Ploughed Quotes & Sayings

That is why it is often such a relief when the talk turns from "general topics" to a man's own hobby. It is like turning from the landscape in the parlor to the ploughed field outdoors. It is a return to the three dimensional world, after a sojourn in the painter's portrayal of his own emotional response to his own inattentive memory of what he imagines he ought to have seen. — Walter Lippmann

He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful. — Charles Dickens

The unique impression of Jesus upon mankind - whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world - is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion. Jesus belonged to the race of prophets. He saw with open eyes the mystery of the soul. One man was true to what is in you and me. He, as I think, is the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the gray November weather came, and hung its soft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields and the vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy stillness weighed my heart down to a forlorn yearning after the pleasant things of childhood, the petting, the comforting, the warming faith in the unfailing wisdom of the elders. A great need of something to lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

We are the ones who first ploughed the earth when Modise (God) made it," ran an old Setswana poem. "We were the ones who made the food. We are the ones who look after the men when they are little boys, when they are young men, and when they are old and about to die. We are always there. But we are just women, and nobody sees us. — Alexander McCall Smith

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf's below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows' legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo's sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies. — China Mieville

My field was God's earth. Wherever I ploughed, there was my field. Land was free. It was a thing no man called his own. Labor was the only thing men called their own. — Leo Tolstoy

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time. — Lew Wallace

I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerners even read about, and they ploughed on. I often openly cried during interviews, unable to process this violence and hatred towards women I was witnessing. — Lynsey Addario

Spiritual Love is born of sorrow ... For men love one another with spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground buried beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel one another and feel with one another in their common anguish, and so they pity one another and love one another. — Miguel De Unamuno

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under. — Jeanette Winterson

Every mouth you've ever kissed was just practice. All the bodies you've ever undressed and ploughed in to were preparing you for me. I don't mind tasting them in the memory of your mouth.
Was it a long journey? Did it take you long to find me?
You're here now, welcome home. — Warsan Shire

The Spanish voyager, as his caravel ploughed the adjacent seas, might give full scope to his imagination, and dream that beyond the long, low margin of forest which bounded his horizon lay hid a rich harvest for some future conqueror; perhaps a second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another Cuzco with its temple of the Sun, encircled with a frieze of gold. Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long stand idle. — Francis Parkman

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right. — Richard Dawkins

Alessandro Manzoni, who based his conception on a different awareness of Christianity and of the mechanisms governing the mob and desire. As a young man Nietzsche admired Manzoni's masterpiece I promessi sposi [The Betrothed]; at least, he said so, though the results are not apparent.63 Girard, however, was not thinking about what Nietzsche actually produced, so much as what he came across by chance as his whaler ploughed through far northern seas. In that sense he was a genuine explorer — Giuseppe Fornari

From the dark forest that bordered the soft ploughed fields, came a low cry that did not belong to any animal. It was accompanied by the sound of branches bending and snapping, and the splintering of wood as trees were crushed or toppled onto their sides. — Peter James West

'Green' cannot be allowed to become an excuse for stealth taxes. And nor should 'green taxes' be about punishment. Instead, they should represent a switch of emphasis. So if domestic flights are taxed, it should be on the absolute condition that the money is ploughed into improving the alternatives, such as trains. — Zac Goldsmith

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

The fields that push up the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, are all one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses, and the sun. The stuff that is in you, Gauguin, will pound through a grape tomorrow, because you and the grape are one. When I paint a peasant labouring in the field, I want people to feel the peasant flowing down into the soil, just as the corn does, and the soil flowing up into the peasant. I want them to feel the sun pouring into the peasant, into the field, the corn, the plough, and the horses, just as they all pour back into the sun. When you begin to feel the universal rhythm in which everything on earth moves, you begin to understand life ... . — Irving Stone

It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left untouched by the plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the fields there comes at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet, and on the low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among it. — Leo Tolstoy

Id i think i was god that i had to lie and take it did i think then i was a mountain or a hill or a ridge and who told me that and who decided stones had no rights for stones can waste away from being denied from being abused and who decided who is the ploughed and who ploughs and why did i not get up and why not go away and what would have happened if i had resisted.. — Marlene Van Niekerk

A picture of my existence ... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow ... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night. — Franz Kafka

I ploughed the land with horses,
But my heart was ill at ease,
For the old seafaring men
Came to me now and then,
With their sagas of the seas. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was hard to describe what she had sensed, but it had been distinct and clear, like the shape of a leafless tree against the sky, or a crow flying across a ploughed field. She hesitated to close her eyes again, for it had risen up close to her face like something appalling. — Jessica Rydill

The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad, and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis. — Glen Duncan

There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields. — W. Somerset Maugham

As he hurried along, eagerly anticipating the moment when he would be at home again among the things he knew and liked, the Mole saw clearly that he was an animal of tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden-plot. For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual conflict, that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime. — Kenneth Grahame

A huge blue and white umbrella unfolded out of the vehicle, followed by two legs clad in a masculine-sized pair of gumboots. The driver nudged the door shut and ploughed through the downpour like a striped galleon, only his oilskin coat and denim-clad calves showing. — Tracey Alvarez

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. — Joan Didion

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh) — John Berger

The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles. — Ayn Rand

He dug and ploughed over his piece of land, and then sowed some turnip seed. Soon the seed began to show itself above ground, and there grew on turnip immensely large and thick, which seemed as if it would never have done growing, but was a princess among turnips; and as there had never before been seen such a turnip, so also there has never been such another since. — Jacob Grimm

I myself am quite absorbed by the delicate yellow, delicate soft green, delicate violet of a ploughed and weeded piece of soil. — Vincent Van Gogh

With drooping shoulders The majority sit hunched, their foreheads furrowed like Stony ground that has been repeatedly ploughed-up to no purpose. — Bertolt Brecht

Also the spectacle and the awareness of her own body. Daily and, so to speak, ceremoniously soiled with saliva and sperm, she felt herself literally to be the respository of impurity, the sink mentioned in the Scriptures. And yet those parts of her body most constantly offended, having become less sensitive, at the same time seemed to her to have become more beautiful and, as it were, ennobled: her mouth closed upon anonymous members, the tips of her breasts constantly fondled by hands, and between her quartered thighs the twin, contiguous paths wantonly ploughed. — Pauline Reage

According to St. Augustine, the left hand represented the temporal, the mortal, and the bodily, as opposed to the right, which stood for "God, eternity, the years of God which fail not."25 For centuries the preference for the right hand over the left governed how people fished, ploughed fields, twisted rope, and ate their meals. The Greeks and Romans, for example, always reclined on the left side, propped on the left elbow, leaving the right hand free for the business of eating and drinking. Plutarch noted that parents taught children to eat right-handed from a young age, and "if they do put forth the left hand, at once we correct them."26 The prejudice against the left hand persisted during the Renaissance, with parents freeing a child's right hand from its swaddling clothes to ensure right-handedness at the dinner table as well as at the writing desk. — Ross King

Lovegood had got out The Quibbler again. Meanwhile, at the Hufflepuff table Ernie Macmillan was one of the few still staring at Professor Umbridge, but he was glassy-eyed and Harry was sure he was only pretending to listen in an attempt to live up to the new prefect's badge gleaming on his chest. Professor Umbridge did not seem to notice the restlessness of her audience. Harry had the impression that a full-scale riot could have broken out under her nose and she would have ploughed on with her speech. The teachers, however, were still listening very attentively, and Hermione seemed to be drinking in every word Umbridge spoke, though, judging by her — J.K. Rowling

What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught? — Helen Keller

We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour: the short summer had already died, the body of the ploughed plains smoked. — Anna Akhmatova

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne five children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? — Sojourner Truth

What I am interested in, what I write and care about, exists in the slow lane, somewhere between hand-ploughed fields and a pint of real ale. — Fennel Hudson

As he made his way, he ploughed his bare feet through the mud as a child, head bowed as a child, interested as a child neither in where he was going nor in what might happen next but only in the furrow his foot opened that vanished a moment later. — Richard Flanagan

The Christmas genre is a field that's been well-ploughed. — John Oates

We have ploughed the vast ocean in a fragile bark. — Ovid

The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. — Henry David Thoreau

My soul is a dark ploughed field In the cold rain; My soul is a broken field Ploughed by pain. — Sara Teasdale

How could she have gotten herself here? To this place where she stood by while the man she adored checked out things to share with his wife?
You knew what you were getting into.
But that wasn't really true. One never knew, not entirely, not until in really deep. She screamed and seethed in raw silence. Damien came in then, and spooned her. He hadn't a clue she was an impulse away from getting up, dressing, and leaving.
How shocked he would be, if she did that.
And he'd conclude that she wasn't the well-matched true lover that he thought he had finally, at long last, discovered.
That thought ploughed a spike deeply through her. It gouged her so much that her breath stopped. It hurt her even more than did the wife. And she knew in that moment while he settled into bliss that she wasn't going to leave, that leaving hadn't had the slightest chance. — Aphrodite Phoenix

Some of his colleagues and a few of his students claimed to have been moved so by a book that they had read it again and again. Who were they? Of what were they made? Were they dissembling? Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever. It would become part of you and never leave, and you would love the characters as if they were your own. Who would want to plough over ground that has been perfectly ploughed? Would it not be, like living one's life again, infinitely painful and dissonant? — Mark Helprin

From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? — W. Somerset Maugham

From high Meonia's rocky shores I came, Of poor decsent, Acoetes is my name, My sire was measly born: no oxen ploughed, His fruitful fields, nor in his pastures lowed, His whole estate within the waters lay' With lines and hooks he caught the finny prey; His art was all his livelehood, which he Thus with his dying lips bequeathed to me: In streams, my boy, and rivers take thy chance; There swims', said he, Thy whole inheritance. — Ovid

It was likely, then that this - -this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field- - meant death. Death - -the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point. — C.S. Lewis

To give a recipe for getting a rough idea, in case you want to, I recommend the following procedure. Select a flat ten-acre ploughed field, so sited that all the surface water of the surrounding country drains into it. Now cut a zig-zag slot about four feet deep and three feet wide diagonally across, dam off as much water as you can so as to leave about a hundred yards of squelchy mud; delve out a hole at one side of the slot, then endeavour to live there for a month on bully beef and damp biscuits, whilst a friend has instructions to fire at you with his Winchester every time you put your head above the surface. — Bruce Bairnsfather