Quotes & Sayings About Front Porch

American democracy is the inalienable right to sit on your front porch, in your pyjamas, drinking a can of beer and shouting out 'Where else is this possible?' Which doesn't seem to me to be freedom, really. — Peter Ustinov

Three generations of women out on the front porch, four counting little Emily, trying to put words around a past and a future that could never be explained. — Lalita Tademy

Well, look who's on my front porch," he said, speaking Empire with this odd hissing accent. "A murderer and a cross-dressing pirate."
I looked down at my clothes, ripped and shredded and covered in mud and sand and dried blood. I'd forgotten I was dressed like a boy.
"So are you here to kill me or to rob me?" the man said. "I generally don't find it useful to glow when undertaking acts of subterfuge, but then, I'm just a wizard — Cassandra Rose Clarke

Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout. — E. Lockhart

Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by the hour. — Mordecai Brown

His shoes on the front porch before he came inside. "The Japanese do that," he said. "They don't bring the dirt of the world into another person's house. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

It was a fairly large house, larger than all our previous dwellings. There were two pinkwashed, picture- windowed, orange gable-roofed storeys, encompassing eight rooms, and an adjoining, presently shuttered garage. A friendly, unsymmetrical house, with pink bougainvillea hanging over the iron-lace decorated, semi-circular front porch and ivy climbing from the walls to the uneven gables. — Sonal Panse

Information about time cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator.
Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man's mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he's got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight. — Tom Robbins

Something inside of him twisted in an ugly manner. The girl had a damn movie star on her front porch and had looked away. — Alessandra Torre

I just want to come and sit on your front porch and drink mint juleps. — August Wilson

wasn't Lily; it was Craig Simmons, the landscaper. Holding a sweat-stained baseball cap in his hand, the fortyish-something sandy-haired man stood on the front porch, still wearing his work boots, faded jeans and stained T-shirt. "Hello, Ms. Boatman, I just got back from lunch, noticed your car in the back drive and wondered if you had a chance to look through your house. I wanted to make sure everything is all right." "Yes, we went through the house, and nothing seems to be missing." That wasn't entirely true. She had only been to the library and kitchen, but according to Walt, Adam and Bill left empty — Bobbi Ann Johnson Holmes

I wish I were three feet tall and he could pick me up and he still had a beard and he wore cotton sweaters that felt soft on my cheek and I could cry it all away and I would wipe my tears on his shoulder and I could suck my thumb and suck the end of my ponytail and he wouldn't tell me only babies did that and he would rock me on the front porch with the wind coming clean from the north and he would sing nursery rhymes with made-up words like Mom used to and he could teach me the alphabet again and how to walk and how to run and maybe I would do it better this time. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The morning after I'd dumped the Easy-Bake Oven on the guesthouse porch, I'd walked out of my front door and nearly tripped on the box on the way to my truck. She'd returned it with a butter knife sticking through the side, and despite myself, I smiled. — R.S. Grey

The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies.
"Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "why are these places always named after women
as if women actually own them?"
"You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys."
Rachel smiled.
"You're right. I guess it's a shrewd move. Name a place of female degradation and slavery after a female and it doesn't sound so bad, does it? It's packaging. — Michael Connelly

While I stood on the front porch, watching him climb into his vehicle, I breathed in the humid air. I looked at the cloudless sky, and the blue vastness of it made me think about the endless opportunities that lay ahead for me. Life, I knew, was going to be different now ... better. I was going to live for today and for the future. Dear past ... thank you for the lessons. Dear future ... I am ready. — Debra Kay

His grandparents had a light on, on their front porch, and Eleanor's face caught every bit of it. She looked like she should be married to the man in the moon. — Rainbow Rowell

A few years have gone and come around when we were sittin' at our favorite spot in town and you looked at me, got down on one knee. Take me back to the time when we walked down the aisle; the whole town came and our mammas cried. And you said "I do.", and I did, too. Take me home where we met so many years before; we'll rock our babies on the very front porch. After all this time, you and I. And I'll be eighty-seven you'll be eighty-nine, I'll still look at you like the stars that shine. In the sky. Oh, my my my. — Taylor Swift

I am looking through a lace curtain at a dead man's feet. I am ten years old, the mist is rising on a fall morning in 1944 in Sawyer, Georgia, and I am standing on a front porch painted gray with white trim. — Anne Lovett

We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well? — Jimmy Wales

This sort of day makes indoor work seem shameful. So working outside, whether in the garden or the woods or on the front porch ... , is a sacrament. — Robert Michael Pyle

Like a rare species of shrub in a tub, near the carriages, in front of the porch where I was waiting, stood a young page who amazed the eye as much by the remarkable harmonies of his coloured hair as by his plant-like skin. — Marcel Proust

Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses - always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking - chickens pumped full of hormones that left them too big to walk - and he thought how these same chickens might return from their destination as pieces of meat to the floodlit Bojangles' up the hill from his house, and that meat would be drowned in the bubbling fryers by employees whose hatred of the job would leak into the cooked food, and that food would be served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and end up in the hospital in Greensboro with diabetes or heart failure, a burden to the public, and later Dean would see them riding around the Mayodan Wal-Mart in electric carts because they were too heavy to walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like hormone-fed chickens. — George Packer

Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica. — Abraham Lincoln

In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy. — Rebecca Wells

She once told me of a night that fumed with escapes and was filled with bedsides reeking of ecstasy; she told me the stars cast not judgments, but blessings, knowing full well the disastrous outcomes of the deeds they cradled with the strings of their young hearts. She'd inhaled the night itself, those around her doing the same, and so all become one. No disharmony. No discordance. Nothing to shatter the cause; nothing to unearth the beauty. So as we together ascended that front porch, allowing the glow behind the blown-out windows and the odious steams plunder us from through the cracks ... time forgot to distill us, and our steps became as silver as glass. I could no longer deny the boiling words of my blood: tonight would be the beginning of a very long road indeed. — Dave Matthes

Their house was about a mile outside of town. The kids would play outdoors, in the backyard and the large stubble field behind the house. Dusk seemed to last for hours, and when it was finally dark they would sit under the porch light, catching thickly buzzing June bugs and moths, or even an occasional toad who hopped into the circle of light, tempted by the halo of insects that floated around the bare orange lightbulb next to the front door — Dan Chaon

But I don't want "good" and I don't want "good enough"
I want "can't sleep, can't breathe without your love"
Front porch and one more kiss, it doesn't make sense to anybody else
Who cares if you're all I think about,
I've searched the world and I know now,
It ain't right if you ain't lost your mind
Yeah, I don't want easy, I want crazy
Are you with me baby? Let's be crazy — Hunter Hayes

I am proud of being a Southerner. I wasn't about to let Southerners on my show be stupid or aw-shuckses who just sit on the front porch and spit in the yard. I wasn't about to do that, and I made that very clear from the start. I was kind of the gate-keeper on that stuff. — Andy Griffith

Money can't buy happiness but it'll sure keep a mess of grief off your front porch.
— James Lee Burke

I had spent four years propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through the spanish moss, lost in the mystery of finding myself alive at such a time and place. — Walker Percy

But drenched in vanilla twilight
I'll sit on the front porch all night
Waist deep in thought because when
I think of you I don't feel so alone — Owl City

She walks barefoot into the humid night, moonlight on her freckled shoulders. Near a huge, live oak tree on the edge of her father's cotton fields, Sidda looks up into the sky. In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.
Sidda stands in the moonlight and lets the Blessed Mother love every hair on her six-year-old head. Tenderness flows down from the moon and up from the earth. For one fleeting, luminous moment, Sidda Walker knows there has never been a time when she has not been loved. — Rebecca Wells

The sidewalk was all cracked and wavy, like little hills, and the weeds pushed their way up through the cement. I had to roller-skate there anyway, because they wouldn't let me out of their sight, and they could watch me from the swing on the front porch of the old house. It was hard to skate there, and I kept falling down and getting sores on my knees...Sometimes, when they left me alone in 102 to go to the store, I'd turn on the radio and dance all around the room. I'd get on the furniture and jump from couch to the bed to the chair, leaping and twirling the whole time. — Carol Burnett

The two of us sat back down in the swing and continued sitting side-by-side the first Day of June; moving to-and-fro in the swing on the front porch. A soothing summer breeze caught a ride on the south wind and blew across our faces. I enjoyed endless days and nights sitting, sighing, lying, walking, and talking alongside my best friend..." Lone Walk From Panther Creek — Kat Kaelin

The roof of the front porch of the house is covered, for some reason, with moss, and also, on one side, with wisteria, which gives the house a sort of raffish Veronica Lake look, a disheveled charm. — Renata Adler

What would it be like to make it so late into life before trouble hit? To always have someone on the front porch, calling you to dinner? The husband doesn't have even a touch of this raised-by-wolvesness. — Jenny Offill

I like to sit on the front porch of an old cabin I built in the woods and just listen to the birds; I like to fish in the pond and I always throw the fish back. — Johnny Cash

Jesse motioned to my hair. "Looks like you've been in the bath yourself." He settled into a chair on the front porch.
"I had just washed my hair, but then I had to go shoot someone. Do you want a cold drink? — Ruta Sepetys

The rocking chair test." "Pretend that you're one hundred years old," Alicia would say, "and you're sitting out on your front porch in a rocking chair. Now think back on your life. What was it like? Do you have any regrets? — Suzanne Brockmann

Okay," I said. "I'd hoped to avoid this, but ... Bill, I rescind your invitation into my house." Bill began walking backward to the door, a helpless look on his face, and my brush still in his hand. Eric grinned at him triumphantly.
"Eric," I said, and his smile faded. "I rescind your invitation into my house." And backward he went, out my door and off my porch. The door slammed shut behind (or maybe in front of?) them. — Charlaine Harris

The further I wake into this life, the more I realize that God is everywhere and the extraordinary is waiting quietly beneath the skin of all that is ordinary. Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond, and music is in both the flowing violin and the water dripping from the drainage pipe. Yes, God is under the porch as well as on top of the mountain, and joy is in both the front row and the bleachers, if we are willing to be where we are. — Mark Nepo

She liked to sit on the front porch in the afternoons and read books she'd checked out from the library. Aside from coffee, reading was her only indulgence. — Nicholas Sparks

Say you're at home and you want something, like a book, so you go online and order it from Amazon. Two days later, the book you ordered is in a box on your front porch. What if you'd just thought, 'I wish I had that book,' but you didn't do anything else? Would it be on your porch two days later?" A few ladies shook their heads. "No, it would not. Because you didn't put in an order. Think of all the times you've said, 'Why isn't this happening for me?' or 'I want this,' and nothing ever changes. Without placing your order, you're just saying words that circle in the air. — Karen McQuestion

Does this public display of affection with my daughter on my front porch mean I'm stuck with you now?" he asks, opening the screen door for Harper.
I'm not sure if I should laugh, so I hold back. "I'm afraid so. — Trish Doller

I even move out onto the front porch and see my own limited view of the world. I want to take that world, and for the first time ever, I feel like I can do it. I've survived everything I've had to so far. I'm still standing here. — Markus Zusak

Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road ... old buildings, old people on a front porch ... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff. — Robert M. Pirsig

If you let a bully come in your front yard, he'll be on your porch the next day and the day after that he'll rape your wife in your own bed. — Lyndon B. Johnson

One thing I learned there on that beautiful front porch was if I wanted to be successful, if I wanted to do important work one day, I would have to increase my capacity. I had to learn to manage disappointment. — Chip Gaines

It was all a cottage is supposed to be, small and snug, with a front porch, pink climbing roses, and lots of trees for shade. — Jeanne Birdsall

It didn't escape Blue that his slightly accented voice was as nice as his looks. It was all Henrietta sunset: hot front-porch swings and cold iced-tea glasses, cicadas louder than your thoughts. — Maggie Stiefvater

There is one story about letters. A perpetually cheerful Frog pays a visit to Toad but finds Toad glum, sitting on his front porch.
"This is my sad time of day," says Toad, "when I wait for the mail to come."
"Why is that?" says Frog.
"No one has ever sent me a letter. My mailbox is always empty. That is why waiting for the mail is a sad time for me."
Then Frog and Toad sit "on the porch, feeling sad together."
Frog rescues the situation by running home, writing a letter to Toad, and sending it literally by snail mail. The little snail brings it four days later.
Even though Toad saw Frog every day, he longed for the strangeness, the otherness of a letter, for something to come from out there and address him, "Dear Toad." Is that the thrill I feel finding a letter from you in my box? The address of a friend is made into a physical fact and every letter an artifact of the otherwise invisible communion of friendship. — Amy Andrews

But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn't feel? — Lucia Berlin

A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book. — Robert M. Gates

Travis came up behind her, his hat brim bumping her head as he nuzzled her neck. She giggled and danced away, feeling playful yet oddly shy at the same time. Travis gave chase, his husky laughter blending with hers as the two of them darted out of the barn. When they neared the porch, he grabbed her about the waist and lifted her off her feet. Meredith squealed. "You can't escape me," Travis murmured in her ear as he gently settled her back on the ground. Meredith turned in his arms to face the man she loved. "I've no desire to." His eyes darkened, and for a moment she thought he would kiss her. But then he scooped her into his arms and carried her up the porch steps. The front door proved more of a challenge to conquer. Travis had to juggle his hold on her a bit before he could get the latch open. Meredith laughed in delight, endeared by his awkward efforts. Once the door was cracked, he kicked it wide with his boot and carried her over the threshold. "Welcome home, Mrs. Archer. — Karen Witemeyer

It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. — E. Lockhart

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

Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch.
"Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk," Sal said. — Dean Koontz

Its front porch had a beautiful view of the water and invisible screening to keep the jellybugs and stinkmoths at bay. I wove mats for the floors and painted sincere, klutzy seascapes for the walls. Piece by piece I assembled chef-quality cooking equipment, learned how to use it, and achieved a state of domestic competence that would have astounded my long-suffering ex-wife, Joanna. — Julian May

When I was this kid's age, you'd be burned alive for such talk. Being a homosexual was unthinkable, and so you denied it, and found a girlfriend who was willing to settle for the sensitive type. On dates, you'd remind her that sex before marriage was just that, sex: what dogs did in the front yard. This as opposed to making love, which was more what you were about. A true union of souls could take anywhere from eight to ten years to properly establish, but you were willing to wait, and for this the mothers loved you. You sometimes discussed it with them over an iced tea, preferably on the back porch when you girlfriend's brother was mowing the lawn with his shirt off. — David Sedaris

By no means was crazy unique to the South,but it sure did love to parade it around on the front porch, give it a drink and welcome the world to stare. — Robert Reeves

The saddest thing is a little girl who is told by her own mother and father that she will never be pretty.
And then they open the front door, and on the porch is a little white suitcase, with all of her things in it. — Chris Onstad

The magnificent houses, the three old-money brick houses, each with a small turret and a wraparound porch, had been built uptown near the churches when the town was younger and smaller, before the Great War. The wraparound porches were there to hold rainy-day children and morning tea carts and quiet late-evening converstion, cosy, discreet conversation which could not easily take place in front rooms or kitchens or bedrooms, certainly not on the street. — Bonnie Burnard

Back the, my life was mostly pieces-tire swings and lemonade, dogwood petals drifting down and going brown in the grass. Cotton dresses, bedsheets flapping on the line. An acre of front porch. A year of hopscotch rhymes. — Brenna Yovanoff

To the little girl the house seemed a gigantic head, and she only a morsel of meat conveniently positioned in its gaping mouth. The front porch was that grinning mouth, the white porch railing its lower teeth, the ornamental wooden frieze above its upper teeth, the painted wicker chair on which she perched its green wagging tongue. Frances sat and rocked and wondered when the jaws would clamp shut. — Michael McDowell

On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless. — Ray Bradbury

I would sit up on top of the woodpile playing and singing at the top of my lungs. Sometimes I would take a tobacco stake and stick it in the cracks between the boards on the front porch. A tin can on top of the tobacco stake turned it into a microphone, and the porch became my stage. I used to perform for anybody or anything I could get to watch. The younger kids left in my care would become the unwilling audience for my latest show. A two-year-old's attention span is not very long. So there I would be in the middle of my act, thinking I was really something, and my audience would start crawling away. I was so desperate to perform that on more than one occasion I sang for the chickens and the pigs and ducks. They didn't applaud much, but with the aid of a little corn, they could be counted on to hang around for a while. — Dolly Parton

In May, when the grass was so green it hurt to look at it, the air so overpoweringly sweet you had to go in and turn on the television just to dull your senses- that's when Claire knew it was time to look for the asparagus in the pastures. If it rained she wondered if she should check our secret places for morels. In June, when the strawberries ripened, we made hay and the girls rode on top of the wagon. I was ever mindful of the boy who had fallen off and broken his neck. In July, the pink raspberries, all in brambles in the woods and growing up our front porch, turned black and tart. In August, the sour apples were the coming thing. In September there were the crippled-up pears in the old orchard. In October, we picked the pumpkin and popcorn. And all winter, when there was snow, we lived for the wild trip down the slopes on the toboggan. — Jane Hamilton

One day, my youngest uncle - the other one who was first to go to college, Randy - and I were sitting out on the front porch. And he was brilliant. He ended up - he just retired from Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas. — James Earl Jones

Like your sweet, affectionate house cat, Alice Dahl is easy to underestimate. It's not until the songbirds in the yard show up eviscerated on the front porch that you realize you should've kept that bell collar on her - because those poor birds never even saw her coming. — Elle Lothlorien

I am trying to sleep on the front porch of forgiveness. I am too young to be this lonely. Still, do not mistake all of my honest open for empty. I didn't leave the door of my love unlocked so you could mistake my sadness for a shelf. I do not have room to carry anyone's chaos but my own. If I sink, it will be in my own ocean. If I float, it will be on the ship I built with my own hands. — Blythe Baird

Atticus sat looking at the floor for a long time. Finally he raised his head. "Scout," he said, "Mr. Ewell fell on his knife. Can you possibly understand?"
Atticus looked like he needed cheering up. I ran to him and hugged him and kissed him with all my might. "Yes sir, I understand," I reassured him. "Mr. Tate was right."
Atticus disengaged himself and looked at me. "What do you mean?"
"Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"
Atticus put his face in my hair and rubbed it. When he got up and walked across the porch into the shadows, his youthful step had returned. Before he went inside the house, he stopped in front of Boo Radley. "Thank you for my children, Arthur." he said. — Harper Lee

Adults ask questions as a child does. When you stop wondering, you might as well put your rocker on the front porch and call it a day. — Johnny Carson

At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year. — Andrew Geyer

And I couldn't take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying "hello" and "happy holidays."
I watched him because I couldn't believe that could be anyone's comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he'd rejected it. You're offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual. — Patton Oswalt

The other two of her three kids stood on the covered front porch, tails wagging, feet dancing. One of the best things about dogs, to Fiona's mind, was their absolute joy in welcoming you home, whether you'd been gone for five minutes or five days. There lay unconditional and boundless love. — Nora Roberts

Standing on the front porch was the kind of person who would probably elicit a question like 'You ain't from around here are ya, son?' from most people around there. — Jonathon Kane

Go out on the front porch of the house, turn the Washington Post over with your big toe, and if your name's above the fold, you know you're not going to have a good day. — Bert Lance

Easy to not think about other people's suffering, when it was hidden away. Harder to stomach when it collapsed on your front porch. — Kat Zhang

Johnny James was sitting on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came. — Robert McCammon

The only major thing I'd done all day was lay out a plan of action to find the key that Pete Fortney used to let himself into my home. I'd decided to start at the front porch and look in every conceivable place, working my way clock-wise around the exterior, ground level, and eaves of the house. I'd devote fifteen minutes every evening until I found it. For my own peace of mind, I had to find that key. — Dolores Wilson

High time he had another tutor,' said Larry. 'You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby Dick on the front porch.' 'I'm sure he didn't mean any harm,' said Mother, ' but it was rather silly for him to do it on the veranda. — Gerald Durrell

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

Grandma's on the front porch with a Bible in her hand, sometimes I hear her singing take me to the promised land. — John Mellencamp

I moved into an all-electric house. I forgot and left the porch light on all day. When I got home the front door wouldn't open. — Steven Wright

He updated his report, doing his best to tune out the two men who staggered into the police station, dragging each other.
"I want you to arrest this idiot bastard," the taller one shouted, face contorted with rage. "He shit on my front porch!"
Your dog shits all over my yard every day," the other one countered shoving.
Calm down, please," Leila said when they reached reception.
The tall one thumped a fist on the counter. "I want to make a police report. I stepped in that shit!"
Chase checked out the floor behind them, the questionable footprints. Made a mental note to walk around them when he left. — Dana Marton

Hillary's trying to appear downhome. Earlier today she was sitting on the front porch of a general store whittling a pantsuit. — David Letterman

The Something"

Here come my night thoughts
On crutches,
Returning from studying the heavens.
What they thought about
Stayed the same,
Stayed immense and incomprehensible.

My mother and father smile at each other
Knowingly above the mantel.
The cat sleeps on, the dog
Growls in his sleep.
The stove is cold and so is the bed.

Now there are only these crutches
To contend with.
Go ahead and laugh, while I raise one
With difficulty,
Swaying on the front porch,
While pointing at something
In the gray distance.

You see nothing, eh?
Neither do I, Mr. Milkman.
I better hit you once or twice over the head
With this fine old prop,
So you don't go off muttering

I saw something! — Charles Simic

I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care ... — Laurie Halse Anderson

Little brats yellin 'Trick or Treat' all through my screen door,
When y'all should be at home sleep,
Instead of at my front porch 15 deep.
The jack o' lantern came in handy ...
I can turn my porch light out like I ain't got no candy.
But ain't that somethin?
You buy a Halloween costume and a pumpkin,
Almost gave your children a heart attack.
It's a tradition, but who the hell started that? — Kam

Edward Abbey said you must "brew your own beer; kick in you Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." I already had a good start. As a teenager in rural Maine, after we came to America, I had learned hunting, fishing, and trapping in the wilderness. My Maine mentors had long ago taught me to make home brew. I owned a rifle, and I'd already built a log cabin. The rest should be easy. I thought I'd give it a shot. — Bernd Heinrich

Deliberately, as if committing himself to something, he stepped forward and walked down the path to the porch and knocked on the front door. — John Edward Williams

Shoot you on the front porch and knock you to the back yard. — Lil' Wayne

So much for the bimbo alert; if she read books like that, then there was a light on upstairs, above the splendid front porch. — C.I. Dennis

After a minute I leaned back, elbows on the table, and looked up for the twinkle of the first star in the evening sky. When we were little, it was a ritual Finn and I did on the front porch. He'd make his wish silently, and I would too, but I never could keep a secret; and I'd tell him what I wished every time. He'd always tell me it wouldn't come true, but I didn't believe him. I'd had plenty of them come true, from a new box of crayons showing up out of nowhere to a bag of candy left on my bed. It had been a while, though, and the only thing I'd wish for now was impossible. I found the first star in a patch of burnt-orange sky, above the crinkly purple mountains in the distance, and then I wished my brother back anyway. — Jessi Kirby

Rocking Chair
Sad is.
Scared is.
That is all.
The rocking chair I live in rocks like a paper boat. Sometimes I am all words, and no boot.
No muster. No yes. All lag and tired pray,
all miss my hometown. Miss the woods
and the quiet porch and the talking slow.
I caught the snow on my tongue.
Snow angel, I.
My heart a blue lamp.
My mother calling me home.
We cannot be called home enough times in our lives.
Dear lonely,
what is your name?
I will open my front door
and ring it through the streets. — Andrea Gibson

My dad loved to 'arrange things' to take us kids to that scared the crap out of us on Halloween. He'd take us to the old 'Hermit's House' at the edge of town. He'd park the car 100 yards down the street and say, 'Go back there and get something off the front porch!' — Bill Moseley

There's that line in that show Designing Women when Julia Sugarbaker says something like, 'We here in the South don't hide our crazy relatives up in the attic; we bring them downstairs and show them off.' My stories are about what then happens when they run out the front door, jump off the front porch and run down the street naked. You might lock the front door to prevent it but it's going to happen sooner or later. Life is always going to have those crazy moments, so I'll always have something to write about. — Thomas F. Clardy

We lived near a playground that had four baseball diamonds on it, and when I got to be 11, 12 years old, I was always over at the ballpark practicing or playing or doing something pertaining to baseball. And when I wasn't doing that, I was bouncing a rubber ball off the steps of my front porch at home. — Bobby Doerr

It's much easier for me to make major life, multi-million dollar decisions, than it is to decide on a carpet for my front porch. That's the truth. — Oprah Winfrey

I stood on Susan Boone's front porch, feeling lame. But then, since I've pretty much felt lame my entire life, this was no big surprise. On the other hand, usually I felt lame for no particular reason. This time I really had a reason to feel lame. — Meg Cabot