Open Fields Quotes & Sayings

the way you could hear outside in the open air - when the conditions were exactly right - the corn growing in the fields of my youth. — Elizabeth Strout

There should of course be left a field of work for the sake of experiment but at all times one must remember that there will always remain open a possibility of err. — Sri Aurobindo

The National Security Adviser is supposed to be an arbiter of policy and open minded in internal debates. But the playing field was never balanced. It was always tilted toward Rumsfeld's position, which is obviously the same as Bush's. — Seymour Hersh

Sleeper in the Valley
The river sings and cuts a hole in the meadow,
madly hooking white tatters on the rushes.
light escalades the strong hills. The small
valley bubbles with sunbeams like a beerglass.
The young conscript bareheaded and open-mouthed,
his neck cooling in the blue watercress;
he's sleeping. The grass soothes his heaviness,
the sunlight is raining in his green bed,
baking away the aches of his body. He smiles,
as a sick child might smile himself asleep.
O Nature, rock him warmly, he is cold.
The fields no longer make his hot eyes weep.
He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his breast lies open,
at peace. He has two red holes in his left side. — Robert Lowell

Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work. — Ken Kesey

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. They planted groves and walks of Plantanes, where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course, it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. — Henry David Thoreau

Working in an open air is a magic! If you are tired of the walls surrounding you, work in the fields to heal yourself! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'm from Kansas, so there were a lot of vacant lots and open fields to tackle each other in so we could avoid tackling each other on the street. But running on the street and trying not to get taken down on the concrete, that will make you fast, that's for sure. — Barry Sanders

When you grow up close to poultry and fields and gardens and open-air markets, you can't help but develop an instinct for quality food. — Alain Ducasse

When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. — Joseph Campbell

Whenever I am present, we are vigilant to give the same allotments to all who approach us." "But when you are absent?" Stephen turned and stared out the storeroom's open doorway. "The widows and orphans from the freedmen's group are perhaps the most vulnerable among us. Many come from outlying provinces. They include many former slaves, with no funds or income or place to stay. We help care for all their needs. Especially those without gardens, fields, or vineyards of their own." "And families to help," Abigail said softly. He looked at her. "If everyone had your giving heart and caring spirit, this situation would vanish. — Janette Oke

The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon. — James Carlos Blake

The race to be a leader is crowded, but the field is wide open for those willing to be servants — Rick Warren

It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to go. — Jo Baker

Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a 'crime' to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn't have it all life long, he said. Then the rolling fields of the valley leading up to the hills seemed to sit in a rising mist of olive green: sunflowers, grapevines, swatches of lavender, and those squat and humble olive trees stooping like gnarled, aged scarecrows gawking through our window as we lay naked on my bed, the smell of his sweat, which was the smell of my sweat, and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was, and all around us Mafalda's chamomile-scented laundry detergent, which was the torrid afternoon world of our house. — Andre Aciman

Where are the coconut trees bowing allegiance to the wind, the wide open spaces, the verdant green fields? — Renita D'Silva

Environmental historians ... insist that we have got to go ... down to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history. Here we will discover even more fundamental forces at work over time. And to appreciate those forces we must now and then get out of parliamentary chambers, out of birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into fields, woods, and the open air. It is time we bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them. — Donald Worster

I grew up driving old pickup trucks on the ranch with my dad, and I still always find myself driving like I'm out in an open field, except I'm in LA on La Cienega in the middle of rush-hour traffic. — Amber Heard

... bleak, wind-swept fens and moors; empty fields with broken walls and gates hanging off their hinges; a black, ruined church; an open grave; a suicide buried at a lonely crossroads; a fire of bones blazing in the twilit snow; a gallows with a man swinging from its arm; another man crucified upon a wheel; an ancient spear plunged into the mud with a strange talisman, like a little leather finger, hanging from it; a scarecrow whose black rags blew about so violently in the wind that he seemed about to leap into the grey air and fly towards you on vast black wings ... — Susanna Clarke

Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It's not mine. I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats; Of fields wide as arms open for me. This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key? — Toni Morrison

I believe I never was more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields. I now preach to ten times more people than I would if I had been confined to the churches. — George Whitefield

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability. — Daniel Dennett

could not picture that Father had once swung on a swing. He could not imagine that Father had once been a boy, like him. A boy. Carefree, light on his feet. Running headlong into the open fields with his playmates. Father, whose hands were scarred, whose face was crosshatched with deep lines of weariness. Father, who might as well have been born with shovel in hand and mud under his nails. — Khaled Hosseini

Of course he enticed them!" "Well now," said the sergeant, propping his bicycle carefully against one of our pumps. "This is a very hinterestin' haccusation, very hinterestin' indeed, because I hain't never 'eard of nobody hen-ticin' a pheasant across six miles of fields and open countryside. 'Ow do you think this hen-ticin' was performed, Mr. 'Azell, if I may hask?" "Don't ask me how he did it because I don't know!" shouted Mr. Hazell. "But he's done it all right! The proof is all around you! All my finest birds are sitting here in this dirty little filling station when they ought to be up in my own wood getting ready for the shoot!" The words poured out of Mr. Hazell's mouth like hot lava from an erupting volcano. "Am I correct," said Sergeant Samways, "am I habsolutely haccurate in thinkin' that today is the day of your great shootin' party, Mr. 'Azell? — Roald Dahl

Sometimes, sitting in the park with my boys, I imagine myself back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below - Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges. There is magic in these moments, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have never seen but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of sports. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind. — Charles Lindbergh

One quarter of a mile is, in metric terms, about 400 metres. I believe the world record for a man to cover this distance by use of his legs is about forty something seconds. At that time, I would have bet any amount of money that I would have beaten the world record at that distance as I sprinted like a tornado across the open farmer's fields. — Stephen Richards

A well-judging man will open his trunk-line of study in such a direction that, while habitually adhering to it, he may enjoy a ready access to such other fields of knowledge as are most nearly related to it. — James Fitzjames Stephen

I traded in my
freedom for
a needy, whiny
and defiant
four-year-old,
a junky girlfriend,
and a relationship
riddled with
someone else's
problems

Now, I stare
out of open
windows like
a wild mustang
craving open
fields

I clench my
crotch, where
my balls
used to be,
and I hum a
loathsome tune,
like an out-
of-work castrato
who's realized his
dreams of someday
having his own family
are gone — Phil Volatile

This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hand and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. Beyond the door, where the river is, where the roads are, we shall be. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it's getting late. I don't know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields. — Jeanette Winterson

It's not enough to open the window
To see the fields and the river.
It's also not enough to not be blind
To see the trees and the flowers.
It's also necessary to not have any philosophy at all.
With philosophy there are no trees, there are only ideas.
There's only each of us, like a wine-cellar.
There's only a shut window and the world outside it;
And a dream of what you could see if you opened the window,
Which is never what you see when you open the window. — Alberto Caeiro

This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. — William Wordsworth

Although psychotherapy and writing are distinct in many ways, they are two fields whose great resource is the vast plains of the unconscious mind and how this landscape gets translated into words. As a writer, you are often asking your mind to dream while awake, and if remembering dreams is difficult in general, then it seems to follow that it would be sometimes grueling to conjure up the murky depths on call, eyes open. (Robert M. Young) calls it madness, which is a strong word, but it's not a bad one in exaggeration, because he's talking about creating a safe and bound space in which to explore all sorts of darknesses that collect in the recesses of the mind. He's talking about what we do not understand, or know about, or have control over. And the unconscious, if treated well, is the writer's very good friend. Allowing it room is crucial. Allowing it structure can be the safest way to access it without feeling overwhelmed. — Aimee Bender

The sun will sink lower soon enough, turning the fields into open black space, ushering another day out, another day in
one after the next. — Allison Winn Scotch

On every full moon, rituals ... take place on hilltops, beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists, lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics
women and men from many backgrounds come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of the Dance of Life. The religion they practice is called Witchcraft. — Starhawk

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges. — Anton Chekhov

Winning a war such as this was not about planting flags or defending territory or building fancy villas. It was not about titles or promotions or offices. It was not about democracy or jihad, freedom or honor. It was about resisting the categories chosen for you; about stubbornness in the face of grand designs and schemas. About doing what you had to do, whether they called you a terrorist or an infidel. To win a war like this was to master the ephemeral, to plan a future while knowing that it could all be over in an instant. To comfort your children when the air outside throbs in the middle of the night, to squeeze your spouse's hand tight when your taxi hits a pothole on an open highway, to go to school or the fields or a wedding and return to tell about it. To survive. — Anand Gopal

I wanted a trumpet concerto that reflected Native American music because, well, there aren't any. I looked around for one but couldn't find anything. So it's a wide-open field. — Christopher Moore

I know exactly the potential of the people around here. They have the potential to lie. They have the potential to deceive. They have the potential to inveigle. They'll change nothing. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I lie awake thinking, my God! We have so much. We have these huge forests. We have boundless open fields. We can see the deepest, furthest horizons. Look around you. Look. We should be giants. We really, really aren't. — Anton Chekhov

God, we thank you for this earth, our homes; for the wide sky and the blessed sun, for the salt sea and the running water, for the everlasting hills and the never resting winds, for trees and the common grass underfoot. We thank you for our senses by which we hear the songs of birds, and see the splendor of the summer fields, and taste of the autumn fruits, and rejoice in the feel of the snow, and smell the breath of the spring. Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty; and save our souls from being so blind that we pass unseeing when even the common thorn bush is aflame with your glory. — Walter Rauschenbusch

Goodness is not in the backyard of the individual nor in the open field of the collective; goodness flowers only in freedom from both. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Upon Westminster Bridge
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still! — William Wordsworth

Don't you be worried or annoyed, Sancho, about any comments you hear, or there will never be an end to them. Keep a safe conscience and let people say what they like: trying to still gossips' tongues is like putting up doors in open fields. If the governor leaves office rich they say he's a thief, and if he leaves it poor they say he's a milksop and a fool. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. — H.P. Lovecraft

It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, "Now then, one, two, three!" and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time. — Kenneth Grahame

Two things I'm obsessed with are the countryside and fields and being in the open space and body parts, so you'll hear me mentioning body parts and human anatomy. I've listened to my songs and I think I am quite visual and I talk about bones and flesh a lot. — Ellie Goulding

No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different. — Carl Sagan

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them. — Jane Hirshfield

And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outline of things. — Virginia Woolf

Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest. — Albert Camus

THE TREE OF LIFE

The sun is rising,
And the ether dance at the first sight of his light,
As he ascends like a phoenix from the ashes of morality,
His luminous rays form the magnificent tree of life.
He springs up from the east,
Spreading his long arms like branches,
Over the horizons of milky meadows and open seas,
Extending his wings to embrace all living things.
He walks on water and grazes through fields,
Pouring his butter like honey to feed the Earth.
Towering over all of creation,
He who is the lamp of the universe,
The power source of all life.
And in his truth and light,
Everything becomes aroused
Like a flower,
And everything is given
Sight. — Suzy Kassem

The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house. — Robert Louis Stevenson

What are the liberal arts and sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued disinterestedly - that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical benefit. Disinterestedness doesn't mean that the professor is equally open to any view. Professors are hired because they have views about their subjects, views that exclude opposing or alternative views. Disinterestedness just means that whatever views a professor does hold, they have been arrived at unconstrained, or as unconstrained as possible, by anything except the requirement of honesty. — Louis Menand

I believe that the world has become more democratic and open. Women have become more outspoken, more active and competitive. They have achieved great accomplishments in many fields that were previously dominated by men. — Dalia Grybauskaite

Friendships are like plowed open fields ready for growth. What we plant is what will grow. If we plant seeds of reassurance, blessing, and love, we reap a great harvest of security. Of course, if we plant seeds of backbiting, questioning, and doubt, we reap a great harvest of insecurity. — Lysa TerKeurst

In the field of controversy I always pity the moderate party, who stand on the open middle ground exposed to the fire of both sides. — Edward Gibbon

It's open season; a season that lasts all year round. There are no permits required, no restrictions levied. Grab yourself a shotgun and head out into the open software fields to root out those pesky varmints, the elusive bugs, and squash them, dead. OK, reality is not as saccharin as that. — Anonymous

We have to reconcile ourselves with philosophical questions in every field. Every field should be open to inquiry and knowledge. — Tariq Ramadan

Everyone is entitled to a home where the sun, the stars, open fields, giant trees, and smiling flowers are free to teach an undisturbed lesson of life. — Jens Jensen

Each year they threw open the grounds of the manor house for a party attended by children from some of the roughest districts of Birmingham. They built a large hall known as The Barn in the park to provide tea and refreshments for up to seven hundred children. George Sr., with his love of nature, believed strongly that every child should have access to playing outside in clean air. Games were organized in the open fields, but the star attraction was the open-air baths. More than fifty children could bathe at any one time, and for the young visitors, most of whom had no access to a bath, it was thrilling. The sun on their backs, the sparkling water always inviting, the boys from the inner cities had no desire to leave and would stay in all day, until they were blue and shivering and cleaner than they had been in years. — Deborah Cadbury

The reaction of the people below to this fantastic sight and sound was one of wild excitement. Details could be seen vividly from aloft. An elderly man and woman fell to their knees and prayed. People in the villages stood still and gaped upward. Most of them still had their Sunday finery on. "You could see people going to church...man, wife, and child walking along the country roads." Bombardier Herbert Light, through his binoculars, saw an open-air festival in progress, with the women dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. One of them threw her apron over her head in panic.
As they roared over the wheat fields, the first unfriendly acts occurred: farmers threw stones and pitchforks at them. One farmer leading two horses was startled by the advancing planes and leaped into a nearby stream. A girl swimming in another river was reported by ten separate crews. — Leon Wolff

The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless
a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. — William Faulkner

With the opening of the New Year, all the closed portals of limitations will be thrown open and I shall move through them to vaster fields, where my worthwhile dreams of life will be fulfilled. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Once a person falls in the fields of love, all the rules are already broken; the lover becomes open an exalted in ways that transcend the local issues as well as the commonly held beliefs. Love, like genuine devotion, will find a way. Where duty becomes replaced with love, a greater and deeper faith will blossom forth. — Michael Meade

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles. — Charles Horton Cooley

While reason is still tracking down the secret, you end your quest on the open field of love. — Sanai

Criminality was so widespread that its practitioners split into fields of specialization. Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly tame); others became foists (pickpockets), nips, or nippers (cutpurses), hookers (who snatched desirables through open windows with hooks), abtams (who feigned lunacy to provide a distraction), whipjacks, fingerers, cross biters, cozeners, courtesy men, and many more. Brawls were shockingly common. — Bill Bryson

I've come down from the sky
like some damned ghost, delayed
too long ... To the abandoned fields
the trees returned and grew.
They stand and grow. Time comes
To them, time goes, the trees
Stand; the only place
They go is where they are.
Those wholly patient ones ...
They do no wrong, and they
Are beautiful. What more
Could we have thought to ask? ...
I stand and wait for light
to open the dark night.
I stand and wait for prayer
to come and find me here.
Sabbaths 2000 IX — Wendell Berry

In Charly Cruz's garage there was a mural painted on one of the cement walls. The mural was six feet tall and maybe ten feet long and showed the Virgin of Guadalupe in the middle of a lush landscape of rivers and forests and gold mines and silver mines and oil rigs and giant cornfields and wheat fields and vast meadows where cattle grazed. The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin's eyes was open and the other eye was closed. — Roberto Bolano

I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you could hear outside in the open air-when the conditions were exactly right-the corn growing in the fields of my youth...You cannot hear my heart breaking, and I know that part is true, but to me, they are inseparable, the sound of growing corn and the sound of my heart breaking. — Elizabeth Strout

And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed to enter and move familiarly through the house. The wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool danger. It was necessary to do what? ... to talk.
("Death Of A Traveling Salesman") — Eudora Welty

He had grown up among people to whom such emotions were unknown. The old Marquess's passion for his fields and woods was the love of the agriculturist and the hunter, not that of the naturalist or the poet; and the aristocracy of the cities regarded the country merely as so much soil from which to draw their maintenance. The gentlefolk never absented themselves from town but for a few weeks of autumn, when they went to their villas for the vintage, transporting thither all the diversions of city life and venturing no farther afield than the pleasure-grounds that were but so many open-air card-rooms, concert-halls and theatres. Odo's tenderness for every sylvan function of renewal and decay, every shifting of light and colour on the flying surface of the year, would have been met with the same stare with which a certain enchanting Countess — Edith Wharton

I am falling, tumbling through the air, but this time the darkness is alive around me, full of beating things, and I realize that I'm not surrounded by dark but have only had my eyes closed all this time. I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterlies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below us, all green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath me, and the air around me is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and I'm laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air because, of course, I haven't been falling all the time.
I've been flying. — Lauren Oliver

On the Gallows Once
Kofi Awoonor

I crossed quite a few
of your rivers, my gods,
into this plain where thirst reigns
I heard the cry of mourners
the long cooing of the African wren at dusk
the laughter of the children at dawn
had long ceased
night comes fast in our land
where indeed are the promised vistas
the open fields, blue skies, the singing birds
and abiding love?
History records acts
of heroism, barbarism
of some who had power
and abused it massively
of some whose progenitors
planned for them
the secure state of madness
from which no storm can shake them;
of some who took the last ships
disembarked on some far-off shores and forgot
of some who simply laid down the load
and went home to the ancestors — Kofi Awoonor

Recalling his childhood in later life, Adams wrote of the unparalleled bliss of roaming in the open fields and woodlands of the town, of exploring the creeks, hiking the beaches, "of making and sailing boats ... swimming, skating, flying kites and shooting marbles, bat and ball, football ... wrestling and sometimes boxing," shooting at crows and ducks, and "running about to quiltings and frolics and sances among the boys and girls." The first fifteen years o fhis life, he said, :went off like a fairytale". — David McCullough

If you have to be right, you put yourself in a hedged lane, but once you experience the power of not having to be right, you will feel like you are walking across open fields, the perspective wide and your feet free to take any turn. — John Naisbitt

Positive assumptions are needed only when you have negative assumptions that you're trying to overcome. But when you drop your assumptions altogether, your soul stands naked in the open fields of possibility. And what you choose to create from that space is up to you. — T.K. Coleman

In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by graduation. — Charles Darwin

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched. — Malcolm X

Behind him the hill are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. — Thomas Hardy

But like a forest I rise,
like a plateau I open,
I writhe like roads and fields.
I push up trees till they meet with heaven,
with the whisper of my trees I embrace the feet of the sky
I grow around my hips a thick and bouncing grass,
a thousand ravenous root mouths gorge my breasts.
My blood I give to the orchid,
hanging black trinkets on its ankles and wrists,
when it stands with its hardened stem,
in the dusk along the roads.
My feet numb in the dew I give to the Parnassus grass,
as it lifts its black cross towards the moon. — Marja-Liisa Vartio

For a mile up and down the open fields before us the splendid lines of the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia swept down upon us. Their bearing was magnificent. They came forward with a rush, and how our men did yell, 'Come on, Johnny, come on!' — Rufus Dawes

It can hit at any time [anxiety/panic attack]. You feel like you're in an open field, and there's a tornado coming at you. And you're just consumed by it. — Kim Basinger

On the far side of the bay was the command station that controlled the door, which was currently semi-open. Rather than the normal closed maw of steel, there was a network of pulsing gold veins crisscrossing the gaping mouth of black - a nitrogen membrane keeping the molecular air contained and pressurized while allowing aircraft to pass through. — April Adams