Out Of This Town Quotes & Sayings

Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside? — Richard Hugo

I recently saw a restaurant in the U.S. that boasted of serving authentic African cuisine. Africa is a big place. The distance from Tangier, in Morocco, to Cape Town, in South Africa, is over five times more than the distance from London to Rome. Yet, we don't compare tortellini with Yorkshire pudding. This so-called 'authentic African cuisine' featured dishes from what looked like two or three north African countries. When I looked through the kitchen window, out of curiosity, I saw Asian staff and what appeared to be a Mexican chef. Multiculturalism is a good thing, but — Danielle Hugh

Well ... yes, and here we go again. But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter - (and, yes, it appears that I do) - so why not make this quick list of my life's work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not? But for just a moment I'd like to say, for the permanent record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o'clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, 2000 miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain. Very strange. — Hunter S. Thompson

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. — Cormac McCarthy

In winter this town is freezing. You step out your door in the morning and the whole place looks like one of those nature specials in which a guy brings a camcorder to the North Pole and then the camera cuts out and you hear on the news that he got eaten by a bear — Flynn Meaney

In the loveliest town of all where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla. — E.B. White

In tangled wreath, in clustered gleaming stars,
In floating, curling sprays,
The golden flower comes shining though the woods
These February days;
Forth go all hearts, all hands, from out the town,
To bring her gayly in,
This wild, sweet Princess of far Florida -
The yellow jessamine. — Constance Fenimore Woolson

In this town of towheaded drunks, [his daughter] would bear the weight of her difference, doled out in murmurs, taunts, and shoves. But now it occurred to Victor that she would suffer more than he ever had because, unlike him, she had been loved, and her punishment would come as a surprise. — Anya Ulinich

People do. But, Daddy, it's not right. I didn't know you even cared for Addie Moore. Or even knew her that well. You're right. I didn't. But that's the main point of this being a good time. Getting to know somebody well at this age. And finding out you like her and discovering you're not just all dried up after all. It just seems embarrassing. To whom? It's not to me. But people know about you. Of course they do. And I don't give a damn. Who told you? It must've been one of your tightass friends in town here. It was Linda Rogers. She would. Well, she thought I should know. And now you do. — Kent Haruf

Ninety-nine percent of girls want to be models because they believe it will mean that they are the most beautiful women in the world. They think that they will wear expensive clothes, makes loads of money, travel a lot and have a rock star for a boyfriend. This never interested me. I didn't want anyone to scream out my name. I wanted to make art, to create an image with a photographer. And yes, I wanted to get out of Clinton, Mississippi - a small town that was so closed-minded you can't even imagine. — Crystal Renn

You're a good man," Fang said. "You're the last good man in this whole town. All the good that could be squeezed out of this forsaken place was used to make you. That's why you're so small, my friend: there just wasn't that much left." Fang laughed. "and that's why you can see us, you know, and nobody else can. You see everybody, even that lumberjack. — Daniel Wallace

He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air. He scowled, sniffed some more. He pressed an intercom button on the wall.
"Betty, I distinctly smell sewage. Could you get a plumber out here ASAP?"
Several curly hairs fluttered in the air after he was gone.
I clutched at the arm of the dentist chair.
"This isn't a joke, Tub! I'm in trouble. We're all in trouble, the whole town, the whole world! You have no clue. You have no idea what kind of things we're dealing with here. There's a whole land of
— Guillermo Del Toro

Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus. — Sylvia Plath

Hearing my brother's words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss - wild and wired with no place to put those feelings. — Laura Anderson Kurk

One day, The road came. The road brought with it beer and cigarettes. The road brought Coca-Cola and disposable razors. The road brought all the wonderful things that we westerners know and hold close. But where did the road go? A few of the younger men decided to find out. They rode a buffalo cart along the road until they came to a town and then a train station. They hid in a bunch of rice sacks and took the train to the city, to the lights, to the jobs. There was this thing called money, with it you could buy stuff. You could gamble, drink, and be merry. After a period of two years, one of the young men returned to the village driving a new car. He showed the villagers all the beautiful things that he had bought. He said that there was work for everyone in the cities. He took another young man and two young women with him. They were pretty in a rural way and very hungry for money. Money was good. They liked it. It was a great adventure. — James A. Newman

I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up, — Larry Klayman

The food thing is crazy to me. In this town the beer thing is also crazy to me. Frankly even with Brightest Young Things, it's such a celebration of [beer and food], all this stuff. I don't think it's bad or evil, but there's something out of bounds. It's like, "A bar opened!" Who cares? Think about that. — Ian MacKaye

The streets were full of destruction and rubble, and this town I'd never liked, with its stupid people, stupid streets, and stupid houses, was now unrecognisable, now it had a truly unique beauty, and scantily-clad women traversed it like ghosts. A twelve-storey building in the city centre had totally collapsed. Caught up in her bed sheets, a woman who had fallen from the top floor found herself alive and alone on the pavement. Her husband had been thrown out of bed. From now on she would sleep forever, since reality was now as extraordinary as dreams. — Gherasim Luca

Cynicism is idealism turned inside out. It stems from an expectation unrealized and a promise perverted. That is so much of Washington today in a nutshell. — Mark Leibovich

I thought about how I had come to know him a little bit over the last few months and how he was now getting out, escaping from prison, just like he always said he would. I realized I wanted to escape as well. I wanted to leave this town and this lousy job, go home, collect my family, and drive away to Washington State, Colorado, the Florida Keys, or up to northern New England and find a new job where I wasn't exposed to the worst parts of the worst people every day. — Robert Reilly Jr.

There are the stars
doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk ... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. — Thornton Wilder

The reason for the peculiar name could be found in the whimsical sense of humor of the early colonists who arrived on Deanna several decades in the past and found very little at all there to laugh at. Obsidian Crows might seem funny at first, unless you just happened to ride over one with your Jeepo five miles out of town and didn't have a spare tire. Although there was a reasonable expectation of hitting one of these diminutive brutes on the roads, this did not happen nearly as often as you might think. — Christina Engela

I love playing in the UK because there are some topics that you just can't talk about in the States without getting run out of town. So let me just say this: Louis C. K.'s new show sucks. — Doug Stanhope

The difference in this town - here in Washington - on the war is not between Democrats and Republicans; it's between people who believe essentially we've already lost in Iraq and it's time to get out - and most of the rest of us who believe not only have we not lost, but we're winning. — Joe Lieberman

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out. — Stephen King

He's seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all of those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter.
So much more that he'll never see. So much more that he'll never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it's forever beyond his reach. — Patrick Ness

For many people it is depressing even to move house. A lost fragment of life always remains. To move to another town, settle in a foreign country, is for everyone a major decision. But, to be suddenly driven forth, within twenty-four hours, from one's home, one's work, the reward of years of steady industry. To become a helpless prey of help. To be sent defenceless out to Asiatic highroads, with several thousand miles of dust, stones, and morass before one. To know that one will never again find a decently human habitation, never again sit down to a proper table. Yet this is all nothing. To be more shackled than any convict. To be counted as outside the law, a vagabond, whom anyone has the right to kill unpunished. — Franz Werfel

He looked up from the paper he was scribbling on and offered
her a lopsided grin. "Hey, sweet pea. You bring me anything
special?"
The lopsided bit wasn't odd, but there was something forced
about it. "Got a fresh bag of cat food outside." Cat food that she'd
bought with the twenty he'd left to pay for his ice cream.
He pushed his makeshift drum set aside and rose with a
stretch. "Words every man dreams of hearing. Make my night if
you say you got catnip too."
She tried not to giggle. She tried hard.
But she couldn't help herself. "Extra strength," she said.
This time, his grin came out bigger, less forced. "Woman of
my dreams."
"In your dreams," she said. — Jamie Farrell

The Silence took your friend."
Nobody says What's the Silence?
Satan Says, "It is a creature that came out of the walm. Large as a lake, this creature,
but it's not made of water. It is made of sound. And it feeds off of sound, or anything
that makes sound, or anything that can hear sound. It will empty this entire world of
sound if we let it. It claims this side of town its territory. Anybody that's out on the street
is at risk. It will eat anything that it hears and your friend must have been something it
heard. He will never come back. Nobody ever escapes from the stomach of Silence. — Carlton Mellick III

Don Quixote took windmills for giants and sheep for armies; d'Artagnan took every smile for an insult and every glance for a provocation. As a result of which he kept his fist clenched from Tarbes to Meung, and all in all brought his hand to the pommel of his sword ten times a day; however the fist never landed on any jaw, and the sword never left its scabbard. Not that the sight of the wretched yellow nag did not spread many smiles across the faces of passersby; but since above the nag clanked a sword of respectable size, and above this sword shone an eye more fierce than proud, the passersby restrained their hilarity, or, if hilarity won out over prudence, they tried at least to laugh on one side only, like antique masques. D'Artagnan thus remained majestic and intact in his susceptibility until that unfortunate town of Meung. — Alexandre Dumas

My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." " ... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita. — Vladimir Nabokov

You ain't too smart, are ya boy? I'm Javier "Bones" Jones. I'm the baddest man there is in this town or any town through The Mississippi. You thinking you're gonna waltz up on me and kill me? Ha! I'll do for you like I did for my late dog and put you out of your misery. — Justin Bienvenue

Somewhere, things must be beautiful and vivid. Somewhere else, life has to be beautiful and vivid and rich. Not like this muted palette -a pale blue bedroom, washed out sunny sky, dull green yellow brown of the fields. Here, I know ever twist of every road, every blade of grass, every face in this town, and I am suffocating. — Lisa Ann Sandell

I'm going to get out. Her spirits lurched unsteadily into the air like a wounded pigeon. I'm going to get out of this wormpit of a town. And I will never, never come back here again. — Frances Hardinge

I told her if she really cared about me, then she'd let me do whatever I wanted for my birthday, just like Mom did when I was twelve."
"What happened when you were twelve?"
"Oh, Mom offered to take us all out for dinner - us girls, Dad was out of town - to celebrate, but I didn't want to. This book I'd been waiting for had just come out, and the only thing I wanted to do was read it all night."
"My God," I said, touching the top of her nose. "You're adorable."
She swatted me away. "Anyway, Carly and Zoe really wanted to go out so that they could score a meal, but Mom just said, 'It's her birthday. Let her do whatever she wants.'"
"Your mom is cool. — Richelle Mead

Because here's the thing. We can do a lot in thirty-five days." He sat on the bed and pulled her down next to him. "I mean, think about books and movies. You can watch a great love story in two hours, right? Or read one in maybe two days? So imagine what we can do with thirty-five. We can celebrate a whole year of holidays. We can lock the door at night and turn the music up and memorize each other. We can taste and smell and touch every single thing we love about this whole town, so we never forget, no matter who we turn into out there." He hugged her hands tightly with his. "And then when it's time to leave each other, we'll go off smiling into the future, and we won't be distracted by all that 'when will I find true love' stuff people always worry about because they don't know how it feels. Because we'll already know how it feels. And if neither one of us ever gets another great love story, this one will be enough to last our whole entire lives. — J.C. Lillis

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. — James W. Loewen

Matt asked me to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a relatively young sketch group. They needed a girl. I had heard of their shows around town, which seemed like a mixture of improvisation and performance art. They had done a show where each member sat on a street corner and had a Thanksgiving dinner. They did a show where they pretended a member was committing suicide. They did a show where they took an audience member for a virtual-reality tour out into the streets of Chicago. Most of their stuff was about getting the audience out of their chairs and out of their comfort zone. The Upright Citizens Brigade name came from a fake big bad corporation that was mentioned in one of their shows. The idea was this group had co-opted the name and was causing chaos on purpose - picture Occupy Wall Street if they renamed themselves "Halliburton Inc." Like I said, Matt had big ideas. He had a big plan for the UCB and I wanted to be part of it. I grabbed his coattails and held on tight. — Amy Poehler

There are things I need to say first. Things you need to hear before we go any further."
She tensed. "Oh, God, are you married?"
He chuckled. "No, nothing like that."
"Good," she replied, letting out a relieved breath.
"I want you to know you've made this very difficult for me. I had a speech prepared. Then I see you like this." His finger continued to trail down her stomach, tracing the rim of her panties. "And I can't even remember my damn name. — Stacey O'Neale

There comes a moment when having everything seems to be the only way to squeeze even a little out of life. There comes a day when this job, this home, this town, this family all seem irritating and deficient beyond the bearable. There comes a period in life when I regret every major decision I've ever made. This is precisely the time when the spirituality of stability offers its greatest gift. Stability enables me to outlast the dark, cold places of life until the thaw comes and I can see new life in this uninhabitable place again. But for that to happen I must learn to wait through the winters of my life. — Joan D. Chittister

As an old-time small-town merchant, I can tell you that nobody has more love for the heyday of the smalltown retailing era than I do. That's one of the reasons we chose to put our little Wal-Mart museum on the square in Bentonville. It's in the old Walton's Five and Dime building, and it tries to capture a little bit of the old dime store feel. But I can also tell you this: if we had gotten smug about our early success, and said, "Well, we're the best merchant in town," and just kept doing everything exactly the way we were doing it, somebody else would have come along and given our customers what they wanted, and we would be out of business today. — Sam Walton

Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of the earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from the earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung food from it and from the food, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But not for the first time, such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than life itself - clothes upon the body of his son. — Pearl S. Buck

I don't need to be dead to see something like that. Besides, I know you pretty well by now. You better slow down before you run out of eligible men. This is a small town. — J.J. Cook

Every weekend we've been trying to go out of town, to let people know about this album. I've been trying to host parties. It's hard, because it's a lot of work to do both. — Angie Martinez

So I hear we get to go to town this weekend. Want to catch a movie or something?
Z
P.S. That is, if Jimmy doesn't mind.
Translation: This weekend might be a good chance for us to see each other outside our school in a social environment, free of competetiton. I do not view other boys as threats, and I enjoy making them seem insignificant by calling them the wrong names. (Translation by Macey McHenry) — Ally Carter

Had his room been facing west he would have noted the sparkling twenty-five-mile vista to the sea which looks almost like the Mediterranean. He would have noted how the streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath. How laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight. Had he been facing seaward on a balcony overlooking the city the writer might have heard drifting out of a tiny apartment window the optimistic voice of a shower singer imbued with the conviction that this is a place where it is possible to be happy. — Steve Martin

You don't really have to go anywhere in particular in New York City to have a good time. In every part of town, there's always something going on. It helps to know people there, too, because everything changes so fast, and they will be able to point out what's hot this month. — Tibor Fischer

Soon after this incident the court rose. As I was being taken from the courthouse to the prison van, I was conscious for a few brief moments of the once familiar feel of a summer evening out-of-doors. And, sitting in the darkness of my moving cell, I recognized echoing in my tired brain, all the characteristic sounds of a town I'd loved, and of a certain hour of the day which I had always particularly enjoyed. The shouts of newspaper boys in the already languid air, the last calls of birds in the public garden, the cries of sandwich vendors, the screech of streetcars at the steep corners of the upper town, and that faint rustling overhead as darkness sifted down upon the harbor. All these sounds made my return to prison like a blind man's journey along a route whose every inch he knows by heart. — Albert Camus

The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history. — Douglas Adams

He'd been looking for me? I forced myself to remain cool about this, to not pump my fist in the air. I wondered where I'd been. Probably swimming in my pool or driving around town or sprawled out on my bed and thinking about him. There was something beautiful about the idea of us reaching invisibly across town for each other. — Nick Burd

Haven't you ever wanted something so bad that it becomes more than a want? I need to get out of this town. I need it like I need to breathe. — Alwyn Hamilton

My family's going to eat as long as anybody eats. What they're trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That's what I hear. I hear they're buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they're going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists. — Ernest Hemingway,

I sighed. What was the use? How could I compete with thousands of free samples? This street fair was supposed to be my way to attract more customers, to get the word out that I had the best baked goods in town, and I couldn't even get anyone to stop and try them. "Hey there," a kind voice called — Stacey Alabaster

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit's power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension. — Alan Hirsch

What I finally did in 1995 was I said, I'm going to get out of this town and I'm going to go out West. — Bruce Babbitt

Let's get this straight. He told you his name? Yes. Now - I like that ... I like that! He's been giving me gyp for years, simply because I could have spilled the beans, and now he's telling any old broad he meets, free of charge! Who else knows? Faquarl? Nouda? Did he deck his name out in neon lights and parade it round the town? I ask you! And I never told anyone! — Anonymous

Your mother can't hear you here."
"Distance is no match for my mother's eavesdropping and mind-reading skills."

"I had steel anti-mind-reading plates installed this week. Specially designed to be Marilyn-proof. Also sounds an alarm if she gets within two hundred yards of the building, and I sent the guards downstairs to ninja training. You're safe. — Jamie Farrell

We've been together for seven years. Can I really just walk out in the middle of a date and not look back?" #shinersbayou #book2

"How in tarnation do you lose a police car?" -Sheriff Hall #shinersbayou

"I know it's probably not the most romantic end to an otherwise charming night, but have you ever shot a shotgun before?" #shinersbayou #book2

#shinersbayou "No offense, but this is a small town, and if you're not from around here, the law around here doesn't care about you."-Eddie — Gen Griffin

I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were. — Bob Colacello

had occurred to very few in the hopeful-starlet community that regular features and low body weight might not after all be counted on to buy you a thing that mattered. The shock of the Cielo Drive murders was bad enough out in civilian life, but the impact on Shasta and her friends was paralyzing. You could be the sweetest girl in the business, smart with your money, careful about dope, aware of how far to trust people in this town, which was not at all, you could be nice to everybody - focus pullers, grips, — Thomas Pynchon

I lived in London for a long time, and that's a pretty white town. In Toronto, I just ended up in this circle of indie rock kids who happened to be white, too ... Really, it was just when I started getting out there and meeting more people and seeing more fans that I went, 'Oh, actually, I'm not white.' — Bryan Lee O'Malley

He ordered Ronan to put on some terrible music
Ronan was always too happy to oblige in this department
and then he abused the Camaro at every stoplight on the way out of town. "Put your back into it!" Gansey shouted breathlessly. He was talking to himself, of course, or to the gearbox. "Don't let it smell fear on you!" Blue wailed each time the engine revved up, but not unhappily. Noah played the drums on the back of Ronan's headrest. Adam, for his part, was not wild, but he did his best not to appear unwild, so as not to ruin it for the others. — Maggie Stiefvater

He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion ... no, make that: he - he romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. — Woody Allen

A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. — Karl Ove Knausgard

We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring. — Richard Bach

Solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen.
***
Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again. — Virginia Woolf

Well, friend, I don't know about your tastes, but I tend to like it very bloody," Myrnin said. He shifted position, dragging Claire along like a rag doll without any effort at all. "Have we been introduced?"
"Probably not. Why, are you asking me out, sweetheart?"
"You're not my type, darling. Is this one yours?"
"No," Frank said, and looked at Shane, just in a quick flicker. "Let's say she's a friend of the family. — Rachel Caine

Every town has a psychopath or two. Not just the everyday crazy person, either. Not like Crazy Larry, the paint huffing weirdo peddling around town on a child-sized Huffy ranting about the end of the world, or the old lady dressed in rags who hands out filthy doll clothes to the kiddies. I'm talking about the cold, never remorseful lunatic, who may never have seemed insane up until the day he hacked apart his mother and shoved her stinking corpse into the attic. This town is overflowing with them; bloodcurdling murderers like Kenny Wayne Hilbert, Charlie Fender ... Orland Winthro. And Al, the crazy had to come from somewhere. — Nikki Ferguson

They put all this money into these huge films and then no one goes to see them. That sort of shows they're out of touch. Then everyone in town passes on my little movie and it does really well. — Zach Braff

The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child's green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its own back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in bedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that. — Virginia Woolf

In the years that she had been tying scraps to the branches, the tree had died and the fruit had turned bitter. The other apple trees were hale and healthy, but this one, the tree of her remembrances, was as black and twisted as the bombed-out town behind it. — Kristin Hannah

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this. — Michael Eric Dyson

You take a deep breath and you walk through the doors. It's the morning of your very first day. You say hi to your friends you ain't seen in a while, try and stay out of everybody's way. It's your freshman year and your gonna be here for the next four years in this town. Hopin' one of those senior boys will wink at you and say, "You know I haven't seen you around before." 'Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them. And when you're fifteen, feelin' like there's nothin' to figure out, but, count to ten, take it in. This is life before you know who you're gonna be. Fifteen. — Taylor Swift

Being in this business for as long as I've been in it, it's sort of like living in a town or a city before the war and then after the war and then during the reconstruction and then during the time that it sprawls out to the malls. — Carly Simon

33/ Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick. — Kim Addonizio

God of the gaps" Christianity seeks to present Christianity as playing a strong savior role whereby it fills the gaps and provides the missing links for all of society's questions and concerns. This entails the view of God riding into town and miraculously saving the day (deus ex machina). On this view, God delivers his people from their (and his) enemies - in Bonhoeffer's case, the Nazis. In contrast, in Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer writes that God allows us to push him out of the world and onto the cross. — Paul Louis Metzger

Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle? - the burning of Rome in Nero's time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!' Why, THAT ain't a picture! — Mark Twain

By the spring of 1963, Las Vegas was made up of an odd convergence of gamblers, gangsters, and government. All three forces, intentionally or unintentionally, catered to every kind of human weakness. Although the aboveground nuclear blasts were gone, the town was still full of glitzy, beckoning casinos; flamboyant, roguish celebrities; down-and-out and entrepreneurial prostitutes; and notorious, brutal criminals. By now it had gained its much deserved reputation as "Sin City" - universally considered a town where "just about anything goes." And surrounding it were the infamous "holes in the desert." Many of Las Vegas's problems were known to be buried in those same holes.
So, naturally, as a woman who relished audacity, this would be the place to which my mother would move my sister and me. As it turned out, that was the other part of her telephone call's "exciting news. — Gary Spetz

Them up when the other team had a runner on third. By the time the Yankees came to town - this was going on to the end of April - the whole stadium would flush orange when the Bombers had a runner on third, which they did often in that series. Because the Yankees kicked the living shit out of us and took over first place. It was no fault of the kid's; he hit in every game and tagged out Bill Skowron between home and third when the lug got caught in a rundown. — Stephen King

Randall, the gay alcoholic in the house next door, boldly peeps through my windows. 'Boy, you sure rock in that chair a lot,' he said last week, his face pressed against my screen.
This time I was lying on my bed with Katherine's cats. I'm watching them while she's out of town. I can be very mushy, and he watched me kissing them and saying that all the other cats in the neighborhood were jealous of their beauty. — David Sedaris

Looking out on the second day of our mission, I became aware that in the far distance, there was a distinctive-looking star. It stood out because, while all the other stars stayed exactly the same size and shape, this one got bigger and bigger as we got closer to it. At some point it stopped being a point of light and started becoming something three-dimensional, morphing into a strange bug-like thing with all kinds of appendages. And then, isolated against this inky background, it started to look like a small town.
Which is in fact what it is: an outpost that humans have built, far from Earth. The International Space Station. It's every science fiction book come true, every little kid's dream realized: a large, capable, fully human creation orbiting up in the universe.
And it felt miraculous that soon we'd be docked there, and the next phase of our expedition would begin. — Chris Hadfield

So do you come here often?" he asked in a slightly self-mocking way. I couldn't help myself - I smiled. "see, you don't even have to answer that, because I know all the trash cans in town, and while this is a very nice trash can, it doesn't look like the kind of trash can a girl like you would normally scavenge from." I opened my mouth to protest, but he went on. "Now, the trash cans on Seventh Street, those are some very nice trash cans. — Ally Carter

Chris: I'm never gonna get out of this town am I, Gordie?
Gordie: You can do anything you want, man.
Chris: Yeah, sure. Give me some skin.
Gordie: I'll see ya.
Chris: Not if I see you first. — Stephen King

This two-bit bar, this worn-out town, just a speck in the middle of a lonely grassy prairie with the stony hills beyond, the small fix-it-yourself house I'd bought for us - that was all ours, our world, our high life. It wasn't name-brand, shiny, or white picket fences, but none of that mattered. As long as we were together, it was good, it was clean, it was ours. — Cat Porter

By the time I got to the phone and dialed John's number, I was out of breath with excitement. "You are not going to believe this," I blurted out.
"What's the matter?" Hr sounded concerned.
"Are you sitting down?"
"Yeah, sure, Pattie. What's wrong?" God only knows what John was thinking at this point.
"GOD IS REAL!" I practically shouted in his ear. I waited for John to react in a dramatic way, almost disbelieving way. I expected him to say, "No way! C'mon! Get out of town!" After all, I thought I was telling him something he didn't already know, something that would turn his world upside down like it did mine. — Pattie Mallette

Out on the street I start to run; I need to breathe in this life, the trees, the warmth of my town. I will be able to control my own fate and I will know how to be happy. Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle ... — Shan Sa

I replied with an Avenian accent. "Is the priest of this church still here?"
"No." He squinted at me. "Never seen you before. You from out of town?"
"I've never seen you before either," I said. "So maybe you're the one from out of town."
That amused him. "My name is Fink. Well, that's not really m name, but it's what everyone calls me."
"What's your name, then."
"Dunno. Everyone just calls me Fink."
"Don't you have anywhere else to go?"
"Not really. Why d'you want the priest?"
"A doctrinal question. What punishment does the Book of Faith recommend for a kid who's being too nosy? — Jennifer A. Nielsen

On the morning of September 17, together with Mrs. Washington and my three children, I started for Atlanta. I felt a good deal as I suppose a man feels when he is on his way to the gallows. In passing through the town of Tuskegee I met a white farmer who lived some distance out in the country. In a jesting manner this man said: "Washington, you have spoken before the Northern white people, the Negroes in the South, and to us country white people in the South; but Atlanta, to-morrow, you will have before you the Northern whites, the Southern whites, and the Negroes all together. I am afraid that you have got yourself in a tight place." This farmer diagnosed the situation correctly, but his frank words did not add anything to my comfort. — Booker T. Washington

The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune. — T.E. Lawrence

The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly; part of this town and happy. I lean out of the window and am washed by the cool air, air it seems no one has yet breathed. — James Salter

I can't believe I let you talk me into this," muttered Serena, as the number 16 bus rumbled over the bridge connecting the north and south sides of the town.
"I didn't talk you into anything," I reminded her as we reached Jason's neighbourhood and began passing a string of progressively nicer - and larger - houses. "You invited yourself along."
"Okay, then I can't believe you didn't talk me out of this. — Kathleen Peacock

So, okay. He was basically an amalgamation of every redheaded man to ever turn my crank (and how!). And he lived in a popular gay resort town, which meant the chances were above average that he might actually be interested. Watching him trot lightly down those stairs to the beach, I realized what my objective this summer would be.
Agent Carlisle, your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to find out which of these residences belongs to Mr. Strawberry-Blond Hunka Burnin' Love and convince him to do you on every horizontal surface - and against a few of the vertical ones. — Amelia C. Gormley

They are examin'd skeptickally. "Not from the Press, are you?" " 'Pon my Word," cry both Surveyors at once. "Drummers of some kind's my guess," puts in a Countryman, his Rifle at his Side, "am I right, Gents?" "What'll we say?" mutters Mason urgently to Dixon. "Oh, do allow me," says Dixon to Mason. Adverting to the Room, "Why aye, Right as a Right Angle, we're out here to ruffle up some business with any who may be in need of Surveying, London-Style, - Astronomickally precise, optickally up-to-the-Minute, surprisingly cheap. The Behavior of the Stars is the most perfect Motion there is, and we know how to read it all, just as you'd read a Clock-Face. We have Lenses that never lie, and Micrometers fine enough to subtend the Width of a Hair upon a Martian's Eye-ball. This looks like a bustling Town, plenty of activity in the Land-Trades, where think yese'd be a good place to start?" with an amiability that Mason recognizes as peculiarly Quaker, - Friendly Business. — Thomas Pynchon

If I'd ever taken the time to wonder about my soul being as black as this town seemed to believe, I knew the moment Ashton stepped out of her little white Jetta looking like an angel from Heaven that my soul was damned to Hell. — Abbi Glines

As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. — Henry David Thoreau

What is it? What is it?!" I began dumping clothes out of the dresser drawers, snatching them on as quickly as I could before hauling my suitcase and large duffel out of the closet. I would not cry. I would not cry! "Brendan, what was the only fucking thing I asked from you that first night? Do you remember?"
He blinked, scrubbing a hand through his tousled hair. "You ... you asked me to respect you. Which I do, I'm just trying to - "
"Oh, really?" I gave him a derisive sneer as I threw wadded clothes into my bags and began slamming about, looking for odds and ends I might have missed. "That's what you call this? You offer to put me up like your personal rent-boy in some no-tell motel and promise to drop by every few days for a booty call while your wife's in town, and you think that's not demeaning? Well, fuck you. — Amelia C. Gormley

Live steady. Don't fuck around. Give anything weird a wide berth
including people. It's not worth it. I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.
... Back to Chicago; it's never dull out there. You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on *something*. Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars. — Hunter S. Thompson

Nathaniel's trying to get hold of it right now.
All very well, but could he use - Wait a minute! The radiant features of the boy contorted, slipped out of true, as if the condoling intelligence had drawn back in shock; an instant later they were as perfect as before. Let's get this straight. He told you his name?
Yes. Now
I like that ... I like that! He's been giving me gyp for years, simply because I could have spilled the beans, and now he's telling any old broad he meets, free of charge! Who else knows? Faquarl? Nouda? Did he deck his name out in neon lights and parade it round the town? I ask you! And I never told anyone!
You let it slip last time I summoned you.
Well, apart from that.
But you could have told his enemies, couldn't you, Bartimaeus? You'd have found a way to harm him if you'd really wished it. And Nathaniel knows that too, I think. I had a talk with him. — Jonathan Stroud

This has got to be the most poorly named town I've ever visited. There is absolutely no sign of anything even remotely enchanting about it. It's one of the worst cases of false advertising I've seen.
I've traveled a lot.Done considerable time in my share of dead-end dumps. Or at least that's what I thought until I came here.
I mean,where do people shop for clothing and food?
Where do the teens all hang out-the ones who haven't already hopped the first bus out of this godforsaken place?
And,more important,where do I catch that very same bus-how soon 'til it leaves? — Alyson Noel

Well, did you know he's the best checker-player in this town? Why, down at the Landing when we were coming up, Atticus Finch could beat everybody on both sides of the river." "Miss Maudie, Jem and me beat him all the time." "It's about time you found out it's because he lets you. Did you know he can play a Jew's Harp? — Harper Lee