Quotes & Sayings About Rafters

Like waking up in our home one night to find ourselves in a blazing fire, we must be arsonists of emotion, forcing ourselves to grab only what is truly important to us before our life-rafters collapse in on us and we can no longer escape alive. — A.J. Darkholme

I avoid the looming visitor,
Flee him adroitly around corners,
Hating him, wishing him well;

Lest if he confront me I be forced to say what is in no wise true:
That he is welcome; that I am unoccupied;
And forced to sit while the potted roses wilt in the crate or the sonnet cools

Bending a respectful nose above such dried philosophies
As have hung in wreaths from the rafters of my house since I was a child.

Some trace of kindliness in this, no doubt,
There may be.
But not enough to keep a bird alive.

There is a flaw amounting to a fissure
In such behaviour. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I'll be singing hymns to the rafters, be praising His goodness so loud they're going to have to turn down the volume in Heaven. — Diane Hammond

Again Mosca felt she was up in the rafters, watching the mice. Little mouse, witless with fear. Running the wrong way. And here she was, just watching. Becoming a part of it by doing nothing. — Frances Hardinge

I suppose we were worn down and shivering. Three a.m. is a mean spirited hour. I suppose we were drenched, with the cold hose water trickling in at our collars and settling down at the tail of our shirts. Without doubt the heavy brass couplings felt moulded from metal-ice. Probably the open roar of the pumps drowned the petulant buzz of the raiders above, and certainly the ubiquitous fire-glow made an orange stage-set of the streets. Black water would have puddled the city alleys and I suppose our hands and faces were black as the water. Black with hacking about among the burnt-up rafters. These things were an every-night nonentity. They happened and they were not forgotten because they were not even remembered. — William Sansom

A girl is there. Dressed in a dirty rag of a dress, turning to look at him with the large, gold eyes that have studied everything from the rafters. Her hair in the overhead light appears dark for an instant, then when she shifts, fair. She is there in vivid detail, down to a mustache of beaded water above her generous mouth. A dead girl, looking more real and more alive than anyone he has ever seen.

She is not the girl - Oisin knows this with an instant, wrenching disappointment - whom he has been waiting for. — Lisa Carey

Juliana?" the words were low and far - too calm for her husband, who had found that he rather enjoyed the full spectrum of emotion now that he had experienced it.
"Yes?"
"What are you doing twenty feet in the air?"
"Looking for a book."
"Would you mind very much returning to the earth?"
"What are you thinking, climbing to the rafters in your condition?"
"I am not an invalid, Simon, I still have use of all my extremes."
"You do indeed - particularly your extreme ability to try my patience - I believe, however, that you mean extremities. — Sarah MacLean

Hell came right along with God, hand in hand. The stink of sulfur swirled in the air of the church, fire burned in the aisles, and brimstone rained out of the rafters. From the evangelist's oven mouth spewed images of a place with pitchforks, and devils, and lakes of fire that burned forever. God had fixed a place like that because he loved us so much. — Harry Crews

I didn't eat all of it."
"Oh, so it ate itself?" Dee shrieked so loudly I thought I heard the rafters in the ceiling shake. "Did the spoon ate it? Oh wait, I know. The carton ate it."
"Actually, I think the freezer ate it. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Elisa thought how empty the prayers sounded. The words rattled around in the ancient rafters and then returned to them like dead leaves falling from the trees. No life. No shade of hope. Only a cold wind that blew into their very souls. — Bodie Thoene

Delusions, errors and lies are like huge, gaudy vessels, the rafters of which are rotten and worm-eaten, and those who embark in them are fated to be shipwrecked. — Gautama Buddha

I'm the fucking Horde King, I don't woo."
"Woo her," Ristan continues.
"I don't woo."
"Woo," he repeats.
"I'm not the kind of man to woo anyone. I can make her scream my name to the rafters, isn't that enough wooing?"
"Woo," Ristan smirks, which only served to irritate me more.
"Woo," I grind out on an exhale.
"Yes, woo," he says, already turning to walk away. I watch his shoulders quake with laughter.
"Woo," I growl.
"Woo!" He says over his shaking shoulders.
"Fuck me," I shake my head.
"No thanks, not my type ... — Amelia Hutchins

It's hard to put it in perspective right now. I'm starting to feel a little emotional about what's going to happen Friday night. Getting your number put in the rafters is always something that as a kid ... you dream of seeing happen to you. — Scottie Pippen

The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian, and Polish, and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles. — Pete Hamill

His ability to evoke Celtic pride was incredible. He would always talk about how all the old players called him up after an embarrasing performance and wanted to disassociate themselves from the Celtics. They wanted to mail in their championship rings, wanted their numbers removed from the rafters, and by this point there would be tears rolling down our cheeks and we'd want to kill. — Bill Walton

Strings of chili hung from the rafters, chili to wake them from their dreams, dreams born of scents and rhythms, and the warmth that fell from the sky like the fleeciest blanket. — Anais Nin

Yet as a general rule it's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound "whole-grain goodness" to the rafters. — Michael Pollan

He preached as if he had a flaming sword in his hand. Bats fell out of the rafters. The organ started up by itself. The water sloshed in the font. — Terry Pratchett

A bare bulb swished from side to side. Dust floated in what little light it threw and cobwebs hung from the rafters. It smelled of spiders. — Louise Penny

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken. — John Updike

Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me. — William Styron

He turned them into real-life versions of an M. C. Escher drawing, automating them to the rafters, with blinking lights on aisles and shelves to guide human workers to the right products, and conveyor belts that ran into and out of massive machines, called Crisplants, that took products from the conveyors and scanned and sorted them into customer orders to be packaged and shipped. These facilities, Wright decreed, would be called not warehouses but distribution centers, as they were in Walmart's internal lexicon. — Brad Stone

I'm chasing a decade old ghost. Searching beneath the rafters of a cobweb-filled haven lined with old memories which my brain cannot accept are dead. The light of nostalgia is burning bright inside my heart. Ignoring the emptiness around me, and hoping for a resurrection of love. — LeAnne Mechelle

I can't believe you ate all the ice cream, Daemon!"I cringed and stopped inside the dining room. There was no way I was going into that kitchen."I didn't eat all of it.""Oh, so it ate itself?" Dee shrieked so loudly I thought I heard the rafters in the ceiling shake."Did the spoon eat it? Oh wait, I know. The carton ate it.""Actually, I think the freezer ate it," Daemon responded dryly. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something
it can be everything
to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle. (
from The Spectator Bird) — Wallace Stegner

Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become. — Shirley A. Martin

In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters? — William Gibson

It's going to be great. A lot of the players are coming. I wasn't here when they put (Jackson) up in the rafters. But to have him here as my number goes up, it brings back a lot of great memories. — Scottie Pippen

Through the round of many births I roamed without reward, without rest, seeking the house-builder.
Painful is birth again & again.
House-builder, you're seen!
You will not build a house again.
All your rafters broken,
the ridge pole destroyed,
gone to the Unformed,
the mind has come to the end of craving. — Gautama Buddha

The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus."

"Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?"

"White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway."

"I don't know."

Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. "What you mean, 'You don't know'? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That'd be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson's jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way. — Paul Beatty

'Gods of Wheat Street' has been described as an Aboriginal 'Neighbours' or 'Home and Away.' But on set, we were calling it 'Black to the Rafters.' — Shari Sebbens

Trust me, I never underestimate my charm or any of my other magnificent attributes. They work great on women. Alas, men tend to see me as an unwelcome rival. You, he might listen to. You're good at talking people into things."
"What makes you say that?"
"Because I'm perched in the rafters of a cannery, at risk from a man-slaying magical creature, and spending time with a drunk, a gangster, and an assassin at ... what time is it? — Lindsay Buroker

The whole house is spic and span and everybody's supposed to be real honest and full of what he calls 'the good'. We even leave food out for the mice in the rafters so they won't have to sin by stealing. And you know what happens when dinner's over? Everybody hunches over and licks his place clean so none of God's grace will be wasted. — Yukio Mishima

It was peak season and packed to the rafters and Harry presumed that was why it was so difficult to gain eye contact with the waiters. "The waiters here are like the planet Pluto," Andrew said. "They orbit on the periphery, only making an appearance every twentieth year, and even then are impossible to glimpse with the naked eye. — Jo Nesbo

The laugh of Doctor Prunesquallor was part of his conversation and quite alarming when heard for the first time. It appeared to be out of control as though it were a part of his voice, a top-storey of his vocal range that only came into its own when the doctor laughed. There was something about it of wind whistling through high rafters and there was a good deal of the horse's whinny, with a touch of the curlew. When giving vent to it, the doctor's mouth would be practically immobile like the door of a cabinet left ajar. Between the laughs he would speak very rapidly, which made the sudden stillness of his beautifully shaven jaws at the time of laughter all the more extraordinary. The laugh was not necessarily connected with humour at all. It was simply a part of his conversation. — Mervyn Peake

Every piece of wood in your house - from the windowsills to the furniture to the rafters - was once part of a living being, thriving in the open and pulsing with sap. If you look at these wooden objects across the grain, you might be able to trace out the boundaries of a couple of rings. The delicate shape of those lines tells you the story of a couple of years. If you know how to listen, each ring describes how the rain fell and the wind blew and the sun appeared every day at dawn. — Hope Jahren

I opened my eyes to find Gary and my mother sitting cross-legged up against a half-fallen wall, both of them laughing so hard they had tears running down their faces. My mother had Gary's forearm in one hand as she wheezed, "She didn't, she didn't!" and wiped tears away with the other, and Gary nodded so merrily it appeared his head would go bobbling off.
It was so completely incongruous with the farewell I'd just experienced I just sat there, offended on general principles, and waited for them to notice I'd woken up. Instead my mother threw her head back and shrieked like a delighted banshee, laughter bouncing off the crumbling walls.
I looked upward. The surviving banshees still sat in the oak rafters, many of them with expressions of accusation. This was not how things were done, and it was clearly all my fault. — C.E. Murphy

I'm going to build that house with my own hands, from the foundation to the roof. I'm going to do it for us, and I'm going to do it right, so it lasts forever. Can't go raising walls on a shaky foundation. Can't go slapping thatch over rafters so thin, they'll topple with the first winter storm. Do you know?"
She nodded. "I know."
He reached for her hand. "It's the same with us. I mean to build something with you. Something that will last. Much as I want you, I don't want to rush and bollocks it up. — Tessa Dare

At North Farm"

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings? — John Ashbery

This is your house, Reb. You are in the rafters, the floorboards, the walls, the lights. You are in every echo through every hallway. We hear you now. I hear you still. How can I - how can any of us - let you go? You are woven through us, from birth to death. — Mitch Albom

A little brown house sparrow swoops out of the rafters and lands on the tiles in front of her. Marie-Laure holds out an open palm. The sparrow tilts his head, considering. Then it flaps away. One month later she is blind. — Anthony Doerr

A big cigar was jammed in the corner of his wide mouth. Blue-gray smoke wafted to the ceiling rafters, curling around the big wagon-wheel chandelier like ghostly tendrils. — Kymber C. Hawke

He was hanging from one of the rafters in a laundry up near Frau Diller's. Another human pendulum. Another clock, stopped. — Markus Zusak

He- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it- was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. — Virginia Woolf

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole. — E.B. White

Golden bars make no less a prison
than a coffin on a hill.
And in caged reformation,
one wanders aimless still.
The rafters now a recollection
of sacred suppression.
How the morning dawn
strikes mourning confession.
Now Death yields a harvest
of the living masses.
We walk toward its path
no earthly power surpasses. — Craig Froman

My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything - so long as it beings with A through L. — Catherynne M Valente

A tree there towere Tall and branching That house upholding The hall's wonder Its leaves their hangings Its limbs rafters Its mighty bole In the midst standing. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Courtesy which oft is found in lowly sheds, with smoky rafters, than in tapestry halls and courts of princes, where it first was named. — John Milton

It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below. — Wallace Stegner

You're going to look your girl straight in the eye and say, Baby your mom rode to the rafters. Your mom lifted three girls in her hand, grinning all the way, she says, our voices rising to a baying now, all together. Your mom build pyramids and flew high in the sky, and back in Sutton Grove, they're still talking about the wonders they saw that night, still talking about how they watched us all reach to the heavens. — Megan Abbott

Inside a barn is a whole universe, with its own time zone and climate and ecosystem, a shadowy world of swirling dust illuminated in tiger stripes by light shining through the cracks between the boards. Old leather tack, lengths of chain, rope, and baling twine dangled from nails and rafters and draped over stall railings. Generations of pocketknives lay lost in the layers of detritus on the floor. — Carolyn Jourdan

The press box at Wrigley Field in Chicago is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park's second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate. — Roger Angell

You still talk to your horses."
I jerked and Sackett shifted, not liking the spike of energy that shot through me or the fact that my fingers had yanked at his mane.
Moses stood silhouetted in the barn door, holding what looked to be a large canvas in his hand.
I hadn't realized I was still talking to Sackett, and I did a quick examination of what I'd just said. I believe I had just uttered an embarrassing rant on Moses not being allowed in Georgia. Oh, Lord, I prayed fervently, you can make the blind man see and the deaf man hear, so it shouldn't be too much to ask to make this man forget everything he's just seen and heard.
"What does Sackett think about those new, stricter laws in Georgia?"
I looked up at the rafters, "Hey, thanks for comin' through for me, Lord. — Amy Harmon

When I did show up next door, at 6:34, it sounded like World War III had erupted in the house. I'd let myself in since no one answered the damn door.
"I can't believe you ate all the ice cream, Daemon!"
I cringed and stopped inside the dining room. There was no way I was going into that kitchen.
"I didn't eat all of it."
"Oh, so it ate itself?" Dee shrieked so loudly I thought I heard the rafters in the ceiling shake. "Did the spoon eat it? Oh wait, I know. The carton ate it."
"Actually, I think the freezer ate it," Daemon responded dryly.
I grinned when I heard what sounded like the empty container hitting what suspiciously sounded like flesh. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters of the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, Maybe I didn't write you, but I found you. — Hoagy Carmichael

I'm not the kind of man to woo anyone. I can make her scream my name to the rafters, isn't that enough wooing? — Amelia Hutchins

But five minutes later the five-hundred-year-old Roman chapel was filled to the rafters with the soaring sounds of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody, — Tiffany Reisz

When we sing, the sound made even by small-scale earthbound creatures such as us rings around the rafters that we cannot otherwise reach. — N. T. Wright

I've actually got a new sorta-boyfriend and I suppose maybe I'll have shake-the-rafters, rattle-the-windows sex with him since I'll finally be legal and all."
"Eponine," Phil hissed. Maube I'd only said it for the reaction, because there was absolutely no way that would be happening withing the month. I could count the numbers of boys I'd merely kissed on one hand. I didn't even need a hand at all to number the guys I'd slept with. I figured the integer wasn't about to change any time soon, either.
"Obviously I'm kidding, Phil." His posture relaxed, only slightly. "We'll be quiet. — Megan Squires

God is asking you to take care of this special place. He says: If a man is lazy, the rafters sag; if his hands are idle, the house leaks (Ecclesiastes 10:18). — Jim George

Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about rafters? — Henry David Thoreau

Doves coo in the rafters above us as she sits down on the blanket, her loathed dress whispering around her. She pops a grape into her mouth and sighs. "This is so unreal. I feel like a princess."
She couldn't have given me a better opening for the conversation I've been hoping to have.
"Funny," I say. "I was thinking the same thing."
Delilah frowns. "You feel like a princess too? — Jodi Picoult

Separation by death must finally be choked down,
but separation in life is a long anguish,
Chiang-nan is a pestilential land;
no word from you there in exile.
You have been in my dreams, old friend,
as if knowing how much I miss you.
Caught in a net,
how is it you still have wings?
I fear you are no longer mortal;
the distance to here is enormous.
When your spirit came, the maples were green;
when it went, the passes were black.
The setting moon spills light on the rafters;
for a moment I think it's your face.
The waters are deep, the waves wide;
don't let the river gods take you. — Du Fu

There goes the dismantled - Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman," he thought to himself, "without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman," he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, "and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere," he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. "Out looking for what she's afraid to find - Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home. — Djuna Barnes

Constellations hanging overhead in the rafters of the universe — T.C. Boyle

Instead of feeling like there's two or three of us in this town of hostile crackers, I'm in a big church filled with people who believe the same thing I believe and the power of song is raising what we're trying to do, raising it up to the rafters. — Stanley Nelson Jr.

She rolled onto her back in the middle of the suddenly empty bed. Above her, the rafters glowed with the summer sun. Blue touched her mouth. It felt the same as it always did. Not at all like she had just gotten her first and last kiss. — Maggie Stiefvater

The child had woken before she could ask whether this meant that pigeons were all human ghosts, forms that dead people had gone into and become, or whether they somehow existed simultaneously in Heaven, where dead people go, and up amongst the rafters of the derelict barn in the neighbour's yard at the same time. — Alan Moore

And while Luce dreamed below of the most glorious wings unfurling-the likes of which she'd never seen before-two angels in the rafters shook hands. — Lauren Kate

Each piece of the set was on a winch and pulley, bag-dropped, counterbalanced by nests of fifty-pound bags of sand. The setup was called a "Fairbanks," for the reason that when a stagehand so wanted, he could stand upon a knot on the rope, untie as few or as many bags of sand as he wanted, and ride nearly to the rafters like Zorro as the scenery lowered.
There was no particular reason to ride that way, but because Carter allowed it, the team of men did so all night long, trading places at the top, jumping onto the ropes and riding back down later. With the mighty Egyptian set descending in its many pieces, the audience was deprived of a behind-the-scenes tableau of beauty: Carter's team swiftly riding ropes up to the catwalk and down to the stage again, simply because they could. — Glen David Gold

Anyway, she loved horses a lot, my mother. When she was growing up she had a horse she said got lonely sometimes? and he liked to come right up to the house and put his head in at the window to see what was going on.
"What was his name?
"Paintbox." I'd loved it when my mother told me about the stables back in Kansas: owls and bats in the rafters, horses nickering and blowing. I knew the names of all her childhood horses and dogs.
Paintbox! Was he all different colors?
"He was spotted, sort of. I've seen pictures of him. Sometimes - in the summer - he'd come and look in on her while she was having her afternoon nap. She could hear him breathing, you know, just inside the curtains. — Donna Tartt

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop. — W. H. Auden

Born on straw at night
under low stable rafters,
Baby Jesus cried. — Richelle E. Goodrich

2012 has been an extraordinary year for our country. We cheered our Queen to the rafters with the Jubilee, showed the world what we're made of by staging the most spectacular Olympic and Paralympic Games ever and - let's not forget - punched way above our weight in the medals table. — David Cameron

For the first time in a decade I felt a voice rising from deep inside my soul. It cried out 'what will you be today?' and I heard 'relentless' booming from the rafters inside an old gym as Sami and a group of young men chased dreams and trophies while their fathers went to war. — Tucker Elliot

I have passed in ignorance through a cycle of many rebirths, seeking the builder of the house. Continuous rebirth is a painful thing. But now, housebuilder, I have found you out. You will not build me a house again. All your rafters are broken, your ridge-pole shattered. My mind is free from active thought, and has made an end of craving. — Gautama Buddha

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky.
These rocks, he thought, are waiting for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them. — Ayn Rand

The government passed more laws to protect women from dirty jokes than to protect men from death by faulty rafters at a construction site. — Warren Farrell

I was kind of an obnoxious kid. I would imitate Celine Dion. I would jump around and belt to the rafters and do the accent and everything. — Kimiko Glenn

And when it has got in; as one not finding what it seeks, whatever that may be, it wails and howls to issue forth again: and not content with stalking through the aisles, and gliding round and round the pillars, and tempting the deep organ, soars up to the roof, and strives to rend the rafters: then flings itself despairingly upon the stones below, and passes, muttering, into the vaults. — Charles Dickens

High above, the rafters were made of old wood, and sturdy as the mountain the house had been built on, and across the way, sixteen coffins were stacked one upon the next, as if they were nothing but moving boxes from U-Haul. The — J.R. Ward

Haiku Christmas Story

New light in the sky
announces a sacred birth.
Shine brightly young star.

Hallelujah song
carries on a gentle wind,
heralding a king.

Shepherds lift their heads,
not to gaze at a new light
but to hear angels.

"Unto you is born
in the city of David
a Savior for all."

Born on straw at night
under low stable rafters,
Baby Jesus cried.

Sheep and goats and cows
gather 'round a manger bed
to awe at a babe.

Wise men come to see
a child of greater wisdom
and honor divine.

Rare and precious gifts,
gold and myrrh and frankincense,
to offer a king.

Mary and Joseph
huddle snugly together.
They cradle God's son.

On this wise He came,
the Son of God to the earth.
A humble wonder. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Living on the Plains"

That winter when this thought came-how the river
held still every midnight and flowed
backward a minute-we studied algebra
late in our room fixed up in the barn,
and I would feel the curved relation,
the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life
holding the earth round and ready
to meet itself again when morning came.

At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal
she said, "You're studying too hard,"
and I would include her face and hands in my glance
and then look past my father's gaze as
he told again our great race through the stars
and how the world can't keep up with our dreams. — William Stafford