Quotes & Sayings About Roadside

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings. — Martin Filler

The rules of engagement are so lax that soldiers are shooting and killing Iraqis under mere suspicion, and tragedies are everyday. There are road killings, killings on the road when someone is trying to pass a convoy and they get shot. Or if a roadside bomb goes off, the soldiers just start shooting in all directions. — Yaroslav Trofimov

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies ... and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia. — William James

And I thought kitty liter was the unlawful practice of discarding small felines along the roadside. — Robert J. Morrissette

I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho. — Douglas Coupland

Ardon was greeted by several of the members of the tribe of Dan. They were an unruly, quarrelsome group, and Ardon remembered the prophecy that Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, had given on his deathbed. He had identified the nature of each of his sons, and of Dan he had said, "Dan will be a serpent by the roadside, a viper along the path, that bites the horse's heels so that its rider tumbles backward." A grim smile touched Ardon's broad lips. "Old Jacob got it right that time. Dan has some good soldiers, but they are not to be trusted. — Gilbert Morris

Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside


Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.

Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied
to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,
lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.


Translated by Stephen Mitchell — Rainer Maria Rilke

In America, diner food or roadside barbecue is the best road food, but I am not a fan of eating while driving - too messy. — Jose Andres

Life must be poetry, a song, a dance, like a flower on the roadside, blossoming for no one in particular, but spreading its fragrance in the wind, and sending it anywhere. — Lao-Tzu

I would need ... daisy love, you know, pretty love, sweet love that nonetheless was ubiquitous in roadside ditches in the summertime, and instead I would get orchid love. Love that needed misting and replanting and pruning and fertilizing and died anyway. — Mary Ann Rivers

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

one kept me informed on Dad's progress. Or lack of progress. Or how serious it all was - is. You certainly didn't, darling." Yet, was this true? Vaguely I seemed to know that my father was not doing well for some time. Driving on our country roads you see the carcasses of animals - raccoons, deer - lying at the roadside, killed — Joyce Carol Oates

Las Vegas is Everymans cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperors orgy is now a democratic institution. Topless Pizza Lunch. — Alistair Cooke

I love to close my eyes a moment and think of the land outside, white under the mingled snow and moonlight--the heaps of stones by the roadside white--snow in the furrows. Mon Dieu! How quiet and how patient! — Katherine Mansfield

Mr. Wang had found my interest in fen, the Mandarin word for excrement, peculiar. Nonetheless, he tried to be helpful. He would point out when he spotted a truck full of fen looming behind, though its odor preceded it by far. He would alert me when he saw a tiny figure in a roadside field bearing a tank and hose, spraying--by the smell of it--the contents of his toilets on his cabbages. This practice would horrify any public health professional, given the disease-load of feces, but it's what happens to 90 percent of China's excrement, and has been done forever. There are reasons not to eat salads in China, and why the sizzling woks are so sizzling. — Rose George

The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts. — Rudy Rucker

Cattle liked to stand on the roadside at night and would suddenly step out into the paths of oncoming cars, almost as if they were curious to find out what lay behind the headlights. Perhaps they thought that the headlights were torches, held by their owners, and came out to see if they brought food; perhaps they were looking for warmth and thought the lights were the sun. Perhaps they thought nothing in particular, which was always possible with cattle, and with some people too, for that matter. — Alexander McCall Smith

When you see a roadside marker, take in what it tells but also ask, how might this be wrong? One giveaway is the use of qualifying phrases introducing statements of fact, as in: "According to tradition..." or "According to the legislature..." Visitors can count on the rest of such sentences to be unsubstantiated. — James W. Loewen

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little. — Stephen King

Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people. — Tom Robbins

For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed. — Lorrie Moore

Dr. Martin Luther King put it like this: "We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside . . . but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved."23 — Shane Claiborne

The weeping voices rise straight up and strike the clouds. A passer-by at the roadside asks a conscript why, The conscript answers only that drafting happens often. — Du Fu

My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner - financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy - so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared.When he retired, he reached new levels of preparedness, so his car contained bottled water, hand wipes, a roadside emergency kit with flares, books on tape, a coin dispenser, and two hand towels to use as makeshift bibs so he and my mother could drive and eat without making a mess. — Jancee Dunn

And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I don't know of any wrestler who hasn't, at one time or another, been with a fan. One time I met a woman at a match in Tennessee, and afterward we went to a little roadside motel. We checked in, went to the room, and enjoyed each other for an hour or so. — Jerry Lawler

Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station. — Mira Jacob

I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real. — George MacDonald

Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.

What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.

Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear).

And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image - shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home. — Allen Ginsberg

Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside. — O. Henry

Whoop it up for liberty! After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won't touch socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won't pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic. Now, isn't that worth fighting for? — James Connolly

Why uproot
a perfectly healthy
white blazing star
from the soil
to allow room
for a roadside weed? — Stephanie Hemphill

You should indeed have longer tarried By the roadside before you married. — Walter Savage Landor

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside — Anne Sexton

There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Instead the king asked the beggar to give him something. Taken aback, the beggar fished three grains of rice from his bowl and dropped them into the king's outstretched hand. When at the end of the day the beggar poured out what he had received, he found to his astonishment three grains of pure gold in the bottom of his bowl. O, that I had given him all!3 One — Timothy J. Keller

watch the goshawk snip, tear and wrench flesh from the rabbit's foreleg. I feel sorry for the rabbit. Rabbit was born, grew up in the field, ate dandelions and grass, scratched his jaw with his feet, hopped about. Had baby rabbits of his own. Rabbit didn't know what lonely was; he lived in a warren. And rabbit is now just a carefully packed assemblage of different kinds of food for a hawk who spends her evenings watching television on the living-room floor. Everything is so damn mysterious. Another car passes. Faces turn to watch me crouched with rabbit and hawk. I feel like a tableau at a roadside shrine. But I'm not sure what the shrine is for. I'm a roadside phenomenon. I am death to community. I am missing the point. — Helen Macdonald

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. — Walt Whitman

Googie architecture could ... be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. There are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors. — Jane Jacobs

Speaking of names, a word to parents: Stop using alternate spellings for your kids. Aimee, Eryn, Bil, Derik. You're only costing jobs. The whole customized-coffee-mug and key-chain industry. An entire generation is being robbed of their roadside-Florida-souvenir heritage. "Daddy, why don't they ever have my name? I see something close, but it's spelled different." "Sorry, honey, we decided to be pricks. — Tim Dorsey

On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
"A Time to Break Silence," at Riverside Church — Martin Luther King Jr.

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt. — Joy Kogawa

Our military should spare no expense to ensure the safety of our troops, particularly as they confront a hostile insurgency and roadside bombs throughout Iraq. — Christopher Dodd

The village of Polgardi is a dusty roadside settlement northeast of Lake Balaton, a resort area in western Hungary popular with German tourists. — Peter Landesman

And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider's web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving - to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing - light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves. — Vladimir Nabokov

Grief is a funny thing because you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life. After a bit you set it down by the roadside and walk on and leave it. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled. — Tom Robbins

And he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day. M — Neil Gaiman

Do you think Radiohead is my whole goddamn life? I also have a roadside cart where I sell apples and mincemeat pies. — Thom Yorke

Getting up quite late in the morning, going and trying to clean my bikes - I have quite a few of them in Ranchi - spending some time with my family, my parents and friends. Going out for rides with my friends and having lunch or dinner at a roadside hotel - that's my favourite time-pass. These are the sort of things that really excite me. — Mahendra Singh Dhoni

I'm convinced that her obsession with Jesus was far more romantic than spiritual. I think she was actually attracted to him. I sincerely thought that one day while out on a grocery run, she would find some skinny, bearded, out-of-work Foote guy on the side of the road and, convinced that he was our anorexic Son of God, rescue him and head for some unincorporated Christian town in the middle of Illinois with a bingo hall and lots of roadside crucifixes, never to return. — Adam Rapp

Aw, you goddammed bastards! They're shootin' him while he's down! Son of a bitch!"
The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, "Suck on this, asshole."
The ship vibrated for half a second, then paused before continuing toward the lock.
"Point defense cannons?" Holden asked.
"Summary roadside justice," Alex grunted back. — James S.A. Corey

I'd assume love was safe, like ordering the same thing at a restaurant every single time. I didn't realize that it could be a greasy roadside sandwich and vomiting, followed by a conversation that made time slow down and my heart speed up. — Alicia Thompson

A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder. — Dylan Thomas

The rain had ripened all the country around and the roadside grass was luminous and green from the run-off and flowers were in bloom across the open country. He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. — Cormac McCarthy

Wherever there is a large motorway enabling the transport of ton after ton of German goods, you will inevitably find a sweet little rabbit trembling by the roadside. — Timur Vermes

The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy's central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash. — Nancy Isenberg

In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest
usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation
and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside. — John Millington Synge

Well I walk right on up to your rebel roadside
The one that rambles on for a million miles
Yes I walk down this road searchin' for your love
And my soul too
When I find ya I ain't gonna let go. — Jimi Hendrix

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay. — Anne Rivers Siddons

We remember the grind of the insurgency
the roadside bombs, the sniper fire, the suicide attacks. From the 'triangle of death' to the fight for Ramadi; from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south
your will proved stronger than the terror of those who tried to break it. — Barack Obama

They actually have working gasoline cars, and motels and roadside diners. They even have halls where they pump in toxic fumes so you can smell how it was when we were kids. — Stephen Baxter

Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: 'CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What could it all be about? 'As one victim to another,' his body language seems to marvel, 'What's a mushroom done to deserve that kind of abuse?' Not even in the worst days of street-fighting did he ever experience ill-treatment on this scale. — Alexander Masters

I went to my favourite meeting of the year, the Southern 100, and my Honda 600 threw a con-rod, splitting the case and letting oil spill onto the exhaust, setting the bike on fire. Race fans at the roadside poured beer and bottles of water over it to put out the flames. After the TT race failure I'd had with the bike I wouldn't have been bothered if they'd let it burn. — Guy Martin

On our way home we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside. It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair — Agota Kristof

She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear. — Tom Robbins

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside ... — Martin Amis

Brave young women complete heroic acts everyday, with no one bearing witness. This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story the made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet feats of courage. And to introduce them to the young women like Kamila Sidiqi who will go on. No matter what. — Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Sometimes we cannot see and don't want to see because we are blinded. We need eye salve to put on our eyes. We cry out for revival, and yet God says, "I want to open your eyes so you can see what is before you. Revival has a face and a name. It lies bleeding on the roadside." If we want to see revival, we need to begin with the one in front of us. — Heidi Baker

One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. — Rudyard Kipling

Oh shit, I can see Gomez," Alex said over the comm. "He's down. Aw, you goddammed bastards! They're shootin' him while he's down! Son of a bitch!" The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, "Suck on this, asshole." The ship vibrated for half a second, then paused before continuing toward the lock. "Point defense cannons?" Holden asked. "Summary roadside justice," Alex grunted back. Holden — James S.A. Corey

Then she rooted around until she found the bathroom medicine cabinet. It used to contain a bottle of aspirin. Now it contained her scream from the time she was bitten by a llama at a roadside petting zoo in Manitoba. — Ian Tregillis

We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos. — Bob Barker

Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination. — Swami Sivananda

I remember every player - every single one - who wore the Tennessee orange, a shade that our rivals hate, a bold, aggravating color that you can usually find on a roadside crew, "or in a correctional institution," as my friend Wendy Larry jokes. But to us the color is a flag of pride, because it identifies us as Lady Vols and therefore as women of an unmistakable type. Fighters. I remember how many of them fought for a better life for themselves. I just met them halfway. — Pat Summitt

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. — Vladimir Nabokov

I liked taking the elements of roadside advertising out of context because it removes the imperative and just goes to the essence of it - the pure heart of advertising. — Stanley Donwood

In the case of a single nineteen year old infantry soldier mangled in the devastating blast of a carefully laid roadside bomb, some fifty or even sixty years of exigent torment - some 500,000 hours of constant, inescapable misery - has been created out of virtually nothing, far exceeding the total output of brutal (albeit dazzling) terror felt by another less fortunate soldier in the seconds before his body is irreparably torn apart by shrapnel and his life is extinguished on a poorly defined battlefield, his account closed forever. — John Zande

Some of you may feel that if you don't do something soon to change your life, you will be left by the roadside, alone, homeless and in despair. But is the despair not there as you reach and grapple to create or manifest your desires through your own effort and will? What happens if or when those things appear in your life? Joy? Peace? Or a temporary sense of relief?

What if it is relief from the wanting you have been craving for so long, not the outcome, but the relief from the constant wanting. — Kelly Martin

O Canada I have not forgotten you,
as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on
the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that,
you are the two boys with pails walking along that road. — Billy Collins

For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower — Gregory Maguire

A high-speed collision gave a new sense of sight
To me
And now my vision can render the scene
A blurry image of wreckage and roadside debris
Happiness returned to me
Through a grave emergency — Owl City

Through PETA, we rescue animals in roadside zoos and circuses. They are some of the most abused animals in the country. — Sam Simon

Pure truth," I said. "You are my bright penny by the roadside. You are worth more than salt or the moon on a long night of walking. You are sweet wine in my mouth, a song in my throat, and laughter in my heart. [ ... ] "You are too good for me," I said, "You are a luxury I cannot afford. Despite this, I insist you come with me today. I will buy you dinner and spend hours waxing rhapsodic
over the vast landscape of wonder that is you." [ ... ] "I will play you music. I will sing you songs. For the rest of the afternoon, the rest of the world cannot touch us. — Patrick Rothfuss

Happiness is a roadside flower growing on the highways of usefulness; plucked, it shall wither in thy hand; passed by, it is fragrance to thy spirit. Trample the thyme beneath thy feet; be useful, be happy. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

Found in a small stone cave bitten from the roadside, stitchless save for his great outsized boots and a plague of flies, fat on the human scrappage of dinners long past, Toad squatted in the slitted stomach of a warm child, eating loudly the face of her hapless, headless father, who sat a good foot off the ground impaled up the ass on a pointed post. — Nick Cave

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. — Jeffrey K. Smith

We saw rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at intervals, and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which obtained in Jacob's time. There were no walls, no fences, no hedges - nothing to secure a man's possessions but these random heaps of stones. The Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal times, and these other Arabs, their lineal descendants, do so likewise. An American, of ordinary intelligence, would soon widely extend his property, at an outlay of mere manual labor, performed at night, under so loose a system of fencing as this. — Mark Twain

If it is not my portion to meet thee in this life then let me ever feel that I have missed thy sight
let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.
As my days pass in the crowded market of this world and my hands grow full with the daily profits, let me ever feel that I have gained nothing
let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.
When I sit by the roadside, tired and panting, when I spread my bed low in the dust, let me ever feel that the long journey is still before me
let me not forget a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.
When my rooms have been decked out and the flutes sound and the laughter there is loud, let me ever feel that I have not invited thee to my house
let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours. — Rabindranath Tagore

At the very time that Congress is considering a Bush administration request to equip our troops in Iraq with vehicles that are more resistant to roadside bombs, its leadership is fighting for a proposal that would have the opposite effect on roads here at home: a measure sought by environmentalists that would force automakers to make vehicles sold domestically much lighter and, thus, more vulnerable in collisions. — Deneen Borelli

This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power. — Neil Gaiman

As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain. Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In those situations, the correct response to, 'Where did you go to school?' is 'School? I never had much in the way of book learnin' and such.' And then get in your BMW and get the hell out of there. — Conan O'Brien

I like to move forward and notice things along the roadside that indicate where I should go. — Josh Homme

I could do terrible things to people who dump unwanted animals by the roadside. — James Herriot

You're my safe harbor in an endless stormy sea. You're my shady willow on a sunny day. You're sweet music in a distant room. You're unexpected cake on a rainy day. You're my bright penny on the roadside, you are worth more than the moon on the long night walk. You are sweet wine in my mouth, a song in my throat and laughter in my heart. — Patrick Rothfuss

The Song of the Defeated
My master has bid me while I stand at the roadside,
to sing the song of Defeat,
for that is the bride whom He woos in secret.
She has put on the dark veil,
hiding her face from the crowd,
but the jewel glows on her breast in the dark.
She is forsaken of the day,
and God's night is waiting for her with its lamps lighted and flowers wet with dew.
She is silent with her eyes downcast;
she has left her home behind her,
from her home has come that wailing in the wind.
But the stars are singing the love-song of the eternal to a face sweet with shame and suffering.
The door has been opened in the lonely chamber,
the call has sounded,
and the heart of the darkness throbs with awe
because of the coming tryst. — Rabindranath Tagore

And there, far ahead of me, running by the side of the road, a human. The low sun stretched his shadow out one hundred times taller than him. Cole St. Clair, running alongside the wolves, side-stepping debris on the roadside every so often and sometimes jumping the ditch for a few strides and then back again. He held his arms out for balance as he leaped, unself-conscious, like a boy. There was something so fiercely big about the gesture of Cole running with the wolves that it made the last thing I said to him ring in my ears. — Maggie Stiefvater

In the wake of the tax bonanzas for new commercial projects, roadside strips boomed. Private developers responded to the lack of planned centers, public space, and public facilities in suburbs by building malls, office parks, and industrial parks as well as fast-food restaurants and motels. — Dolores Hayden

Green roofs, roadside plantings, porous pavement, and sidewalk gardens have been proven to reduce flooding. They absorb rainwater before it swamps the streets and sewage systems. — Frances Beinecke

Time has a way of evening things out, the simple ways endure, and the fancy pants with his smart new way falls by the roadside. The best way to tell how long a thing will last is ask how long it's been around for. The newest things end soonest. And things that have been around for a good long while will last awhile to come. — Marcel Theroux

Treason is a noxious weed," Pycelle declared solemnly. "It must be torn up, root and stem and seed, lest new traitors sprout from every roadside. — George R R Martin