care but that we're driving so fast, all we see are the fence posts flashing by on the side of the highway?
Maybe the first step in changing the world is in slowing down and looking through the fences. — Lisa Wingate

The dream that I've been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It's not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.
There's no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.
When I'm dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I'm dreaming of is not dying. — Ben H. Winters

...just like that wild-growin' ivy you always see climbin' up old broken-down fences, Cory'd gone and wound himself in and around my lonely life. And I liked that there ivy, 'cause it held me together, made me feel so much stronger, all wrapped around me like that. But somehow I was just as scared of the ivy bein' there as I was at the thought of it fallin' loose and goin' away. — Mia Kerick

We stepped a little quicker, laughed a little louder and chatted over the fences a little longer. We gathered bouquets of wildflowers, dined on fresh strawberries and began to ride our bikes up and down the Third Line again. We ran up grassy hills and rolled back down through the young clover, feeling light and giddy, free from our heavy boots and coats. There were trilliums to pick for Mother and tadpoles to catch and keep in a jar. Spring had come at last to Bathurst Township and was she ever worth the wait! — Arlene Stafford-Wilson

People will insist on building high and wide barriers directly in your path, often with the intent of closing you in. If you treat these obstacles like fencing walls, they will prove mightily so. I choose to see them as grand towers meant to be scaled and conquered, providing an added victory as well as a great view of the journey ahead. — Richelle E. Goodrich

[Immigrants] who come from anywhere there is hunger, unemployment, oppression, and violence and who clandestinely cross the borders of countries that are prosperous, peaceful, and rich in opportunity, are certainly breaking the law, but they are exercising a natural and moral right which no legal norm or regulation should try to eliminate: the right to life, to survival, to escape the infernal existence they are condemned to by barbarous regimes entrenched on half the earth's surface. If ethical considerations had any pervasive effect at all, the women and men who brave the Straits of Gibraltar or the Florida Keys or the electric fences of Tijuana or the docks of Marseilles in search of work, freedom, and a future should be received with open arms. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

We spend our life building higher fences and stronger locks, when the gravest dangers are already inside — Richard Paul Evans

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed. — Kim Edwards

This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water. My dear thirteen-year-old daughter Lily, having become a pretty adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary steeplechase. — Kurt Vonnegut

The highway looked different to him now, as they drove on. In theory it was the same stretch of tarmac, bounded by the same traffic paraphernalia and flimsy metal fences, but it had been transformed by their own intent. It was no longer a straight line to an airport, it was a mysterious hinterland of shadowy detours and hidey-holes. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. Of course, everybody on earth had the power to reshape reality. It was one of the things Peter and Beatrice talked about a lot. The challenge of getting people to grasp that life was only as grim and confining as you perceived it to be. The challenge of getting people to see that the immutable facts of existence were not so immutable after all. The challenge of finding a simpler word for immutable than immutable. — Michel Faber

Young people especially sometimes feel that the standards of the Lord are like fences and chains, blocking them from those activities that seem most enjoyable in life. — Ezra Taft Benson

Love is a condition. There are many circumstances in life that can affect this condition. So it falls on you and I to insulate love from the things that would cause it harm. We, the protectors of love, are responsible if the condition of our love becomes critical. Yes, broken fences can be mended, but love on life support should be left to die. So our earthly desire should be to strengthen the condition of love daily. — Gregory C. Warner

He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow. — John Steinbeck

When there is a total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has a quite different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end. — Allan W. Anderson

We have been happily borne - or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way - down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
That's all there is to it! You are arrested! — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All my life I have been trained by that siren. Before I could walk I knew the siren meant death. It meant somehow the fences had been breached and the Unconsecrated were shuffling among us. It meant grab weapons, move to the platforms and pull up the ladders - even if it necessitated leaving the living behind.
Growing up, my mother used to tell me about how in the beginning, when her own great-great-great-grandmother was a child, that siren would wail almost constantly as the village was bombarded with the Unconsecrated. But then the fences has been fortified, the Guardians had formed and time had passed with the Unconsecrated dwindling to the point that I couldn't remember a time in the past few years when that siren had wailed and it had not been a drill. I know that in my life there have been breaches but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose. I can fear the Unconsecrated well enough without them. — Carrie Ryan

A farmer's work in many ways is like setting a stage. In theater, stage managers lay out furniture and props, set up lights, and clean to get a set ready for actors to take over and create a show. Farmers plow, fertilize, set up irrigation systems and fences, and otherwise prep the stage of their farms for the real actors -- the sun and the life within the seeds and animals -- to create the show. — Ben Hartman

There were a lot of fences and walls existing in my life, literally and figuratively, and that was really not indicative of the kind of person that I'd always been. So, when I moved back to Seattle, the first thing I said was, "I will never live in fear again." — Ben Gibbard

When I was growing up, people didn't tell me to slow down, to do less, to be calmer, or to practice being content.
In fact, people told me to do the opposite: be involved, challenge myself, stay busy, push through the pain, chase after my goals, swing for the fences, do more, make more, go all out.
But you wanna know something? When it comes to dealing with the hard stuff in life, it's the slowing down and remembering the basics that are most important. Also, all of those other words sound exhausting. — Chad Eastham

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life. — Katherine Mansfield

Whenever learners or those beyond learning awaken the mind, for the first time they plant one buddha-nature. Working with the four elements and five clusters, if they practice sincerely they attain enlightenment. Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment. This is because the four elements and five clusters and plants, trees, fences and walls are fellow students; because they are of the same essence, because they are the same mind and the same life, because they are the same body and the same mechanism. — Dogen

William the Testy. On the contrary, he conceived that the true wisdom of legislation consisted in the multiplicity of laws. He accordingly had great punishments for great crimes, and little punishments for little offences. By degrees the whole surface of society was cut up by ditches and fences, and quickset hedges of the law, and even the sequestered paths of private life so beset by petty rules and ordinances, too numerous to be remembered, that one could scarce walk at large without the risk of letting off a spring-gun or falling into a man-trap. In a little while the blessings of innumerable laws became apparent; a class of men arose to expound and confound them. Petty courts were instituted to take cognizance of petty offences, pettifoggers began to abound, and the community was soon set together by the ears. — Washington Irving

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people. — George Takei

There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the "white" from the "black," even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range. — Ta-Nehisi Coates