Paint This Town Quotes & Sayings

They steered south. Gordita Beach emerged from the haze, gently flaking away in the salt breezes, the ramshackle town in a spill of weather-beaten colors, like paint chips at some out-of-the-way hardware store, and the hillside up to Dunecrest, which Doc had always thought of, especially after nights of excess, as steep, a grade everybody sooner or later wiped their clutch trying to get up and out of town on, looking from out here strangely flat, hardly there at all. — Thomas Pynchon

There is a bus station in Henry, but it isn't on Main Street. It's one block north - the town fathers hadn't wanted all the additional traffic. The station lost one-third of its roof to a tornado fifteen years ago. In the same summer, a bottle rocket brought the gift of fire to its restrooms. The damage has never been repaired, but the town council makes sure that the building is painted fresh every other year, and always the color of a swimming pool. There is never graffiti. Vandals would have to drive more than twenty miles to buy the spray paint.

Every once in a long while, a bus creeps into town and eases to a stop beside the mostly roofed, bright aqua station with the charred bathrooms. Henry is always glad to see a bus. Such treats are rare. — N.D. Wilson

Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative - essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story - swept candidate Obama into the presidency. — Cynthia P. Schneider

I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording. — Billy Joel

The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood. — Sherwood Anderson

I can find no words for what I feel. My consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age. — Henri Frederic Amiel

His father's made us paint half this town and if we stick around any longer he'll make us paint the rest of it. -Jonah Griggs — Melina Marchetta

Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters. — John Green

Yesterday I felt like shit, so I rode my bike around town and repeatedly grafittied "The revolution is not being televised" in paint pen. It was a "pointless" action, but it nonetheless healed me to do this. It was an act of love for that "hooligan" Arundhati Roy. It was an act of self-love. I don't expect it to change the world, but on the other hand, I know it will. — Inga Muscio

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it. — Noam Chomsky

I didn't really enjoy reading until I married my wife and we began reading the Bible out loud to each other every day. I enjoy reading now, and there is a whole world of books out there to explore. — Roger McGuinn

Rainy day weddings create opportunities for really unique photos! — Julie Roberts

But as he grew older he thought less of it, grew accustomed to the days lived. Each day he climbed the hill, as he used to, and helped build the factory. He visited the town. The seasons passed. Then the years. His father a curtained room. His mother, too. This blank space in his life that he was unable to paint. — Paul Yoon

Here's the simplest, most jargon-free, definition of marketing you're ever likely to come across: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying "Circus Coming to the Showground Saturday," that's advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that's promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor's flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that's publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that's public relations. If the town's citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they'll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that's sales. And if you planned the whole thing, that's marketing. — Allan Dib

No sketches first, no studies, that's long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
--Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive--you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,--
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)--so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,
Enter and take their place there sure enough,
Though they come back and cannot tell the world. — Robert Browning

Revival time was a time of war: war on sin, Coca-Cola, picture shows, hunting on Sunday; war on the increasing tendency of young women to paint themselves and smoke in public; war on drinking whiskey - in this connection at least fifty children per summer went to the altar and swore they would not drink, smoke, or curse until they were twenty-one; war on something so nebulous Jean Louise never could figure out what it was, except there was nothing to swear concerning it; and war among the town's ladies over who could set the best table for the evangelist. — Harper Lee

Every small town has at least one house the children whisper about; the type of house that has always been abandoned; where the once pristine white paint has faded to a grimy gray; where the windows are boarded, and the lawn never grows; where children hold their breath and close their eyes as they pass by. A house that sounds like it contains an army of whispering spirits when the wind whistles through the nearby trees.

In the town of Blackwood, that house could be found on Creep Street. It had stood there as long as he could remember. — The Blood Brothers

Pain has its own timetable. You can't rush it. You can't forgive somebody before you're ready. You can't tell anybody else how to reach that point. — Diane Wilson

What brings understanding is love. When your heart is full, then you will listen to the teacher, to the beggar, to the laughter of children, to the rainbow, and to the sorrow of man. Under every stone and leaf, that which is eternal exists. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

If I have sinned so much, if I have been since then so solitary, if my soul has taken such a swirling and solitary movement, if I have doubted everyting, if I have been fatalist and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man incapable of laughing wholeheartedly it is because you left me ... — Malcolm Gladwell

I entered (into my inward self) and beheld with the eye of my soul ... the Light Unchangeable. — Saint Augustine

I don't believe anyone really likes paint, unless he's tempted to eat it. — Harold Town

How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die — Vera Brittain

I always say my age is connected with three Cs. In here, cuore, which means the heart. Up here, cervello, which is the brain. And, of course, down here: the coglioni. I no feel my age, I tell you. — Dino De Laurentiis

It is not enough to be a good player ... you must also play well — Siegbert Tarrasch

I am also the product of a place called Paint Creek. Doesn't have a zip code. It's too small to be called a town along the rolling plains of Texas. We grew dryland cotton and wheat, and when I wasn't farming or attending Paint Creek Rural School, I was generally over at Troop 48 working on my Eagle Scout award. — Rick Perry

Give all your gifts away in service to the world. If you want to paint, don't wait for a grant, paint a wall in your town that looks drab and uninviting. You never know who is going to see that wall. Whatever it is you want to do, give it away in service to your community. — Marianne Williamson

As animals have no idea of the holy or the devil, they have no idea of the beautiful. The opinion held by some scientists that apes could paint, based on the 'paintings' apes had done, proved to be quite wrong. It has been confirmed that apes only imitate man. So- called 'ape art' surely does not exist. On the contrary, the cave men from Cromagnon onward knew how to paint and care. Their drawings have been found in caves of the Sahara, in Spain at Altamira, in Franc at Lascaux, and recently in Poland at Mashicka. Many of these pictures are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. Some time ago, a group of Soviet archeologists discovered a set of musical instruments, made 20,000 years ago, near the town of Chernigov in the Ukraine. — Alija Izetbegovic

I don't paint the town red. But when I do go out, people always want to touch my hair. It happens every time. — David Lynch

I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence
you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform. — Alice Neel

Disorder in the house
The doors are coming off the hinges
The earth will open and swallow up the real estate
I just got my paycheck
I'm gonna paint the whole town grey
Whether it's a night in Paris or a Fresno matinee
It's the home of the brave and the land of the free
Where the less you know the better off you'll be — Warren Zevon

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

I would paint this fucking town in red if I have to until I found her. — B.B. Reid

Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town. — Walker Percy