Halfway Where Quotes & Sayings

In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species?
We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem. — John Hay

We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. — Carl Sagan

Let's not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-man's-land, halfway between dreams and reality. — Arthur Gordon

Sometimes I would make left turns all the way around a block, and when I returned to the original intersection, I would feel disappointed to find all the drivers were new. It wasn't like a square dance, where you miraculously end up with your original partner, laughing and feeling giddily relieved to find him after dancing with everyone else in the world. Instead, they swung around and kept on going, some people were at work by now, or halfway to the airport. In fact, driving might be the thing most opposite of dancing. — Miranda July

Do you know that there's a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It's called the hurting time, Jean Perdu. It's a bog; it's where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don't underestimate the transition, Jeanno, between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride. — Nina George

Hannah returns to our booth carrying our drink orders. Or rather, Allie and Dex's drink orders. Logan and I asked for sodas, but what we get is water.

"Where's my Dr. Pepper, Wellsy?" Logan whines.

She levels him with a stern look. "Do you know how much sugar is in a soft drink?"

"A perfectly acceptable amount and therefore I should drink it?" supplies Logan.

"Wrong. The answer is too damn much. You're playing Michigan in an hour - you can't get all hopped up on sugar before a game. You'll get a five-minute energy boost and then crash halfway through the first period."

Logan sighs. "G, why is your girl our nutritionist now?"

I pick up my water glass and take a sip of defeat. "Do you want to argue with her?"

Logan looks at Hannah, whose expression clearly conveys: you'll get a soda over my dead body. Then he looks back at me. "No," he says glumly. — Elle Kennedy

Pushing himself off the bed in a violent thrust, his lats widen like wings down his sides, where his waistcoat is open halfway to his waist to accommodate muscular builds, he indicates the gilded cage with outstretched arms. Showing off his supreme musculature, he says, We have forever Phoebe. — Poppet

I'm getting my stuff," he said, and bolted for the steps.
"You don't have to move out," Astrid called after him.
Sam stopped halfway up the steps. "Oh, I'm sorry. Is that the voice of the council telling me where I can go?"
"There's no point having a town council if you think you don't have to listen to it," Astrid said. She was using her patient voice, trying to calm the situation. "Sam, if you ignore us, no one will pay attention."
"Guess what, Astrid, they're already ignoring you. The only reason anyone pays any attention to you and the others is because they're scared of Edilio's soldiers." He thumped his chest. "And even more scared of me. — Michael Grant

Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life?
See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman. — Ray Bradbury

Whenever I wore a bathing suit, I kept a sarong around my hips that went halfway down my thighs. The tops of my thighs are like baby skin. Where the sarong ended, I can see sun damage: I've got dark spots and places where there is no melanin. The spots are not pretty, so I encourage everyone to protect their skin from the sun. — Christie Brinkley

I know someone who has never been able to read _The Cuckoo Clock_ since leaving her girlhood home, because it had to be read sitting halfway up the stairs, where the light through a stained-glass landing window fell on it, staining the pages red and blue and green. — Rosemary Sutcliff

As long as we have hope, we have direction, the energy to move, and the map to move by. We have a hundred alternatives, a thousand paths and an infinity of dreams. Hopeful, we are halfway to where we want to go; hopeless, we are lost forever. — Laozi

Embrace opportunities with limited downside, unlimited upside. The best deals are those where your risk of loss is predictable and fixed if things go wrong, while your potential gains are enormous if things go right. Take such deals whenever you can get them if the odds of success are halfway decent. — Steve Pavlina

It didn't matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home. — Lev Grossman

She sees only what's gone, I see only what's stayed the same. Her hair is no longer halfway down her back or pulled up in a French pleat; nowadays it is cut close to her skull and the grey is allowed to show.
Those peasanty frocks she used to wear have given way to cardigans and well-cut trousers. Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still. The same eyes that were in the same head when we first met, slept together, married, honeymooned, joint-mortgaged, shopped, cooked and holidayed, loved one another and had a child together. And were the same when we separated.
But it's not just the eyes. The bone structure stays the same, as do the instinctive gestures, the many ways of being herself. And her way, even after all this time and distance, of being with me. — Julian Barnes

Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become. — Kent Haruf

Stay not where the lowlands are! Climb not into the sky! The world looks best by far when viewed from halfway high. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I spent four minutes yesterday looking for the halfway point between where I am & where I want to be. I found the city - you just have to tell me if you want pizza, coffee or strange street meat. Just four minutes searching, but all day (really all week), I've been thinking of this letter & you. — Darnell Lamont Walker

The technology of the book is much more flexible than film, more user friendly. The reader can dip into the book at will, without electricity, and is always aware of where she is in the book, halfway through, a third of the way, mere pages from the end, her fingers helping to measure the excitement of coming to the conclusion. — Lewis Buzbee

My darling was purring in her sleep, with the archaic smile on her lips, and she had the extra glow of comfort and solace she gets after love, a calm fulfilledness.
I should have been sleepy after wandering around the night before, but I wasn't. I've noticed that I am rarely sleepy if I know I can sleep long in the morning. The red dots were swimming in my eyes, and the street light threw the shadows of naked elm branches on the ceiling, where they made slow and stately cats' cradles because the spring wind was blowing. The window was open halfway and the white curtains swelled and filled like sails on an anchored boat ...
I felt good and fulfilled, too, but whereas Mary dives for sleep, I didn't want to go to sleep. I wanted to go on fully tasting how good I felt. — John Steinbeck

Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations. As — Emma Donoghue

Our favorite film is Vertigo. Amy Eleni and I must watch it seventeen or eighteen times a year, and with each viewing our raptness grows looser and looser; we don't need the visuals anymore
one or the other of us can go into the kitchen halfway through and call out the dialogue while making up two cups of Horlicks. From the minute you see empty, beautiful, blond Madeleine Elster, you know she is doomed because she exists in a way that Scottie, the male lead, just doesn't. You know that Madeleine is in big trouble, because she's a vast wound in a landscape where wounds aren't allowed to stay open
people have to shut up and heal up. She's in trouble because the film works to a plan that makes trauma speak itself out, speak itself to excess until it dies; this film at the peak of its slyness, when people sweat and lick their lips excessively and pound their chests and grab their hair and twist their heads from side to side, performing this unspeakable torment. — Helen Oyeyemi

Cat, hmmm? From where I sit you look more like a Kitten."
My head jerked around and I shot him an annoyed look.
Oh, I was going to enjoy this, all right.
"It's Cat," I repeated firmly. "Cat Raven."
"Whatever you say, Kitten Tweedy. — Jeaniene Frost

Excerpted From Chapter Eighteen
Pacific Coast Highway ends with a sharp right turn onto Sepulveda. Approaching that intersection, I saw several cars pulled to the shoulder of the road and two fresh, black skid marks leading straight to the edge of the beach beyond Sepulveda. Halfway between the road and the water, a big red Caddy convertible lay upside down on the sand.
I parked and jogged to the wreckage. The windshield and the cloth top had collapsed, so the car was resting on its hood and trunk lid. A young man in swimming trunks and an older fellow in a suit were pulling at the driver's side door, trying to get it open. The twisted metal was resisting their efforts, but the door finally came loose just as I got there. Through the opening I could see Diana Dean sprawled across the shredded remains of her convertible top. From where I stood, she looked to be in about the same shape as her mangled red Caddy. Maybe worse. — H.P. Oliver

My absolute favorite song I've ever written is "This Is Where We Came In." It's a nudge at younger listeners, cause at one time you could go into a cinema halfway through a film and then stay through and pick up where you left off. — James Hunter

I don't know
is happiness a thing we choose, I wonder? Or is it something handed out to some, and not to others?"
"A bit of both, I should think."
" ... I'm not so sure ... I think we all make choices in our lives that set us down the road to happiness or disappointment. It's just that we can't always see where the road is leading us until we're halfway there. — Susanna Kearsley

He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an explanation of the formula used to determine the pull of the body on each of Christ's hands when his voice will wander away from the telephone for a minute and then he'll come back and say, Excuse me. A nine year old body. Father beat her to death. Where were we? — Mary Roach

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway. — Michael Pollan

The reason for her love of maps. It's half worn away, the dot, and the red color is bleached. Yet it's there, flung down there on the map halfway between the lower left corner and its center, and next to it is written, "You are here."
Sometimes it's easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing — Fredrik Backman

My friend Kathy is the only person who'll be halfway honest with me. 'Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions?' she asked.
I nodded mutely.
'That's a bit what giving birth is like. — Marian Keyes

I sauntered to the kitchen, where the lone pot of afternoon coffee had been reduced to thick black syrup. Glad that no one was around to watch, I filled a Styrofoam cup halfway with the molten matter, swished it, and sniffed. Nose of burning rubber, with light tar accents. I topped it off with Sparklett's, then nuked it. Kills the germs. — Denise Hamilton

Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halfway in the shit. — Robert Harris

In a world where you can get a spare kidney, a black-market Picasso or a ticket to ride into space, why can't I see some actual sex? Some actual fucking from people who want to fuck each other? Some chick in an outfit I halfway respect, having the time of her life? I have MONEY. I'm willing to PAY for this. I AM NOW A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, AND I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME. I just want to see a good time. — Caitlin Moran

Boredom forces you to ring people you haven't seen for eighteen years and halfway through the conversation you remember why you left it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-order catalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor. Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in the local shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually, boredom means you will take up golf. — Jeremy Clarkson

For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world. — Lewis Hyde

I am very proud of The Saints and I'm very glad that I've been associated with them all these years, but the next record is the best record ... has to be the philosophy for any band that remains even halfway decent or vibrant, and that is kind of where my head's at. — Chris Bailey

I won't take a real nap. I have this halfway place, a rest stop on the road to sleep, where I can stay for hours. I don't even need to close my eyes, just stay safe under the covers and breathe. — Laurie Halse Anderson

There simply is nothing else like it. And, as a test of physical and mental endurance it has no equal. Other sports may be as intense, as pressurized, as hard for short periods: But the Tour does on day after day after day. It's the only race in the world where you have to get a haircut halfway through. — Chris Boardman

Let's order too much of something just to see where our limits are. Let's take a chance precisely because it might fail. Let's take the hard way out. Let's go to the moon. Fuck it; let's go to the moon again. Let's quit our jobs. Let's work at being better at what we do by fucking up faster, not less. Let's fuck up really fast. Let's wrestle sharks, fight monsters, and disagree with the board. Let's borrow so much money it becomes someone else's problem. Let's start a 10-hour drive by announcing "I'm not into you anymore." Let's dump everything out of the garage onto the sidewalk and build something really cool in that space. Let's start out to build a better mousetrap, and halfway there let's decide to jump on the mice's team. — Mike Monteiro

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.) — Margaret Atwood

I left my heart in San Francisco, high on a hill, it calls to me. To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars, the morning fog may chill the air, I don't care. My love waits there in San Francisco, above the blue and windy sea, when I come home to you, San Francisco , your golden sun will shine for me. — Tony Bennett

But you can't be too careful of these strange new ideas and new things. You must not tamper with them. If you try to understand them, they may entangle and get hold of you, and then where will you be? Hide your mind from them, and hide them from your mind. Stick to the plain common sense of life. There will always be a tomorrow rather like today. At least so far there always has been a fairly similar tomorrow. Once or twice lately there have been jolts ...
Try not to notice these jolts.
'It is no good meeting trouble halfway. — H.G.Wells

We heard her come halfway up the stairs, where she must have seen the bedroom light on.
Again, the normal parent reaction would have been to say something like, "You had better come out this moment or I am releasing the tiger!" But Debbie was not a normal parent, so we heard her gigle and creep away, saying, "Shhh! Rachel! Come with Mommy! Stuart is busy! — Maureen Johnson

They're going to leave me. All I wanted to do was lie in the dry prickly grass with my feet in a ditch forever. I could be a convenient sort of milemarker, I thought. Get to the thief and you know you are halfway to Methana. Where ever Methana might be. — Megan Whalen Turner

Hanging back to get her reaction under control, she wiped her knife on the edge of her petticoat, then angled her body away so she could raise her skirts enough to slip the knife into its sheath, taking care not to drop the pilfered food cradled in her other arm. When she straightened, she expected Darius and Jacob to be well ahead but instead found her companions only a few yards away, their far-too-curious eyes riveted on her. "So that's where you keep it." Darius's attention dropped to a spot halfway down her skirt. "I had wondered." Nicole lifted her chin. "Yes, well, I tried carrying it around in one of those lacy little reticules, but it kept getting tangled in the ribbons. Not very practical." Keeping her eyes averted from Darius's face, she marched past the gawkers and headed for the house. — Karen Witemeyer

TRAVEL Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought Of travelling penniless to some mud throne Where a master might instruct me how to plot My life away from pain, to love alone In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake. Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost Enough to lose a way I had to take; Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust The will that forbid me contract, vow, Or promise, and often while you slept I looked in awe beyond your beauty. Now I know why many men have stopped and wept Halfway between the loves they leave and seek, And wondered if travel leads them anywhere - Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek, The windy sky's a locket for your hair. — Leonard Cohen

'Maybe you out to go back there.'
'Can't. Gotta stay where ... where I know what's what.'
Where I don't forget what I am, and that I don't deserve anything better. Would wreck anything better.
'I Reckon that's what most of us think. But there's more strangers where you're from than in some sandland halfway around the world. And more strangers in your head than any place on the map.' — Lisa Henry

Taking Root

I am no stranger to roots. In third grade, I punctured
a sweet potato's middle with toothpicks, suspended
it halfway in a cup of water until sprout-like whiskers

swam along its bottom. On day nine leaves crowned it.
I scooped out soil with my hands and buried it up
to its neck. I've laid down my own in places

where corn and tomatoes grow in vacant lots,
where cilantro and basil thrive on window sills
and in cities balanced on ancestor's bones.

Roots are hardy travelers, adaptable: they float
on water, cohere to wood, burrow deep beneath
foundations, challenge floorboards.

from Second Skin — Diana Anhalt

The continental philosopher comes to a philosophical conversation looking to have a communal experience where both sides learn from each other. Their perspective is often that we may be on different paragraphs but we are all on the same page.

They'll often speak in stories as an attempt to create a world where everyone listening works together to create agreed upon language/inside jokes/slang.

By contrast, the analytic philosopher often comes to a philosophical conversation looking to win an argument. They often have a set of patterns, labels and pre-packaged arguments. To them, clever double speak and long drawn out narratives are not profound. They'll often label it halfway through as just a bunch of made up gibberish that leaves things even more confusing than before.

It is as if the analytic philosopher says to the continental philosopher 'you are speaking gibberish' and the continental philosopher responds with 'exactly. — Chester Elijah Branch

Many people send me letters in England saying, 'I want to be a war photographer,' and I say, go out into the community that you live in. There's wars going on out there; you don't have to go halfway around the world on an airplane where there are bombs and shells. There are social wars that are worthwhile. — Don McCullin

The bridge will only take you halfway there, to those mysterious lands you long to see. Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair, and moonlit woods where unicorns run free. So come and walk awhile with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known. But this bridge will only take you halfway there. The last few steps you have to take alone. — Shel Silverstein

The universe is littered with them: hidden villages, windswept little towns under wide skies, isolated cabins on chilly mountains, whose only mark on history is to be the incredibly ordinary place where something extraordinary started to happen. Often there is no more than a little plaque to reveal that, against all gynecological probability, someone very famous was born halfway up a wall. Mist — Terry Pratchett

Niko, you're halfway to where you need to go. It's the most dangerous time. And all the gods and forces have a stake in you, Hero. Or do you want to be just a memory, a cult somewhere, with people sacrificing horses to your name? — Janet Morris

In my career as a director, there's always been some point where you get halfway through it, or three-quarters, and you go: 'What is this thing all about, and why am I telling the story? Does anybody really care about seeing this?' At that time you have to say: 'OK, forget that and just go ahead.' — Clint Eastwood

On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,
the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.
I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I've fallen in love
On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:
This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.
But the juke-box inside me is playing a song
That says something different. And when was it wrong?
On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.
the head does its best but the heart is the boss-
I admit it before I am halfway across — Wendy Cope

In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family's Mexican shades passed as various. — Richard Rodriguez

He says when you're smoking a cigarette with someone, and you have a lighter, you should light their cigarette first. But if you have matches, you should light your cigarette first, so you breathe in the 'harmful sulfur' instead of them. He says it's the polite thing to do. He also says it's bad luck to have "three on a match." He heard that from his uncle who fought in Vietnam. Something about how three cigarettes was enough time for the enemy to know where you are. Bob says that when you're alone, and you light a cigarette, and the cigarette is only halfway lit that means someone is thinking about you. — Stephen Chbosky

Mrs Chadwick used to say the same about my English, about going round the houses. But to be honest, I like going round the houses. And as for beginning at the beginning, the reason I never start there is that I don't know where the beginning is, and that's the honest truth. And anyway, I've never known anything in my whole life that ever started at the beginning. Things aren't like that. They usually start about halfway through, or near the end, and then work their way backwards, that's how must things are. — Alex Shearer

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. — Eugene O'Neill

It's always important to draw a line somewhere in a respectful way where you're still approachable, you're still there for the people and meeting them halfway, but you're not neglecting your own duties and your own time to rejuvenate to be able to do it again. — Chuck Ragan

ReVision The failure I saw myself grew darker and darker as the halfway halves halfway blended And somewhere there exists a world so removed from this In moonlight's beam with warriors in gloaming dreaming of being right back here at home Where the snow draped trees beat loneliness and beauty into being And the mirror wipes it all away as a glance becomes a stare And all but a few places unwrinkled and creased remain of what used to be. — Kenyatta Jean-Paul Garcia

As an actor, you have to have trust and believe that somebody is taking care of you or watching your back. With a part like this, especially with where we're going with it, I can't pull any punches. I can't do it halfway, especially when you're dealing with madness and this descent into madness. — Jessica Lange

Halfway down the stairs, is a stair, where I sit. There isn't any, other stair, quite like, it. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair, where, I always, stop. Halfway up the stairs, isn't up, and isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts, run round my head: It isn't really anywhere! It's somewhere else instead! — A.A. Milne

She asked if she could sleep in my bed that night and I said yes and we went upstairs and lay close together in the narrow bed and I wondered if maybe she missed her mother, and then around halfway through the night Edmond came in saying he was lonely and he lay down too only facing in the other direction since it was the only way he could fit, and then around sunrise Isaac wandered in too wondering where everyone had gone and when he saw us he just smiled a little and went down to the kitchen and brought up the big brown teapot and some mugs on a tray and we all piled together on the bed on top of each other like puppies and drank our tea while the sun streamed in thick and yellow through the window. And — Meg Rosoff

The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. — Walter Benjamin

I've met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go - in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

The great festival of Lughnasa was held at Carmun once every three years. The site of Carmun was eerie. In a land of wild forest and bog, it was an open grassy space that stretched, green and empty, halfway to the horizon. Lying some distance west of the point where, if you were following it upstream, the Liffey's course began to retreat eastwards on the way to its source in the Wicklow Mountains, the place was absolutely flat, except for some mounds in which ancestral chiefs were buried. The festival lasted a week. There were areas reserved for food and livestock markets, and another where fine clothes were sold; but the most important quarter was where a large racetrack was laid out on the bare turf. — Edward Rutherfurd

He was beautiful, like looking at a favorite piece of artwork. Not something one can own, but something in a faraway museum, where she would have to go halfway around the world, push through crowds on people, just to catch a glimpse of his unreal splendor. — Caroline Hanson

It's got to be hard to be a band that's trading on your 40-year-old hits, where there's a certain thing that's expected of you. But that's why I admire Bob Dylan's live performances - he's steadfast about mixing up the songs, not just sticking to his greatest hits, and reinterpreting them to the extent that you really can't recognize them until halfway through. It's like, I DARE you to sing along. — Amy Argetsinger

His eyes are about an inch below where they should be on his face, almost to halfway down his cheeks. — R.J. Palacio