Quotes & Sayings About Planks

Those who are born in a gilt cradle and have never wanted for anything, do not know what happiness life contains, just as they do not appreciate to the full a clear sky who have never entrusted their lives to the mercy of four planks on a raging sea. — Alexandre Dumas

Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. — Mary Oliver

The GOP needs to live the planks of its platform, not just offer lip service. — Sarah Palin

Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart! — Edgar Allan Poe

How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about is death and imaginary strawberries? — Elizabeth Wein

I turned, going back along the planks toward the idling pick-up without saying anything else. I just wanted to be away from people. I didn't want to have to avoid answering questions about what happened. I didn't want the questions. — Ken Kesey

I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room. — Reif Larsen

Windows were broken. Where not broken they were boarded up, had been for years: the rust from nailheads had written long, sad farewells down the salt-silvered planks. — Joseph Hansen

The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God's sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return. — Ramsey Campbell

The back-and-forth ancient lull of the tide. The cry of seagulls passing overhead. The smell of salt and fish carried on the warm breeze. With each step along the old wooden planks of the pier, tiny grains of sand that hitchhiked from the beach below are pulverized under our heels. Sand that traveled millions of miles over billions of years across shifting continents and churning oceans, surviving plate tectonics, erosion, and sedimentary deposition is crushed by our new sandals.
The cosmos can be cruel. — Sarah Ockler

It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva's hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady suck-and-hiss that's like the systole and diastole of a beating heart. — Neal Stephenson

Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather. — Alexandre Dumas

If all the world's a stage, then it's missing a few planks. — John Fogarty

The barricade was taking some while to dismantle. Chair legs and planks and bedsteads and doors and baulks of timber had settled into a tangled mass. Since every piece belonged to someone, and Ankh-Morpork people care about that sort of thing, it was being dismantled by collective argument. — Terry Pratchett

The Captain's boat inspections were always pretty slapdash, because they mainly just involved him looking at the ropes and planks and barnacles and then nodding to show that he approved of whatever they happened to be doing. — Gideon Defoe

Her heart - it had been meant for her heart.
And he had taken that arrow for her.
The killing calm spread through her like hoarfrost. She'd kill them all. Slowly.
They reached the second bridge just as Aedion's barrage of arrows halted, his quiver no doubt emptied. She shoved Rowan onto the planks. "Run," she said.
"No - ".
"Run."
It was a voice that she'd never heard herself use - a queen's voice - that came out, along with the blind yank she made on the blood oath that bound them together.
His eyes flashed with fury, but his body moved as though she'd compelled him. He staggered across the bridge, just as
Aelin whirled, drawing Goldryn and ducking just as the Wing Leader's sword swiped for her head. — Sarah J. Maas

I did side planks for my obliques, which are one of my trouble areas. And traditional planks tone your back so you don't have that little bit of fat hanging over your bra. Ugh! — Ashley Greene

We live in the age of Noah (a.s.) in the sense that a flood of distraction accosts us. It is a slow and subtle drowning. For those who notice it, they engage in the remembrance of God. The rites of worship and devotion to God's remembrance (dhikr) are planks of the ark. When Noah (a.s.) started to build his ark, his people mocked him and considered him a fool. But he kept building. He knew what was coming. And we know too. — Hamza Yusuf

I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.
And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action. — Joyce Cary

Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it. — Leo Tolstoy

Mexico City is a perpetual picnic. Literally. There is a dizzying amount of wonderful food here, and the majority of it is consumed standing on one's feet, on the scarred and broken concrete sidewalk. It is dispensed from whitewashed metal stands, doled out of baskets and buckets, fried on griddles barely balanced over planks, ladled out of huge metal pots. — Nicholas Gilman

Did you ever hear the story of the man who walks past the mental hospital?" he said. "He can hear all the patients inside shouting, 'Thirteen! Thirteen! Thirteen!,' but the fence is too high for him to see what is going on. Then he spots a knothole in one of the planks. He looks through it, and bam - a stick pokes him in the eye, and he hears the inmates all shouting, 'Fourteen! Fourteen! Fourteen!'" He took a sip of his cocoa. "I mind my own business, Detectives. — James Patterson

It's go time.' He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier- ... -and launch over the water. It's my favorite moment: when I'm one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. And I'm flying, I'm rushing to meet my own reflection- — Karen Russell

My studio cube is an experiment in solar heating and design. The south wall is covered with glass planks that collect and distribute heat naturally to my work studio on the second level. — Steven Holl

The pirates would kiss Hayden, and sometimes they would cut off a hank of hair - 'as a reminder of yer kisses, me lad' - and one of them even cut off a piece of his earlobe.
This particular pirate was Bill McGregor, and he was the one Hayden feared the most. Bill McGregor was the worst of them - and at night when everyone else was asleep, Bill McGregor would come looking for Hayden, his step slow and hollow on the planks of the deck, his voice a deep whisper.
Boy,' he would murmur. 'where are you, boy?'
After Bill McGregor cut off the piece of Hayden's earlobe, he decided that he wanted more. Every time he caught Hayden, he would cut a small piece off of him. The skin of an elbow, the tip of a finger, a piece of his lip. He would grip the squirming Hayden and cut a piece off of him, and then Bill McGregor would eat the piece of flesh. — Dan Chaon

I do a lot of stairs, a lot of planks, a lot of squats, a lot of treadmill, a lot of screaming - and I do it four times a week. — Sherri Shepherd

Honestly, I do not believe in a drunk Byron writing beautiful verses. Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods, but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself. — George Sand

She reached down and picked a crab out of a bucket. As it came up it turned out that three more were hanging on to it. "A crab necklace?" giggled Juliet.
"Oh, that's crabs for you," said Verity, disentangling the ones who had hitched a ride. "thick as planks, the log of them. That's why you can keep them in a bucket wihtout a lid. Any that tries to get out gets pulled back. yes, as thick as planks. — Terry Pratchett

As the mother of a small boy, she had developed a bad habit of carrying a little of everything in her purse, not to mention all the little treasures that Jeremy had given her - pretty rocks, a wilted violet, a ring he'd made from braided pine needles. The collection was a junky-looking mess. When the stranger picked up an unwrapped peppermint candy with more hair on it than stripes, Chloe wished the floor planks would separate and swallow her. His hard mouth twitched as he dropped the candy back in her purse along with an emergency tampon whose wrapper had nearly disintegrated. — Catherine Anderson

A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form. — Alice Oswald

Her husband had been the nails, the bolts, the rope that held her and her home together. She stood and imagined planks falling off of her arms, tearing free as those nails rusted and the rope frayed and parted deep inside her. — Bryan Costales

Her father had built from ax-hewn planks thatched with bamboo and grass. The floor was dirt, but it was clean. Her mother, Foua, sprinkled it regularly with — Anne Fadiman

Once activated by redstone, a trapdoor will open wide! It can also be manually opened by right clicking it. 6 wood planks are needed! — Steve De Blanc

The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork.those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful. — John Constable

Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick as two short planks,' became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts. — Peter York

In his original design the solicitor's clerk seemed to have forgotten the need for a staircase to link both the floors, and what he had provided had the appearance of an afterthought. Doorways had been punched in the eastern wall and a rough wooden staircase - heavy planks on an uneven frame with one warped unpainted banister, the whole covered with a sloping roof of corrugated iron - hung precariously at the back of the house, in striking contrast with the white-pointed brickwork of the front, the white woodwork and the frosted glass of doors and windows.
For this house Mr.Biswas had paid five thousand five hundred dollars. — V.S. Naipaul

The Republican nominee-to-be, of course, is also a young man. But his approach is as old as McKinley. His party is the party of the past. His speeches are generalities from Poor Richard's Almanac. Their platform, made up of left-over Democratic planks, has the courage of our old convictions. Their pledge is a pledge to the status quo-and today there can be no status quo. — John F. Kennedy

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs. — Jean Cocteau

There were heavy beams - planks of sun - falling randomly, wonderfully, onto the road. Clouds arched their backs to lok behind as they started again to move on. 'It's such a beautiful day,' he said, and his voice was in many pieces. A great day to die. A great day to die, like this. — Markus Zusak

Let us think of Nature as a builder, making all that we see out of atoms of a limited number of kinds, just as the builder of a house constructs it out of so many different kinds of things: bricks, slates, planks, panes of glass, and so on. — William Henry Bragg

Hooves clomping over the whitewashed planks, Doren sprinted along the boardwalk after Rondus, a portly satyr with butterscotch fur and horns that curved away from each other. Puffing hard, Rondus cut through a gazebo and started down the stairs to the field. Only a few steps behind, Doren went airborne and slammed into the heavyset satyr. Together they pitched violently forward into the grass, staining their skin green. — Brandon Mull

The steel-framed span loomed thirty feet above the muddy water. At the far end of the hundred-foot deck, the forest swallowed up a dirt road that used to lead somewhere. Years of traffic rumbling across the bridge had worn parallel streaks into the deck, and heavy runner boards covered holes in rotted planks. Metal rails sagged in spots. Still, the reddish-brown truss beams on either side stood stiff and straight, and overhead braces cast shadows on the deck below. On that rusty frame, between lines of vertical rivets, someone had painted a skull and crossbones and scribbled: 'Danger, This Is You. — Jason Morgan Ward

She went to the window and looked out. The ground fell away to a branch where willows burned lime green in the sunset. Dark little birds kept crossing the fields to the west like heralds of some coming dread. Below the branch stood the frame of an outhouse from which the planks had been stripped for firewood and there hung from the ceiling a hornetnest like a gross paper egg. The tinker returned from the cart with a lantern — Cormac McCarthy

Those who are born with a silver spoon,' Emmanuel said, 'those who have never needed anything, do not understand what happiness is, any more than those who do not know the blessing of a clear sky and who have never entrusted their lives to four planks tossing on a raging sea. — Alexandre Dumas

I exercise at least five times a week with stretching, Pilates, push-ups, planks, sit- ups, squats and light weights. — Reba McEntire

In his experience, the initial bridge of trust and comradeship too easily splinters under the pressure of personal ambition or rots through as proximity leads to a greater understanding of the other's flaws. Before long, a promotion or a move to a different province sends the last planks sweeping down a river. — Jenny White

Broadly, therefore, the three even now lurching across the deserted planks of the Brass Bridge were dead drunk assassins and the men behind them were bent on inserting the significant comma. — Terry Pratchett

She felt, beneath her feet, the shifting of the planks she'd laid across the quicksand of that other life. She'd thought she could escape it? It was there, it had always been there, and this life she'd built on top of it felt about as sturdy as a shantytown on the flank of a volcano. — Laini Taylor

I used to hate planks, because I could only hold them for about 20 seconds. I'll never be like, 'Yeah, I'm so excited to do planks!' but I find that I don't hate them as much anymore. — Misty May-Treanor

When you think about it, we're strapping strange planks of wood to our feet and launching off of giant snow walls. It's pretty intense. — Shaun White

My grandmother used to tell us a story of a mountain of loadstone. When any vessels came near it, they were instantly deprived of their ironwork: the nails flew to the mountain, and the unhappy crew perished amidst the disjointed planks. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Hence a ship is said to be tight, when her planks are so compact and solid as to prevent the entrance of the water in which she is immersed: and a cask is called tight, when the staves are so close that none of the liquid contained therein can issue through or between them. — William Falconer

Desperately knocking against the blind little world, i loosened one of its planks, opening a window to a new, wider world. There, spread out, was a profusion of geography, of atmosphere, of full empty air. — Jonathan Safran Foer

A street turned off at right angles, descending, and became a dirt road. On either hand the land dropped more sharply; a broad flat dotted with small cabins whose weathered roofs were on a level with the crown of the road. They were set in small grassless plots littered with broken things, bricks, planks, crockery, things of a once utilitarian value. What growth there was consisted of rank weeds and the trees were mulberries and locusts and sycamores
trees that partook also of the foul desiccation which surrounded the houses; trees whose very burgeoning seemed to be the sad and stubborn remnant of September, as if even spring had passed them by, leaving them to feed upon the rich and unmistakable smell of negroes in which they grew. — William Faulkner

Ox Cart Man

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hoped by hand at the forge's fire.

He walks by his ox's head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire's light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year's ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again. — Donald Hall

Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks in the floor from which the blood will not be taken out. You may scrape and scrape, as the present owner has done, or plane and plane, as his father did, or scrub and scrub, as his grandfather did, or burn and burn with strong acids, as his great-grandfather did, but, there the blood will still be - no redder and no paler - no more and no less - always just the same. — Charles Dickens

Helen, beloved of the goddess of love, went downstairs to crawl into her empty bed as Lucas, the son of the sun, leaned back on his elbows and watched his father-god brighten the bare wooden planks of her widow's walk. — Josephine Angelini

Round the cabin stood half a dozen mountain ashes, as the rowans, inimical to witches, are there called. On the worn planks of the door were nailed two horse-shoes, and over the lintel and spreading along the thatch, grew, luxuriant, patches of that ancient cure for many maladies, and prophylactic against the machinations of the evil one, the house-leek. Descending into the doorway, in the chiaroscuro of the interior, when your eye grew sufficiently accustomed to that dim light, you might discover, hanging at the head of the widow's wooden-roofed bed, her beads and a phial of holy water — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Even more secretively, Lincoln took up his pen around this same time to write a deeply felt manifesto of principle that he shared with absolutely no one, certainly not sculptor Thomas Jones, in whose presence he likely composed it. Secret or not, it bracingly confirms Lincoln's steadfast determination to preserve - and ultimately, extend - not only the permanence of the Union, but also its guarantee of liberty. He had thought much about these questions in recent days, pondering concepts that went well beyond the planks of the Republican platform he so often cited. The result was an appeal not just to reason but also to emotion, a heartfelt justification for resisting any compromise that reneged on the original promise of American freedom. — Harold Holzer

The bones said death was comin', and the bones never lied.
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grand pere Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across ever day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he'd done all those years ago.
What he'd brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva's brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind.
What stalked Eva now. — Susannah Sandlin

Back then he'd hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he's taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and applied a polish to them. The songs are comfortable now. People can take their shoes off to dance without fear of a spike in the foot; they can lie back on that smooth and waxed wood to take a nap in the afternoon or make love all night long. Oliver sees himself as a carpenter, a craftsman putting notes and melodies together, fitting them when they will, stepping back to rest and reconsider when they won't. — Richard J. Alley

Cabel felt the familiar nostalgic excitement of the endless possibilities encapsulated in a summers' night at Silver Beach. He smiled at himself as a boy and, more ruefully, at the man who now stood on the worn planks of the boardwalk. This night held no possibilities for him, though it was pleasant to remember a time when it did. — Erin Farwell

The dragonets found the carpenters to be even more fascinating than the furniture, and followed the poor men from pen to pen, crowding around to watch, tasting the wooden planks, trying to steal the tools. It made for an interesting day for everyone, as the boys tried to keep the dragonets away from the carpenters, and the dragonets tried to get at the carpenters, and the carpenters worked probably a great deal faster than they ever had in their lives, sure that the dragonets would go from tasting the wood to tasting them. — Mercedes Lackey

I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest. — Umberto Eco

Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish."
"Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish. — J. Maarten Troost

To get that word, male, out of the Constitution, cost the women of this country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign; 56 state referendum campaigns; 480 legislative campaigns to get state suffrage amendments submitted; 47 state constitutional convention campaigns; 277 state party convention campaigns; 30 national party convention campaigns to get suffrage planks in the party platforms; 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses to get the federal amendment submitted, and the final ratification campaign. — Carrie Chapman Catt

When one is building a ship, one does not begin with gathering timber and cutting planks, but rather by arousing in people the yearning for the great wide sea. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

ROOT CELLAR
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath. — Theodore Roethke

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes - since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, — Sinclair Lewis

The whole article, quite a long and verbose one, was written with the sole purpose of self-display. One could simply read it between the lines: "Pay attention to me, look at how I was in those moments. What do you need the sea, the storm, the rocks, the splintered planks of the ship for? I've described it all well enough for you with my mighty pen. Why look at this drowned woman with her dead baby in her dead arms? Better look at me, at how I could not bear the sight and turned away. Here I am turning my back; here I am horrified and unable to look again; I've shut my eyes - interesting, is it not?" I — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow, uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks placed on legs like milking-stools. — Alice Morse Earle

And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. — Umberto Eco

The abbreviators of works do injury to knowledge and to love.Of what value is he who,in order to abbreviate the parts of those things of which he professes to give complete knowledge,leaves out the greater part of the things of which the whole is composed?Oh human stupidity!You don't see that you are falling into the same error as one who strips a tree of its adornment of branches full of leaves,intermingled with fragrant flowers or fruit in order to demonstrate that the tree is good for making planks — Leonardo Da Vinci

And I would have answered:
The knottier the branch, the more twisted and misshapen, the more bent people called it, the harder it is to find it a place among the smooth planks, the more people agree that it should be thrown on the fire, the more useless it is, the more unsuitable for anything except letting one's imagination run riot, the more I covet it, the more I yearn to weigh it in my hand, the more I long to let my whittling knife be guided by its knots and veins ... Yes, bring that piece to me ... — Sjon

To scuttle a boat you don't have to rip out the whole bottom, you just need to remove a few planks, one by one. — Amitav Ghosh

But the sound of water escaping from mill-dams, &c., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. Shakespeare could make everything poetical; he tells us of poor Tom's haunts among "sheep cotes and mills." As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight. — John Constable

Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. — Julian Assange

What do we plant when we plant the tree? We plant the ship that will cross the sea, we plant the mast to carry the sails, we plant the planks to withstand the gales
the keel, the keelson, and beam and knee
we plant the ship when we plant the tree. — Henry Abbey

like planks but narrow. Eyebrows unplucked. In the hours he's spent here fewer than a dozen words have passed between them. She has a Mediterranean look but speaks — A.S.A Harrison

Think of it! A few more boats, a few more planks of wood nailed together in a particular way at a thrifty cost and all those men and women whom the world can so ill afford to loose would be with us today. There would be no mourning in thousands of homes which now are desolate and these words need not have been written. — Lawrence Beesley

A soft Sea washed around the House A Sea of Summer Air And rose and fell the magic Planks That sailed without a care - For Captain was the Butterfly For Helmsman was the Bee And an entire universe For the delighted crew. — Emily Dickinson

The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.
There was no doubt that whoever had shut it wanted it to stay shut. Dozens of nails secured it to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.
'And there's the sign, Ridcully,' said the Dean. 'You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door"?'
'Of course I've read it,' said Ridcully. 'Why d'yer think I want it opened?'
'Er ... why?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'To see why they wanted it shut, of course.'
This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking. — Terry Pratchett

Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks. — Ann Voskamp

What is it that dies? A log of wood dies to become a few planks. The planks die to become a chair. The chair dies to become a piece of firewood, and the firewood dies to become ash. You give different names to the different shapes the wood takes, but the basic substance is there always. If we could always remember this, we would never worry about the loss of anything. We never lose anything; we never gain anything. By such discrimination we put an end to unhappiness. (118-119) — Swami Satchidananda

Rich people's garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors. Planks that looked like wood were shot through with plastic. How was he to classify a loofah? The owners of the recycling plants demanded waste that was all one thing, pure. — Katherine Boo

And as they gave themselves to each other on the smooth, cedar-scented planks, they made something older than time and newer than tomorrow.

They made love - pure, fresh, timeless, and true. — Robin Wells