Outskirts Quotes & Sayings

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me ... I see pictures merging before my mind's eye - paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction - and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home ... — W.G. Sebald

Ellis smiled at her concern and kissed her cheek once more. "I promise. I'll come home if I need help." He stepped back and gave them a bow, showing his respect.
With their permission, he left the counsel room and headed straight to his room. He packed supplies for the journey. His mother had warned him that no magic worked inside of The Forbidden Woods or even in the outskirts of it. He would have to walk there on foot and hope that no one loyal to Walter caught up with him on his way. — Elaine White

Every city has streets that were built under an unlucky star. And they don't have to be located in the outskirts, either. Sometimes they run along beside gloomy factory buildings, sometimes along the railway lines or main highways, sometimes even beside a park or ravine that has survived through some oversight by the municipal authorities. — Sergei Lukyanenko

Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird. — Alan Watts

Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills, - with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance, - the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment, - that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies. — Rabindranath Tagore

When museums are left with so little money that their future is in the hands of private donors, then they are unable to develop their own signatures by collecting themselves. On the other hand, though, I think we should also celebrate the fact that there is a lot of art that lives outside of, or on the outskirts of, the art market - and it is doing quite well. — Olafur Eliasson

Living Holy Week following Jesus means learning how to come out of ourselves to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence, to be the first to move towards our brothers and sisters, especially those who are most distant, those who are forgotten, those who are most in need of understanding, consolation and help. There is so much need to bring the living presence of Jesus, merciful and full of love! — Pope Francis

She is close enough to me that I can see her, because even now there is the outward sign of visible light, even at night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Algoe. After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness. — John Green

It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days
without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money, or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko where you were lost in a midnight rainstorm
and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California. — Hunter S. Thompson

It just seemed like all the records I have made since Creedence Clearwater Revival have all been sort of pushed off center. I felt like I was dancing around the outskirts of what is my true center. With this album, I really wanted to stay on the mark, right in the middle, right where rock 'n' roll is. I wanted this one to be easier, a lot more fun than some of the past records have been. — John Fogerty

When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin. — Darnell Lamont Walker

Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television. — Hunter S. Thompson

I know you don't like the traffic here. I'm sorry that you're burdened with this."
I muttered, "Not liking the traffic is an understatement. People don't know how to drive here. They're crazy."
"We can take back roads with the least traffic on the way, and we'll be driving only to the outskirts of Mumbai, not through the city as before. It shouldn't be too bad. You're a good driver."
"Ha, easy for you to say. You'll just sleep in the back the whole way."
Ren touched my cheek with his fingers and gently turned my face to his. "Rajkumari, I want to say thank you. Thank you for staying and helping me. You don't know what this means to me."
I mumbled, "You're welcome. And rajkumari means?"
He flashed me a brilliant white smile and deftly changed the subject. — Colleen Houck

Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind. — Octavio Paz

After long centuries, agrarian civilization is weakening. Is sufficient attention being devoted to the arrangement and improvement of the life of the country people, whose inferior and at times miserable economic situation provokes the flight to the unhappy crowded conditions of the city outskirts, where neither employment nor housing awaits them? — Pope Paul VI

What's the fun in standing in the outskirts of love and feeling superior? There's no shame in having got it wrong. Whereas its a shame when you don't even give yourself the chance of getting it right. Better to have loved and lost... — Priya Basil

We watched the humans in silence, two vampires standing in the darkness on the outskirts of humanity, always looking in. — Julie Kagawa

A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see 'just leather', he saw the beast - perhaps one of his own - and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing.
Communities were smaller and whether our man lived on the outskirts of some feudal system, had escaped from it, or was entirely isolated, he would work alone, or daily with the same fellow-workers - conversation would soon languish.
But THINK he must. — Dorothy Hartley

This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends - 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland - she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout. — Kate Atkinson

I learned by heart the lines of your face. I can draw them blindly on a water canvas.
Your face in the middle of an inflamed argument. Your face in the middle of a mild one-- when you're at fault.
Your face filled with rainbows of laughter. Your face filled with clouds of distress.
Your face, fluttering, when I open you the door. Your face, agonizing, every time I stand waiting, for the elevator.
Your face, eager, when you kiss me. Your face, surprised, when I lead you to bed.
Your face in the middle of pain. Your face on the outskirts of pleasure.
Your face, with a baffled look, when you wake up. Your face falling asleep, with total surrender.
Your face the first night we met. Your face the last night we parted.
I learned by heart the lines of your face. They all led me into hell.
They all led me into heaven. — Malak El Halabi

There was this cheap motel on the outskirts of town called the Tick-Tock Inn, with green-and-yellow vinyl curtains and beds that smelled like mothballs and ass. — Maris Black

They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was "embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians" (Barbier). It robbed Voltaire of his optimism. In the huge waves which engulfed the town, in the chasms which opened underneath it, in volcanic flames which raged for days in the outskirts, some 50,000 people perished. But to the courtiers of Louis XV it was an enormous joke. M. de Baschi, Madame de Pompadour's brother-in-law, was French Ambassador there at the time. He saw the Spanish Ambassador killed by the arms of Spain, which toppled onto his head from the portico of his embassy; Baschi then dashed into the house and rescued his colleague's little boy whom he took, with his own family, to the country. When he got back to Versailles he kept the whole Court in roars of laughter for a week with his account of it all. "Have you heard Baschi on the earthquake? — Nancy Mitford

Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges ... block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.
People don't bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed. — Robert Dunbar

This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident ... something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn't see it, didn't realize ... and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn't a normal town anymore. — R.L. Stine

I drank my bottle of milk and ate my morsel of bread somewhere on the outskirts, while I circumspectly studied my environment or else fell to meditating on my own harsh lot. — Adolf Hitler

Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns' family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather — Marcel Proust

The Copse at Hurstbourne is one of those fancy-sounding titles for a brand-new tract of condominiums on the outskirts of town. 'Copse' as in 'a thicket of small trees.' 'Hurst' as in 'hillock, knoll, or mound.' And 'bourne' as in 'brook or stream.' All of these geological and botanical wonders did seem to conjoin within the twenty parcels of the development, but it was hard to understand why it couldn't have just been called Shady Acres, which is what it was. Apparently people aren't willing to pay a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a home that doesn't sound like it's part of an Anglo-Saxon land grant. These often quite utilitarian dwellings are never named after Jews or Mexicans. Try marketing Rancho Feinstein if you want to lose money in a hurry. Or Paco Sanchez Park. Middle-class Americans aspire to tone, which is equated, absurdly, with the British gentry. — Sue Grafton

As she slid into her fifties, with grace I might add, she learned the art of hatred, pulling on the pain from a broken heart. She kept this pain alive, growing on the outskirts of her soul, like a copse of trees that constantly needed pruning. — Lawren Leo

Spend any time in the real Italy, however, and you quickly realize that Italians don't really pick grapes much anymore, and they certainly don't stomp them either. They don't pick tomatoes - or olives - and they don't shear their sheep. Their tomatoes and olives are picked largely by underpaid Africans and Eastern Europeans, seasonal hires, brought in for that purpose - who are then demonized and complained about for the rest of the year. (Except when blowing motorists in the offseason - as can be readily observed on the outskirts of even the smallest Italian communities these days.) — Anthony Bourdain

What's silly is paying five bucks for hot milk and flavored syrup! But now I see what's really been going on all this time! They charge you all that money because they need it for the R & D! Somewhere on the outskirts of Seattle, there's a secret facility with higher security than Area 51, and inside there are men with poor eyesight and bad haircuts wearing white coats, and they're trying to make the Holy Grail of all coffee drinks.
The bacon latte?
No, Atticus, I already told you those exist! I'm talking about the prophecy! 'Out of the steam and the foam and the froth, a man in white with poor eyesight will craft a liquid paradox, and it shall be called the Triple Nonfat Double Bacon Five-Cheese Mocha!'
Oberon, what the F
? — Kevin Hearne

I have chosen for my emblem a Star, representing the Virgin Mary, and the Eucharist. Those who know me as a professor of theology will remember my passion for the Eucharist from our classes. Blessed be God for this madness ... We must live our commitment to society steeped in the Eucharist. We must take the Eucharist to the streets, both in the heart of the city and on the outskirts, to the poor neighborhoods and to hospitals ... In order to obey the Resurrected Christ, I dare say with Pope John Paul II: 'Open wide the doors of your heart to the Holy Spirit.' — Nicolas Cotugno

The thought of building a life around minimal morality or minimal significance - a life defined by the question, "What is permissible?" - felt almost disgusting to me. I didn't want a minimal life. I didn't want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it. — John Piper

Imperialism [ ... ] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world. — Rebecca Solnit

When I drop my son off at school, I love walking around the outskirts of Hampstead Heath. — Sean Pertwee

Things in which we do not take joy are either a burden upon our minds to be got rid of at any cost; or they are useful, and therefore in temporary and partial relation to us, becoming burdensome when their utility is lost; or they are like wandering vagabonds, loitering for a moment on the outskirts of our recognition, and then passing on. A thing is only completely our own when it is a thing of joy to us. — Rabindranath Tagore

There were office-worn gents with yellow faces, bent backs, and one shoulder set slightly higher than the other from spending hours hunched over desks. And their sad, anxious faces spoke volumes about their domestic troubles, never-ending money worries, and all those old hopes which had been dashed for good; for they all belonged to the army of poor threadbare drudges who just about make ends meet in some dismal plasterboard house with a flowerbed for a garden in the rubbish-and-slag-heap belt on the outskirts of Paris. — Guy De Maupassant

Mind you, Thunder Bay has a lot of outskirts. It's actually two cities melded together, so in a sense it has twice as many outskirts as other places. It's understandable that we got lost ... — Paul Quarrington

The conquest of the outskirts of the atmosphere, and eventually space, is a revolutionary event, comparable only to the transition of the aquatic animals to the land in geologic times. — Hubertus Strughold

I think actors have a choice of drawing attention to themselves or living on the outskirts. — Rachel Weisz

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion. — Edith Wharton

Like a kite, carried by the wind, he followed her into the fluffy white clouds of her imagination. He didn't think her silly for living in the sky, but rather, he marveled at the wondrous life she had created on the outskirts of reality. He knew her love would elevate him to new emotional heights. — Jaeda DeWalt

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. — Virginia Woolf

For the first billion years, the universe continued to expand and cool as matter gravitated into the massive concentrations we call galaxies. Nearly a hundred billion of them formed, each containing hundreds of billions of stars that undergo thermonuclear fusion in their cores. Those stars with more than about ten times the mass of the Sun achieve sufficient pressure and temperature in their cores to manufacture dozens of elements heavier than hydrogen, including those that compose planets and whatever life may thrive upon them. These elements would be stunningly useless were they to remain where they formed. But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born. The — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Marshall was watching her again, and Jane's skin prickled under his perusal. That was when Jane realized she'd made a mistake. Those freckles, his background - they'd all misled her into thinking that he was a quiet little rabbit. He wasn't. He was the wolf that looked as if he were lounging about on the outskirts of the pack, a lone hanger-on, when in truth he had adopted that position simply so that he could see everything that transpired in the fields below. He wasn't solitary; he was waiting for someone to make a mistake. He looked willing to wait a very long time. — Courtney Milan

I'm used to being on the outskirts of a network, a connection that people use if they really need one. — Krista Ritchie

Around the outskirts of the city, cut off from town by the black oval of the river, everything was in darkness. Everyone ugly was in bed by now. — Scott Westerfeld

And whenever they came back to his lips, these exquisite, funereal laments conjured up, in his mind, a place on the outskirts of a city, a mean and voiceless place where silently, in the distance, lines of men and women, wearied and bowed down by life, were disappearing into the twilight, while he himself, surfeited with bitterness and replete with disgust, felt himself alone, utterly alone, in the midst of a tearful Nature, overwhelmed by an inexpressible melancholy, by a relentless anguish, the mysterious intensity of which precluded all consolation, all pity, all repose. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend. — Alain De Botton

To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans, entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt's principal export of cotton. They built ports, railroads, and dams, all to implement colonial control over the country's economy. With the construction of their crowning achievement, the Suez Canal, Egypt's fate as Britain's most valuable colony was sealed. To pay for these massive — Reza Aslan

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the — Charles Dickens

I live in Hamburg; that's in the north. And I live on the outskirts of town. It looks like countryside. — Cornelia Funke

It was a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely-a busted cart here, a dead dog there-that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces. — Terry Pratchett

Before my first visit to Waorani territory, I was introduced to don Casimiro Mamallacta, a traditional Kichwa healer and family man living in the outskirts of the jungle town of Archidona, by his daughter Mercedes, whom I met at the Jatun Sacha biological station. During the years that I was collaborating on the demarcation effort and in between the work sessions, I lived with don Casimiro's family. — Jonathon Miller Weisberger

Europeans know that their great experiment in building peace, unity and prosperity cannot survive as a privileged enclave, surrounded on its outskirts by breeding grounds of hatred and fanaticism. — Dick Cheney

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the fires of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until they who live on the outskirts of Hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heap of history and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be
transformed into the bright tomorrows of quality integrated education. — Martin Luther King Jr.

There are these very poor communities on the outskirts of Cairo called Mokattam, where a lot of the garbage collectors live. I used to volunteer there, doing health and education work when I was younger and living in Egypt. — Jehane Noujaim

His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky. — David Morrell

Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them, each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question-as "Do you love me?" -could never be answered or forgotten. They walked slowly, meditating, wondering, and the path sloped down from their feet and they followed, walking side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation; their feinting and hesitation done with, they could only await passively for resolution. Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other. They perceived at the same moment the change in the path and each knew then the other's knowledge of it; Theodora took Eleanor's arm and, afraid to stop, they moved on slowly, close together, and ahead of them the path widened and blackened and curved. — Shirley Jackson

The long arm of the law slides up the outskirts of town. — Elvis Costello

(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements
abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out ... In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost. — Nick Flynn

The Beatles were hard men too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia
a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the f***ing Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys
they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles
not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always s**t on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear. — Lemmy Kilmister

ANYWHERE COULD BE SOMEWHERE I might have come from the high country, or maybe the low country, I don't recall which. I might have come from the city, but what city in what country is beyond me. I might have come from the outskirts of a city from which others have come or maybe a city from which only I have come. Who's to know? Who's to decide if it rained or the sun was out? Who's to remember? They say things are happening at the border, but nobody knows which border. They talk of a hotel there, where it doesn't matter if you forgot your suitcase, another will be waiting, big enough, and just for you. — Mark Strand

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. — Fernando Pessoa

On a waste place strewn with bricks in the outskirts of a town twilight was falling. A star or two appeared over the smoke, and distant windows lit mysterious lights. The stillness deepened and the loneliness. Then all the outcast things that are silent by day found voices. — Lord Dunsany

She thought about this. She had analyzed it in depth. When you live alone, travel alone, exist solely on the outskirts of other people's lives, you do have time to wonder why what you want most in life is out of reach. You also have the time to tell yourself that you don't want it at all, though whether you can ever be completely convinced is something else. — Barbara Delinsky

It is the Paraclete Spirit, the "Comforter", who grants us the courage to take to the streets of the world, bringing the Gospel! The Holy Spirit makes us look to the horizon and drive us to the very outskirts of existence in order to proclaim life in Jesus Christ. Let us ask ourselves: do we tend to stay closed in on ourselves, on our group, or do we let the Holy Spirit open us to mission? — Pope Francis

It looks like you two never really got into the eye of the storm. You were more like ... the cows who got tossed around on the outskirts. — Abigail Roux

on the outskirts of Johnson — Scott Pratt

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete. — Walter Bagehot

I can feel the love I'm a part of surrounding me and flowing through me; I'm near home and I'm standing hand in hand with those I love, past and present, in the sun, on the outskirts of something that feels almost like... being free. — Bruce Springsteen

He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. — John Steinbeck

After 7 or 8 billion years of such enrichment, an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born in an undistinguished region (the Orion arm) of an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo supercluster). The gas cloud from which the Sun formed contained a sufficient supply of heavy elements to spawn a few planets, thousands of asteroids, and billions of comets. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

It's a diabolical business. I can't imagine how hellish it must be to be hounded like Amy Winehouse and people like that. I have a little peripheral place on the outskirts of celebrity, when I go to premieres and that sort of stuff, which is as close as I want to get. — Jeff Beck

[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. — William Gibson

Peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won't write the works I don't write now, and to keep on not writing them I'll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself. — Fernando Pessoa

Much more than trying to focus on the battlefield of the war, it was the central place that German doctors occupied within Nazism, the omnipotent and insane idea of wanting to generically modify an entire nation. This idea was not on the outskirts of Nazi ideology, it was the heart of movement, that's what intrigued me. Mengele is the most extreme expression of this idea. — Lucia Puenzo

Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illness. An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again. — Stephen King

There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino. — Edward Abbey

It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved arm in a laboratory vat. — Ray Bradbury

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008. — Greg Egan

We'd arrived on the outskirts of a little ski town nestled in the mountains. The sign said WELCOME TO CLOUDCROFT, NEW MEXICO. The air was cold and thin. The roofs of the cabins were heaped with snow, and dirty mounds of it were piled up on the sides of the streets. Tall pine trees loomed over the valley, casting pitch-black shadows, though the morning was sunny. — Rick Riordan

I attended an evangelical Christian university on the outskirts of suburban Los Angeles and by the time of my graduation was neither evangelical nor Christian. — Mallory Ortberg

Below them the town was laid out in harsh angular patterns. The houses in the outskirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. Each had a small, rectangular plot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door. Meg had a feeling that if she could count the flowers there would be exactly the same number for each house. In front of all the houses children were playing. Some were skipping rope, some were bouncing balls. Meg felt vaguely that something was wrong with their play. It seemed exactly like children playing around any housing development at home, and yet there was something different about it. She looked at Calvin, and saw that he, too, was puzzled. — Madeleine L'Engle

When we talk about communities, we seldom discuss the margins. But for every person nestled comfortably in the bosom of a community, there is someone else on the outskirts, feeling ambivalent. Ambiguous. Excluded. Unwilling or unable to come more fully into the fold. — Adam Mansbach

Neil had spent his entire life drifting by on the outskirts, looked over and looked past. It'd made him happy, or so he'd thought, because being ignored meant he was safe. He hadn't realized how lonely he was until he met the Foxes. — Nora Sakavic

In a secret barracks on the outskirts of Shanghai, three dozen identically faced men moaned uneasily in their sleep, tossed and turned from side to side. They dreamt of violence. They dreamt of fire. They dreamt of death. They woke in a ripple of consciousness. Their mother had died. Their mother was in danger. They rose as one, checked their weapons, checked their bodies. Somewhat calmed by this, they returned to their bunks and eventually to sleep. Their mother might need them soon. — Ramez Naam

My art tends toward the literary. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule. — James Ensor

Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. — Jack Kerouac

Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of town, and sat glumly on the bed, which was damp, and flipped through the little information brochure, which was also damp. It said that the planet of NowWhat had been named after the opening words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across light years of space to reach the furthest unexplored outreaches of the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell. — Douglas Adams

Of every aspect of the moor, the earth and stone and rain and fire, the wind is the strongest one in Near. Here on the outskirts of the village, the wind is always pressing close, making windows groan. It whispers and it howls and it sings. It can bend its voice and cast it into any shape, long and thin enough to slide beneath the door, stout enough to seem a thing of weight and breath and bone. The wind was here when you were born, when I was born, when our house was built, when the Council was formed, and even when the Near Witch lived, — Victoria Schwab

My initial plan was to spend a year in France, go to some kind of school and learn a bit of French. I went a year in an American college in the outskirts of Strasbourg, but got a glimpse of a real art school, L'Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, and enrolled the following year. — John Howe

If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts. — Fernando Pessoa

We need to 'go out,' then, in order to experience our own anointing, its power and its redemptive efficacy: to the 'outskirts' where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight, and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters, — Pope Francis

Their objective is to get to the outskirts of Baghdad. So be it — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

I think mathematics is a vast territory. The outskirts of mathematics are the outskirts of mathematical civilization. There are certain subjects that people learn about and gather together. Then there is a sort of inevitable development in those fields. You get to the point where a certain theorem is bound to be proved, independent of any particular individual, because it is just in the path of development. — William Thurston

I may just be on the outskirts of being okay. — Pawan Mishra

It smelled like a slaughterhouse. I was standing in the interrogation room of Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. A stench of blood and death permeated my senses, my clothes, my being. — Bernard B. Kerik

Poem to Be Read at 3:00 A.M.
by Donald Justice

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
at 3 A.M.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on — Donald Justice

I'm not from the heart of Atlanta, I'm from the Eastern outskirts. Stone Mountain is the town - Gambino is from there, Danger Mouse is from there. So there's a lot more greenery, lakes and a mountain you can climb everyday - all kinds of stuff that I'm into. I wear sandals, or a harness - I'm prepared to be outdoors because that's just how I am. — Gucci Mane

It was at the outskirts of the world that the Old Things accumulated, like driftwood round the edges of the sea. ("The Troll") — T.H. White