Get Up The Yard Quotes & Sayings

A 'For Sale' sign in your yard during the holidays is like a 'kick me' sign. You are telling buyers you are a distressed seller. — Ray Brown

There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into, murmured Calpurnia, and she spat meditatively into the yard. We — Harper Lee

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. — Jacqueline E. Smith

If on Judgement Day I were summoned by St. Peter to give testimony to the used-to-be sheriff's act of kindness, I would be unable to say anything in his behalf. His confidence that my uncle and every other Black man who heard of the Klan's coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings was too humiliating to hear. Without waiting for Momma's thanks, he rode out of the yard, sure that things were as they should be and that he was a gentle squire, saving those deserving serfs from the laws of the land, which he condoned. — Maya Angelou

The heat of the summer transformed the green grass into long brown straw, only the weeds were green. Claire didn't mind, the weeds had pretty flowers. Unlike Tony's flowers, which had been sentenced to his yard, gardens, or clay pots, these flowers grew free wherever they wanted. Furthermore, weeds were survivors. When all else died, the weeds remained. Yes, Claire liked weeds. — Aleatha Romig

Were you in love with Emma?" I ask.
"I was hard-core obsessed," he says without thinking about it. "Not in love."
"What's the difference?"
He's about to throw a stone at ta yard light but stops. "Prison," he says, and puts the stone in his pocket. — Cath Crowley

I'm sure." I smiled and took a sip of coffee. "I don't want to be stranded on the side of the road. Will that old thing even make it that far?" He looked toward his truck. "That old thing hasn't let me down yet." "So how long will it take to get there?" "'bout six, six and a half hours. That should give me time to get settled into my motel room and practice a little before I go to the studio in the morning." I nodded. "Have you had breakfast?" "I ate at Mrs. Wrigley's when I dropped Amy off." "How about a cup of coffee?" I said. "No thanks. It'll just make me have to stop and pee." I laughed. I stood and stepped to him. "Call me when you get there. Okay?" "I'll call. I promise." He turned to look down at Bo, who sat in the yard looking up at us, stick in mouth, waiting. "I asked Mike to keep an eye on you while I'm gone," he said. "The — Heather Meyer

Gemma talking to Charley ...
"Got it. Have you seen my pants?"
"Speaking of which, how did you get home without them?"
"I borrowed a pair of you sweats. I ran into a convenience store with them on. I talked to neighbors out in their yard when I pulled up. And only after I got inside did I realize the had 'Exit Only' written across the back."
"You stole my favorite sweats?"
"I wanted to die."
"It's weird that sweats would make you suicidal. I'd analyze the crap out of that if I were you."
"Do you actually wear those in public?"
"Only when I go out in them — Darynda Jones

Last Saturday he set out to fix a screen upstairs. He went to the basement to get some nails. Downstairs he saw that the workbench was a mess, so he started organizing the workbench. Then he needed some pegboard to hang up the tools, so he jumped into the car and went to buy the pegboard. At the lumber yard he saw a sale on spray paint, so he bought a can to paint the porch railing and came home totally unaware that he hadn't gotten the pegboard, that he had never finished sorting out the work bench, and that he had started out to fix the broken screen, which we really needed fixed. — Thomas E. Brown

I feel like I just returned a 100-yard kickoff in the last two minutes of the Super Bowl to win it all, only to have my run called back by a flag on the play. — Kobe Bryant

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
... The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. — Henry David Thoreau

Suddenly she came racing into the lounge. She wore one of my big blue towels in sarong fashion, and had a white towel wrapped around her head. Her face looked narrow and intent. Her features looked more pointed. "That last trip," she said. "I don't know if it will help. We stopped at some sort of a boat yard in Miami. I can't even remember the name. Something about a new generator. He kept complaining about the noise the generator made. They took up the hatches and got down in the bilge and did a lot of measuring. The man said it would take a long time to get the one Junior Allen wanted. It made him angry. But he ordered it anyway. He left a down payment on it. He ordered some kind of new model that had just been introduced. — John D. MacDonald

Nobody is in the school yard when I get there, except for a few guys hanging near the fence. I recognize a couple of them from the forbidden Latin lunch table. I walk fast, trying not to be noticed, but, of course, they have to go out of their way to call me out. "Move that junk, mami!" one of them calls, making squeezing motions with his hands. I don't turn around to give him the finger, though I probably should. Instead, I hurry up the steps two at a time. — Meg Medina

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can't quite see. Either way, it's the same story. — Phil Klay

Final Disposition

Others divided closets full of mother's things.
From the earth, I took her poppies.
I wanted those fandango folds
of red and black chiffon she doted on,
loving the wild and Moorish music of them,
coating her tongue with the thin skin
of their crimson petals.

Snapping her fingers, flamenco dancer,
she'd mock the clack of castanets
in answer to their gypsy cadence.
She would crouch toward the flounce of flowers,
twirl, stamp her foot, then kick it out
as if to lift the ruffles, scarlet
along the hemline of her yard.

And so, I dug up, soil and all,
the thistle-toothed and gray-green clumps
of leaves, the testicle seedpods and hairy stems
both out of season, to transplant them in my less-exotic garden. There, they bloom
her blood's abandon, year after year,
roots holding, their poppy heads nodding
a carefree, opium-ecstatic, possibly forever sleep. — Jane Glazer

Some friends and I, we went right up there behind the studio and we got on a train, we could tell it was going to go to Roseville. We got off it and got on another train. And we got to Roseville, and it takes hours to get through that yard. It's really big. So we ended up just coming back here. It's like fishing or hunting. You can't always come back with something. — William T. Vollmann

Gregory is a good boy, though all the Latin he has learned, all the sonorous periods of the great authors, have rolled through his head and out again, like stones. Still, you think of Thomas More's boy: offspring of a scholar all Europe admired, and poor young John can barely stumble through his Pater Noster. Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shining star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted. He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him. He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve his elders. He doesn't slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them. If anyone sneezes, he says, 'Christ help you! — Hilary Mantel

There were glowing pumpkins and ghost lights in the yard and cheerful looking spiders and vampire posters everywhere. "This is just disgusting," Abel said in disgust, landing on a happy mummy poster staked in the yard. "Must everything be commercialized these days? I'm surprised the vampires don't sparkle. — John H. Carroll

Liz pasted on a smile, trying to appear normal in light of the fact that he had possibly incriminating knowledge on her from the background check. She hoped her application for a marriage license with Craig wasn't in the report. Or her long shopping record for organization systems from The Container Store. Or her many Internet searches for breeds of nonshedding dogs (she was waiting for the house with a yard before getting one). Or her long-time obsession with new cleaning products. — Kylie Gilmore

Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town. — Walker Percy

My anxiety house a house and a fence and a deer in the yard. A zip code. A plague of starlings. — Kristy Bowen

When I die throw my body in the back and drive me to the junk yard in my Cadillac. — Bruce Springsteen

Emily just knew that the grocery store clerk's cousin had slipped on a bath mat and fallen out a second-story open window only to be saved because the woman landed on a discarded mattress.
But what interested Emily most about the incident was how the cousin had subsequently met a man in physical therapy who introduced her to his half brother who she ended up marrying and then running over with her car a year later after a heated argument. And that man, it was discovered, had been the one to dump the mattress in her yard.
He'd saved her so that she could later cripple him.
Emily found that not ironic but intriguing.
Because everything, she believed, was connected. — Holly Goldberg Sloan

When she looked back at Michael, he was staring up at her with murder in his eyes. "Get down from there!" he roared. He pulled the brake on the wagon and sprang to the ground, stalking across the yard like a barbarian on the march. Even from three stories up she could hear him muttering in Romanian, and whatever he was saying did not sound complimentary. He stood in the middle of the yard and yelled up at her. "Why can't you be a normal woman and keep your feet on the ground? I have traveled nine hundred miles to get back to you, and look! Trousers! — Elizabeth Camden

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard. — Paul McCartney

Whether I was a character in WCW, WWE or The Longest Yard, you want to be able to - the best part about myself is that I have a very wide range of emotions in that one second I can be speaking on Capital Hill about dog fighting and giving them a voice, which they can't obviously speak for themselves. — Bill Goldberg

I get the same buzz cleaning up the yard as Leo Tolstoy did from scything hay. — Sergei Lukyanenko

We get so caught up weeding the yard that we completely miss the tulips that nature gives us for a few precious weeks. We postpone joy. — Amit Sood

If you hate the war, that's fine. But you should still support the troops. They don't get to pick where they're deployed. They just gave the American people a blank check for anything up to and including the value of their lives, and the least everyone else can do is be thankful. Buy them dinner. Mow their yard. Bake them cookies. — Chris Kyle

What does Mad-Eye say happened?" asked Mr. Weasley, unscrewing the ink bottle, loading up his quill, and preparing to take notes. Mr. Diggory's head rolled its eyes. "Says he heard an intruder in his yard. Says he was creeping toward the house, but was ambushed by his dustbins." "What did the dustbins do?" asked Mr. Weasley, scribbling frantically. "Made one hell of a noise and fired rubbish everywhere, as far as I can tell," said Mr. Diggory. "Apparently one of them was still rocketing around when the please-men turned up - " Mr. Weasley groaned. "And what about the intruder?" "Arthur, you know Mad-Eye," said Mr. Diggory's head, rolling its eyes again. "Someone creeping into his yard in the dead of night? More likely there's a very shell-shocked cat wandering around somewhere, covered in potato peelings. But if the Improper Use of Magic lot get their hands on Mad-Eye, he's had it - think of his record - — J.K. Rowling

So now get up.'
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now. — Hilary Mantel

Wait a minute, look at them. Smiling and laughing. Just having a wonderful time, enjoying themselves to the fullest. Why shouldn't they? They deserve it. It's Christmas. Their Christmas. The best day I ever had was the day Karla found me and brought me here, to my home. Ryan, Kaley, Matt and yes, even Derek, are my family too. I'm treated so well I've lost perspective. Well, what do you expect, I am a dog after all. They always find the time to take me for walks, play with me in the yard, bring me to the vet, get me in out of the heat and cold, cuddle up with me before bedtime and even celebrate my birthday. Today is for them and not for me. The least I can do is to let them enjoy it without me getting in the way. But if this continues tomorrow there'll be hell to pay! Who am I kidding, it'll never happen. — Patrick Yearly

The problem with being grounded is it gives you a whole lot of unavoidable time to think. NOt even pulling weeds can take away your ability to plot all the varied and wonderful things you might do to get even, or at least to make up, just get a smidgen for time lost to TV and yard work and house cleaning. — Ellen Hopkins

But maybe her marriage wasn't a Lexus. Maybe it was a Pinto
one of those cars famous for blowing up when rear-ended. As she waited for the mechanics to fix her car, she walked out the back door to the wrecking yard and through the aisles of totaled cars and pickups, vehicles that other people had decided weren't worth fixing. She felt just like them. She felt like that Buick with the driver's-side door so crushed that the driver was undoubtedly hurt, but from the look of the other side, the passenger likely skated through unscathed. She felt like the Saturn with the shattered windshield through which no one could see what lay ahead. It looked as if it had been sandwiched in a multicar pileup. Jill knew exactly how it felt to crash into one thing and then get smashed from behind. She studied that Saturn and wondered whether it would have been salvageable if it had only been rear-ended instead of sandwiched, and she wondered if the same was true about her marriage. — Kaya McLaren

MAMA: I'm afraid of it, for me, I mean. When my time comes. I know it's coming, but...
JESSIE: You don't know when. Like in a scary movie.
MAMA: Yeah, sneaking up on me like some killer on the loose, hiding out in the back yard just waiting for me to have my hands full someday and how am I supposed to protect myself anyhow when I don't know what he looks like and I don't know how he sounds coming up behind me like that or if it will hurt or take very long or what I don't get done before it happens. — Marsha Norman

It was a great place to grow up. There were always kids around in our neighborhood. We had a basketball hoop in the back of our house, a little front yard where you could get touch football games going. I know you think of it as a big city, but it was fun for me to grow up in New Orleans. I remember it as a very normal childhood. — Eli Manning

There are times when I feel like I'm a traveling minister. I'm trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world. — Dave Grohl

Susan Boggs, a black runaway interviewed in Canada in 1863, said of the religious slave masters: 'Why the man that baptized me had a colored woman tied up in his yard to whip when he got home that very Sunday and her mother ... was in church hearing him preach. He preached, You must obey your masters and be good servants.- That is the greater part of the sermon, when they preach to the colored folks ... ' — Gerry Spence

Not long after he moved, the mail carrier got embroiled in a battle with the Middletown government over the flock of chickens that he kept in his yard. He treated them just as Mamaw had treated her chickens back in the holler: Every morning he collected all the eggs, and when his chicken population grew too large, he'd take a few of the old ones, wring their necks, and carve them up for meat right in his backyard. You can just imagine a well-bred housewife watching out the window in horror as her Kentucky-born neighbor slaughtered squawking chickens just a few feet away. My sister and I still call the old mail carrier "the chicken man," and years later even a mention of how the city government ganged up on the chicken man could inspire Mamaw's trademark vitriol: "Fucking zoning laws. They can kiss my ruby-red asshole." The — J.D. Vance

Looking around, I felt a mad desire to go shopping for pink flamingo and garden gnome lawn ornaments. I could do a midnight visit, plant one of each in every yard. — Gayla Drummond

...I'm momentarily transfixed, torn between curiosity and fear. I can pull it up the gently sloping mud bank, but then what? Already thought is lagging behind events, as the blotchy brown mass slides up wet mud toward me, its amorphous margins flowing into the craters left by retreating feet. In the center of the yard-wide disc is a raised turret where two eyes open and close, flashing black. And it's bellowing. A loud rhythmic sound that is at first inexplicable until I realize that those blinking eyes are its spiracles, now sucking in air instead of water, which it is pumping out via gill slits on its underside. And all the while it brandishes that blade, stabbing the air like a scorpion... — Jeremy Wade

A condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round about him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years, eternity! - rather would he live thus than die at once? Only live, live, live! - no matter how, only live! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not a ... turkey ... in the barn-yard but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; and certain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing and roasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflecting fowl living. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

I don't visit my parents often because Delta Airlines won't wait in the yard while I run in. — Margaret Smith

Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. It is the strange knock at the door, the sudden sight of an unceremoniously blooming flower, an afternoon in the yard, a day of riding the midtown bus. Just to see. Just to notice. Just to be there. — Joan D. Chittister

Don't design your back yard from the outside looking in. Design from your window looking out. — Janet Macunovich

If you're going to have guests," the ghost said with a sigh, "would it be so hard to give me a little advance warning?" Her eyes were dark with heavy lids. She had soft cheekbones and gentle features, framed neatly by twin locks of hair, which swept her cheeks on either side. The rest was tucked behind her ears and spilled down her back and shoulders in silvery waves, like a mercurial waterfall. She had a slim, spritely figure, and her movements were as smooth as smoke in a soft breeze. She placed the cup on the tray with a gentle clink, and drifted to a seat on the windowsill. Through her opaque figure, I could see the swaying branches of a weeping willow in the yard. "How — William Ritter

There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it ... — Edward St. Aubyn

I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That's how I would conquer it, conquer death."
She sighed again, and nestled in closer to me. "All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee's hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight. — April Genevieve Tucholke

It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg! — Hans Christian Andersen

The foursome settled down in Kate's living room, which was furnished academically, i.e., from flea markets and yard sales. — Anonymous

I was mischievous. I wasn't bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn't know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me. — Mr. T

Hellbenders. I collected with exuberance and totality, bringing home almost everything I could get my hands on, and releasing them into the assorted outdoor terrariums or aquariums in my back yard (the turtles I let run wild in the yard, like dogs or cats). — Rick Bass

Yes, word had gotten around about my amusing little defeathering trick (note: made the chicken naked). Apparently we couldn't just eat the poor thing and be done with it. Apparently we had to knit cunning lil' sweaters for it so it could squawk around the yard, feeling fancy. — Cate Tiernan

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up
in a stranger's bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away. — Richard Siken

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there. — Alice Sebold

He follows a man with a rolled up mattress strapped to his back. When he stepped down from the train into the brutalising glare of the searchlights in the marshalling yard he noticed two SS soldiers pointing at this man and laughing. — Glenn Haybittle

A cat likes to hear you calling him. He sits in a bush a yard from your shoes - and listens. — Pam Brown

We also pass a farmer in his yard, power-washing a donkey with a high-pressure hose. — Simon Armitage

He couldn't see why on earth people lived in that place when they could have a house and a yard for far less down here. — Harper Lee

Sometimes I get so lost in the moment, I start running around my yard, flapping my arms like a seagull at the beach. A lot of times I'll even start to squawk. Usually right around the third or fourth squawk is when my neighbor starts screaming at me to pipe down. He's always like, "Quiet down, lady! And put on some pants!" And I'm always like, "YOU put on some pants, sir!" because in the heat of the moment I panic and I can't think of anything better to say. Of course, he's already wearing pants, so it doesn't pack quite the punch I want it to, but the bottom line is he's clearly not as connected to nature as I am. — Ellen DeGeneres

One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year. — Charlie Munger

As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe. — Libba Bray

Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got. — Robert Benchley

Returning to the Brandt home but I agreed to give a hand. We arrived after lunch and found Lise at work loading a wheelbarrow with the smaller stones from the huge pile beside the shed. The flower bed itself was in the middle of the yard, positioned in a sunny area between deep pools of shade that lay beneath a couple of tall hackberry trees. — William Kent Krueger