Nothing But My Feet And The Pavement Quotes & Sayings

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization. — Barbara Kingsolver

The Mass. Ave. Bridge is open... Some MIT students once measured it by repeatedly placing an undergraduate named Smoot on the ground and marking off his length. Every six feet or so there is still the indication of one smoot, two smoots, painted on the pavement. I could never remember how many smoots long the bridge was. — Robert B. Parker

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe. — Gary Snyder

Mother!" he cried. "Darling, sweetheart, wait!" Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, "Mamma, Mamma!" He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed. "Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow. — Flannery O'Connor

And then I feel something else. Something that's totally new. I feel the tiniest sensation of hope. Maybe my life isn't over. Maybe my life has just begun. — Blake Nelson

It was like walking into another world. While the mansion was bright, warm, comfy and filled with sound and color, the outside was dark, cold, colorless and devoid of people.
I found myself standing beside Thomas in the street. The paved road felt so cold it was hurting my feet. I kept moving them up and down, afraid my skin would freeze to the pavement. My heart was racing already and I felt a bit out of breath. If we stood there much longer i was going to hyperventilate. — J.C. Joranco

and turned into Bartholomew Close; and now I became aware that other people were waiting about for Mr. Jaggers, as well as I. There were two men of secret appearance lounging in Bartholomew Close, and thoughtfully fitting their feet into the cracks of the pavement as they — Charles Dickens

The cat crossed the street daintily, pointing his feet like a ballet dancer, lifting them high as if his feet were too good for the pavement. — Vera Caspary

I often wonder how different the world would be if Hitler had not been turned down when he applied to art school. — George Carlin

So who's lucky number three?
No answer.
I turn around to look at him again.
No.
He grins.
Now I get it, I tell him. You're stalking me. — Cynthia Hand

Tired are my feet, that felt today the pavement;
Tired are my ears, that heard of tragic things-
Tired are my eyes, that saw so much enslavement;
Only my voice is not too tired. It sings. — Aaron Kramer

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life - for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning. — Evelyn Waugh

I think that in many ways, gays are behind women and behind blacks, as far as rights go. But I always say, if you know one of us, it's hard to hate us. — Lesley Gore

Quincy and Fisher walked through all this in silence. Silence was the most common stock-in-trade between them, and the portfolio of their friendship was thick with it. So, without words, they stepped across the streets, their feet pressing the pavement with the same sounds, their toes turned just so; they knew what life was like at each other's side. Sometimes he would speak, or she would, small offerings on the altar of their joint survival. — Beth Brower

Social media itself is not protest. To tweet is not to protest physically. To do a Facebook post, and though it's critical and crucial, is not to show up and embody the anger you feel, to embody the righteous outrage you feel, to embody the concern you feel. This is about putting feet to pavement and to register in the consciousness of America that this is something that's problematic. — Michael Eric Dyson

Instead, I woke early the next morning, before sunrise, and went out into the world. I walked past my car. I stepped onto the pavement, still warm from the previous day's sun. I started walking. In bare feet, I traveled upriver toward the place where I was born and will someday die. At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon. — Sherman Alexie

I didn't look over my shoulder; there wasn't a sound behind me on the pavement, but I knew he was coming slowly after me. The crawl of the skin up and down my back told me. Little needles of warning that gathered at the back of my skull told me. I'd never known until then that the jungles aren't so very far behind us, after all, and tails, and four feet instead of two. Where else did those symptoms come from?
("Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight") — Cornell Woolrich

Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. — Charles Dickens

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement. — Virginia Woolf

I'm not into politics. I'm into survival. — Ben Richards

It's the way that life asserts itself, no matter what the circumstances. Of course it must be a miserable existence. How could it not be? Yet those little girls manage to live; to breathe; to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that's the word. They adjust and they reach for the stars in their own way. I tell you it's wondrous to me. They make me think of the wild flowers that grow in the cracks of pavement, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down. — Anne Rice

When he starts to fall asleep, he keeps his arms around me fiercely, a life-preserving prison. But I wait, kept awake by the thought of bodies hitting pavement, until his grip loosens and his breathing steadies.
I will not let Tobias go to Erudite when it happens again, when someone else dies. I will not.
I slip out of his arms. I shrug on one of his sweatshirts so I can carry the smell of him with me. I slip my feet into my shoes. I don't take any weapons or keepsakes.
I pause by the doorway and look at him, half buried under the quilt, peaceful and strong.
"I love you," I say quietly, trying out the words. I let the door close behind me.
It's time to put everything in order. — Veronica Roth

own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible - it was not good for one either - trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land - I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you? - with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums - how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude - utter solitude without a policeman - by the way of silence, utter silence, — Joseph Conrad

Failure
Because God put His adamantine fate
Between my sullen heart and its desire,
I swore that I would burst the Iron Gate,
Rise up, and curse Him on His throne of fire.
Earth shuddered at my crown of blasphemy,
But Love was as a flame about my feet;
Proud up the Golden Stair I strode; and beat
Thrice on the Gate, and entered with a cry
All the great courts were quiet in the sun,
And full of vacant echoes: moss had grown
Over the glassy pavement, and begun
To creep within the dusty council-halls.
An idle wind blew round an empty throne
And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls. — Rupert Brooke

If you don't want to live in self-deceit in a new year, miracle must not be your focus — Sunday Adelaja

beetle-spirited vaporing — Richard Adams

I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast ... would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it. — Thomas Jefferson

However it might go, I should have no regrets. If I should be reduced to begging in the street, then I should enjoy the feel of pavement beneath my feet and the odors of asphalt and automobile exhausts. Good and bad fortune were equally attractive when viewed in such a context. Hunger was as interesting as satiety. A life without sight was as interesting as life with sight. Who was to say different? Society? The bulk of humanity?
They were living their first lives, cautiously aware that someday they would die. They had everything to lose. They could not take the risks. But I had been through death, had my insides burned out by it twice.
I was living a second life, freed of those cautious awarenesses.
I had nothing to lose. I could take all the risks. — John Howard Griffin

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself ... A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us. — John Steinbeck

They will tremble with awe because of all the good and all the peace I will bring about for them. Jeremiah 33:9 God does not minimize the things that break our hearts. He is not looking down on us, thinking how petty we are because things have hurt us. If we are so "heavenly minded" that we grow out of touch with earthly hardships, we've missed an important priority of Christ. God left our bare feet on the hot pavement of earth so we could grow through our hurts, not ignore and refuse to feel our way through them. So surrender your hurt to Him, withholding nothing, and invite Him to work miracles from your misery. Be patient and get to know Him through the process of healing. — Beth Moore

You're like that single wild flower that grows from the crack in the pavement: miraculous growth with no water source or fertile soil. A person walking by would step around that flower to avoid crushing it. It's not like the field of wild flowers you tromp through carelessly, crushing them under your feet, knowing that the next day will bring a hundred more. — J.B. Salsbury

The pavement artist thought for a bit, then agreed. 'I can start tomorrow morning.'
'Good, good. But one question. Will you be able to draw enough to cover 300 feet? I mean, do you know enough different gods to fill the whole wall?'
The artist smiled. 'There is no difficulty. I can cover 300 miles if necessary. Using assorted religions and their gods, saints, and prophets. Hindu, Sikh, Judaic, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Jainist. Actually, Hinduism alone can produce enough. But I always like to mix them up, include a variety in my drawings. Makes me feel I am doing something to promote tolerance and understanding in the world. — Rohinton Mistry

Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement. — Ann Patchett

I forced myself to let my belly relax into a deeper breath. I closed my eyes and felt the solidity of the pavement beneath my feet and the rock beneath that, felt the density of the earth hugging me to it, felt it spinning on its axis, felt it hurtling through space in its trip around the sun, felt th solar system whirling through space as part of our galaxy, felt the flight of galaxies escaping from the site of that primal explosion we call the big bang. Always in times of stress, if I contemplated the vastness of the universe, I did in some measure relax, comforted by the knowledge that I was but a small speck in creation after all, a mote in the enormity of God's eye, a fleeting arrangement of atoms that would in due time cycle back into the earth from which I had come and be reshuffled into something else, blended back into the grace of the natural world. In my very insignificance did I find my immortality. pp 113-114 — Sarah Andrews

I see my skeleton walking down the street now. I'm walking behind it. Our feet touch the ground at the same time. I am my own shadow. The road we're walking along looks familiar. The trees lining the pavement have been bleached by the sun. There are stone steps on my left. I climb them. This is the route I used to take after school. It's very dark. The skeleton has disappeared. — Ma Jian

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. — Barbara Kingsolver

It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. In her first despair she is not satisfied to tread the path with her feet: she is determined to crawl it on her knees, choosing the way that is steepest and roughest. She desires no helping hand and will not lift her head--let it sink down with its own heaviness, so that she may put her face to the ground and taste the dust with her tongue! — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Who is respectable when thinking himself alone and free from observation will be so before the eye of all the world. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

When I was really young, I gravitated towards the visual arts first. I feel that's what comes most naturally to me. I've always had an immediate proclivity towards making visual art and I was a really tactile kid. — John Dyer Baizley