Hill Country Quotes & Sayings

Once again, the puppets on Capitol Hill are about to slam the Muppets on Main Street. The country still hasn't recovered from the Wall Street-induced financial cataclysm of 2008, yet Congress is preparing to enact the Orwellian 'JOBS Act' - a bill that should in fact be called the 'Return Fraud to Wall Street in One Easy Step Act.' — Eliot Spitzer

Shania Twain brought a whole other fan base to country music with her sound, the way the videos were produced. — Faith Hill

She'd done things to him he thought only happened to characters in country-western songs, laying waste to his car, his dogs, driving him from his home, and making an outlaw of him. It was almost funny. — Joe Hill

life, can become the truth of your life. He imagined them in Paris trying to talk to each other. She'd give small lectures on the country's innovative health care system; he'd give similar disquisitions on French jurisprudence. That would get them through one day, maybe two. Then they'd start making small talk about whatever was in front of them at that moment: the charming Parisian streets, the weather, the waiters, the daylight that clung on until well past ten. Museums would be a good choice because of the enforced silence. But then they'd be at a restaurant looking at menus and she'd say what looked good and he'd say what looked good and they'd stare at the plates of other diners and point out those that also looked good and express how they were perhaps changing their mind about what they intended to — Nathan Hill

I was trying to learn about Lyndon Johnson when he was young and creating his first political machine in the Texas hill country. I moved there for three years. You had to learn that world. — Robert Caro

Recently the country has seen too much of our legislators, seeing them as a gaggle of check-kiting, judge-smearing deadbeats who don't pay their restaurant bills but raise their pay in the middle of the night. Many Americans-this columnist included-hitherto said tax increases are justified by the budget deficit now say: Give that mob more money? Never. Not a nickel of new taxes until term limits change the political culture on Capital Hill. — George Will

The thing about our country, Americans, and New Yorkers in particular, we all want to help. There's real folks who want to help. The problem is, they don't know how. They don't know how to get involved. — Hill Harper

Melody had heard some of these people from the Ukraine singing. He hadn't understood one word. Yet he didn't have to know the words to understand what they were wailing about. Words didn't count when the music had a tongue. The field hands of the sloping red-hill country in Kentucky sang that same tongue. — William Attaway

Let us resolve tonight that young Americans will always ... find there a city of hope in a country that is free ... And let us resolve they will say of our day and our generation, we did keep the faith with our God, that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill. — Ronald Reagan

In the hill country, civilization steals in last, and the people retain much of the crude but vigorous mode of expression of the colonial days and earlier. — Robert E. Howard

A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield. He was about to send his armies against a powerful foe, whose men outnumbered his own. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy's country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them. Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice - we win, or we perish! They won. — Napoleon Hill

Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale. — Susan Orlean

We got a lot of politicians up there on Capital Hill. Ain't it funny how they prosper while the country stands still? — Waylon Jennings

A man just can't earn a living wage selling Smurfpecker in this blighted nation. I have to tell you, heroin dealers and meth slingers have made your country a wretched place to be a simple, honest drug dealer who wants to give his customers a lovingly curated experience. Tom — Joe Hill

I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me.
They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction.
With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country. — Jake Wood

A revolution is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual the country in which they take place is going down-hill — Theodore Roosevelt

He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy's country, unloaded soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the ships that had carried them. Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, "You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice - we win, or we perish! They won. Every — Napoleon Hill

In East Sussex, let us say, an old farm sleeps in sun-dapple, its oast-house with its cowls echoing the distant steeple of SS Andrew and Mary, Fletching, where de Montfort had prayed and Gibbon now sleeps out a sceptic's eternity. The Sussex Weald is quiet now, its bows and bowmen that did affright the air at Agincourt long dust. A Chalk Hill Blue spreads peaceable wings upon the hedge. Easter is long sped, yet yellow and lavender yet ornament the land, in betony and dyer's greenweed and mallows. An inquisitive whitethroat, rejoicing in man's long opening of the Wealden country, trills jauntily from atop a wall. — G.M.W. Wemyss

And, of course, the sentences would often be strung together in stories, many of them set in the Hill Country. They were about drunks, and about preachers - there was one about the preacher who at a rural revival meeting was baptizing converts in a creek near Johnson City and became overenthusiastic. One teenage boy was immersed for quite a long time, and when his head was lifted out of the water, one of the congregation called out from the creek bank, "Do you believe?" The boy said, "I believe," and the preacher promptly put his head under again. Again, when he emerged, someone shouted out, "Do you believe?" and again the boy said, gasping this time, "I believe." Down he went again, and this time, when the preacher lifted his head up, someone shouted, "What do you believe?" "I believe this son of a bitch is trying to drown me," the boy said. — Robert A. Caro

We stand, when we are young, on the sunny slope among the pines, and look across an unknown country to the mountains. There are clouds, but they are edged with light. We do not fear as we dip into the valley; we do not fear the clouds. Thank God for the splendid fearlessness of youth. And as for older travelers whom the Lord has led over the hill and the dale, they have not been given the spirit of fear. They think of the way they have come since they stood on that bright hillside, and their word is always this: There are reasons and reasons for hope and for happiness, and never one for fear. — Amy Carmichael

Just as the towering myth of Abraham Lincoln - honest backwoods lawyer, spinner of yarns, righter of wrongs - tells only part of the truth, so, too, is the myth of America woefully incomplete. The country that Ronald Reagan once called "a shining city upon a hill" has, in fact, been tangled up in darkness since before she was born. Millions of souls have graced the American stage over the centuries, played parts both great and small, and made their final exits. But of all the souls who witnessed America's birth and growth, who fought in her finest hours, and who had a hand in her hidden history, only one soul remains to tell the whole truth. What follows is the story of Henry Sturges. What follows is the story of an American life. — Seth Grahame-Smith

I used to be a regular college student and now I go all over the country and stay at really nice hotels. — Steven Hill

I live in the country, so I get a fair amount of exercise. We heat our house with wood, so I split wood. We also live on a steep hill, and I have to rake and put in cross-stitches to keep the road from washing out when there's a big rain. — Pete Seeger

If everyone realized this truth about their own inherent power to create and to attract whatever they desired, not everyone would want to be the president of a country, not everyone would want to live on that mansion on the hill, and not everyone would want the same things you would. — Stephen Richards

How many of us would really leave our families, our jobs, our education, our friends, our connections, our familiar surroundings, and our homes if Jesus asked us to? If He just showed up and said, 'Follow Me'? No explanation. No directions. You could follow Him straight up a hill to be crucified. Maybe He would lead you to another country, and you would never see your family again. Or perhaps you would stay put, but He would ask you to spend your time helping people who will never love you back and never show gratitude for what you gave up. Consider this carefully- have you ever done so? Or was your decision to follow Christ flippant, based solely on feelings and emotion, made without counting the cost? — Francis Chan

My favorite country is America. I love going there! I go in the local lake near where I work on Sundays. It's called Berry Hill. — Tom Felton

I believe our country has to do whatever we can do to protect ourselves-we're king of the hill. We need to protect democracy and the lives of those who live in the free world. — Rick Yune

I love running cross-country ... You come up a hill and see two deer going, 'What the hell is he doing?' On a track I feel like a hamster. — Robin Williams

It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country. — Jon Meacham

Summer 2161: Brown, eleven, enrolled in Camp Longhorn by father over strenuous objections of mother. Typical outdoor summer camp in hill country of Texas — Arthur C. Clarke

Before success comes in any man's life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do. More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them. — Napoleon Hill

Fields and more fields on either side of the road.From where they are it looks as if the whole world were green.But from higher up,from a hill-if there were a hill in this flat country-or from a pyramid(one of the many that two thousand years ago lined this route from Thebes to Memphis,from the Delta to the Cataract)or from an aeroplane today,you would be able to see how narrow the strip green was,how closely it clung to the winding river.The river like a lifeline thrown across the desert, the villages and the town hanging on to it, clustering together, glancing over their shoulders at the desert always behind them.Appeasing it,finally,by making it the dwelling of their head. — Ahdaf Soueif

When Hillary's getting knocked around by the folks on the Hill is Bill going to go Larry King to knock her enemies around? Will he be going off to foreign countries on his own little diplomatic missions? I had assumed he'd remain a step in the background as he has through through most of this decade. But that doesn't seem to be the case. If the constitution allowed it, I'd happily have Clinton back. I'd happily have Hillary in his place. But I don't want them both. — Josh Marshall

The part of the Lake District that Beatrix Potter chose as her own was not only physically beautiful, it was a place in which she felt emotionally rooted as a descendant of hard-working north-country folk. The predictable routines of farm life appealed to her. There was a realism in the countryside that nurtured a deep connection. The scale of the villages was manageable. Yet the vast desolateness of the surrounding fells was awe-inspiring. It was mysterious, but easily imbued with fantasy and tamed by imagination. The sheltered lakes and fertile valleys satisfied her love of the pastoral. The hill farms and the sheep on the high fells demanded accountability. There was a longing in Beatrix Potter for association with permanence: to find a place where time moved slowly, where places remained much as she remembered them from season to season and from year to year. — Linda Lear

Charlie Manx laughed, the big, hoarse hee-haw of a country shithead who has just heard a joke involving a kike, a nigger, and a feminist. — Joe Hill

Country music is the people's music. It just speaks about real life and about truth and it tells things how they really are. — Faith Hill

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island. — Mordecai Richler

The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken cartwheel on the hill. — Wallace Stevens

Thirrin could be charming when she forgot to be a princess. But just recently that happened only rarely, and Totus was beginning to wonder what was on her mind. He thought perhaps he knew, but couldn't be sure. And how exactly would one ask the heir apparent if she was afraid that she'd have to rule the country before she was ready, and if she was afraid that she'd have to rule the country before she was ready, and if she was frightened that her father would die before she'd had time to experience life properly? — Stuart Hill

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now
North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere — Hector Tobar

When the sun was fully up, the gunslinger moved on west. He would find another horse eventually, or a mule, but for now he was content to walk. All that day he was haunted by a ringing, singing sound in his ears, a sound like bells. Several times he stopped and looked around, sure he would see a dark following shape flowing over the ground, chasing after as the shadows of our best and worst memories chase after, but no shape was ever there. He was alone in the low hill country west of Eluria. Quite alone. — Stephen King

Country music fans are extremely supportive. Once they're with you, they're with you for life. — Faith Hill

Every voter knew that the Family Party had come to power promising to deport Illegals, to manage its borders more efficiently and to ensure that people of traditional European stock weren't overrun in their own country. — Lawrence Hill

The coolest thing, too, is that people that have never even seen 'One Tree Hill' tell me, 'I love your music.' And I'm like, 'Oh, do you watch the show?' And they say 'No.' And to me that's even cooler because that means I'm actually starting to get country fans. — Jana Kramer

The wealth of the country, its capital, its credit, must be saved from the predatory poor as well as the predatory rich, but above all from the predatory politician. — James J. Hill

I go back five generations in Jamaica. My dad grew up in Port Royal, and my mom grew up in Kingston. My family is from the country like West Moreland and also in Manchester. I've been there countless times. As far as cuisine, there's not really much that comes out of Jamaica that's on a plate that I don't like. — Dule Hill

That's really the big inspiration of this movie. It's really looking at a man who's really showing all the traits and all the characteristics of the classic patriarchal country, where he's of military power, he's the king of the hill at home, as well as in the streets. He has the liberty to live where he wants. — Oren Moverman

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. — Alexander Pope

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. — Hemmingway Ernest

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: 'Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river'. — Edith Wharton

Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country; the taste strengthening as my successes became greater in proportion to the failures. — William Henry Jackson

Don't stop. Keep right on going. Hitch up your trailer and go to Canada or down to Old Mexico. Head for Europe if you can afford it, or go to Mardi Gras. Go someplace you've heard about, where you can fish or hunt or collect rocks or just look up at the sky. Find out what's at the end of some country road. Go see what's over the next hill, and the one after that, and the one after that. — Wally Byam

If we're going to kill our own people without even charging them with a crime, well, then we should just say we live in a different country, and stop telling the world that we're the sort of great, shining city on the hill. — Jeremy Scahill

The night was aromatic with the smell of autumn and the steely fragrance of freshly dampened blacktop. How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February. — Joe Hill

When, from the top of any high hill, one looks round the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one not only ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained, but one is astonished that any such thing as disaffection or irreligion should prevail. — William Cobbett

I feel like I have adopted the Philippines as my second country. — Dan Hill

I don't have many people showing up at my door. Very few people come out. When they do, I get a little suspicious. I live way up on a hill, way, way back in the country. — Robert Duvall

Sometimes all you need is to climb a simple hill, to spend time staring at an empty horizon, to jump into a cold river or sleep under the stars, or perhaps share a whisky at a small country inn in order to remind yourself what matters most to you in life. — Alastair Humphreys

I missed the country sounds on the radio. I missed the Deana Carters and the old Faith Hill songs that are more richly country and not so highly pop. So I really wanted that to be on my first album. — Jana Kramer

Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal. — Alan Paton

When I removed into the country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house, which had no piazza - a deficiency the more regretted, because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sunburnt painters painting there. — Herman Melville

I live with my family on the top of a hill in the country, and during the days, my house is quiet, save for the occasional excitement of the FedEx truck heading up the driveway. I write. — Dani Shapiro

To be 23 and riding the crest of a song sweeping the world country by country is to live an altered and wholly rarefied existence. — Dan Hill

How do I love Tim McGraw? Let me count the ways: I love that he's a country boy with a city sensibility. I love that he refuses to be pegged, and his duet with Nelly proves it. And I really love that he had the brains to marry Faith Hill. — Gayle King

Excuses. Everyone has an excuse. You see them get out of work on the weekend and they go out to the bar or are celebrating on vacation - what are you celebrating? You haven't created the success you want for your life yet! And the problem with America is not that people dream too big and miss, it's that they dream too small and hit! I mean, how did we get to the point in this country where the goal is to make fifty thousand dollars a year with four weeks of paid vacation and enough money to buy a Toyota?

From a conversation with Fabio Viviani — Chris Hill

The reality, sitting ten thousand miles away, is that we remain the country that inspires. We remain that shining city on a hill. — Jon Huntsman Jr.

Independence isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know. What country could be more independent than Russia? And in Russia now there isn't a squeak or a pinpoint of light. I have nowhere to publish. The Contemporary has stuck its head up out of harm's way. So I've stopped quarrelling with the world. I sat in this chair the first morning I woke up in this house ... and for the first time ... for a long time, there was silence. I didn't have to talk or think or move, nothing was expected of me, I knew nobody and nobody knew where i was, everything was behind me, all the moving from place to place, the quarrels and celebrations, the desperate concerns of health and happiness, love, death, printer's errors, picnics ruined by rain, the endless tumult of life ... and I just sat quiet and alone all day, looking at the tops of trees on Primrose Hill through the mist. — Tom Stoppard

I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. — Charlotte Bronte

Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dreams these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in the wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed. Somewhere down the hill hammers and saws were busy and country music was playing out of somebody's truck radio. Zoyd was out of smokes. — Thomas Pynchon

Bill Monroe spoke of bringing 'ancient tones' into his music with echoes of British and Irish fiddle and bagpipe music, while also delving deeply into American blues, gospel, folk hymnody, and hill country dance music. To that gumbo, he added the invigorating rhythms and harmonies of hot jazz. It was a new kind of American music, named in honor of his band The Blue Grass Boys to be known, simply, as bluegrass. — Paul Zollo