Rutted Quotes & Sayings

Grit isn't something you're born with, Carter says. It's something you can learn and exercise, like a muscle. If you're a parent, you can teach grit. How? Let your children struggle. A little challenge, a little anguish, even, is good for them. When children learn to resolve their own conflicts, without Mom or Dad swooping in to the rescue, they build grit, self-confidence, and the creative problem-solving skills that lead to higher academic achievement.14 Teach them to try new things, she says, to take risks, follow inklings, see if they turn into passions, work hard, maybe master something, maybe make mistakes, but love the journey itself, not the reward. — Brigid Schulte

Why did thee call that hell-goat Mephistopheles? asked McTavish one day. — Terry Pratchett

Clothes have always had a wonderful influence on my physical well-being as well as my self-assurance. All I have to do to make me feel like a new and younger man is to order three new suits of clothes. My fur-lined overcoat gave me such a glow of health that very shortly after acquiring it I was able to enjoy the hazards of a Gargantuan studio cocktail party without a single twinge of pain. — Adolphe Menjou

Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases. — Stephen Jay Gould

Yes, we can all cart our fractured selves along as we move through our lives. But we can choose whether we keep plodding along the same rutted road, or take a turn we'd never thought was ours to take. — Rachel Simon

It has been said there is nothing appertaining to life upon the broad plain. That is hardly true. Looking down from the Sierra Blanco, one sees a pathway traced out across the desert, which winds away and is lost in the extreme distance. It is rutted with wheels and trodden down by the feet of many adventurers. Here and there there are scattered white objects which glisten in the sun, and stand out against the dull deposit of alkali. Approach, and examine them! They are bones: some large and coarse, others smaller and more delicate. The former have belonged to oxen, and the latter to men. For fifteen hundred miles one may trace this ghastly caravan route by these scattered remains of those who had fallen by the wayside . — Arthur Conan Doyle

Zachary maneuvered the vehicle down the rutted lane, scanning the corners for signs of danger. Two minutes and they'd be safe. Free. Absurd, giddy joy lit Zachary up. He smiled at Brian. "Jesus, you're a pain in the ass."
Brian grinned. "But I give great head, Sir. — Kari Gregg

Forsaking all other thoughts, he rutted into her, in a fashion more animal than human. His eruption he held fast within, so that she squirmed against the sensation before accepting her own fall into oblivion, her walls pulsing to an echoing rhythm.

from The Gentlemen's Club — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

One could see the full-page color pictures for oneself: the blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan settlers who now industriously tilled, culled, plowed, and so forth in the vast grain bowl of the world, the Ukraine. Those fellows certainly looked happy. And their farms and cottages were clean. You didn't see pictures of drunken dull-wilted Poles any more, slouched on sagging porches or hawking a few sickly turnips at the village market. All a thing of the past, like rutted dirt roads that once turned to slop in the rainy season, bogging down the carts. — Anonymous

Regardless of where many of us believe we land - in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much - we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events - love, shopping, and so forth - but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us? — Hilton Als

For the moment, everything had disappeared: the church, the battle, the screams and shouts and the rumble of limber wheels along the rutted road through Freehold. There wasn't anything but her and him, and he opened his eyes to look on her face, to fix it in his mind forever. — Diana Gabaldon

I don't know if it was the excitement that did it, but by the time we started our tiptoe across the icy, rutted skid yard to that shed Priya had quit shivering, but I was trembling like a marriage license in a young man's hand. — Elizabeth Bear

I love this mansion, though it is too many windows
... to open halfway each morning
... to close halfway each night. — Jim Carroll

A truth you don't understand is more dangerous than a lie. — Mira Grant

To "hike" along a deep-rutted, pebbly lane in frail, silver-hued slippers with high French heels, is not an exhilirating experience. — L.M. Montgomery

TIDES Every day the sea blue gray green lavender pulls away leaving the harbor's dark-cobbled undercoat slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls walk there among old whalebones, the white spines of fish blink from the strandy stew as the hours tick over; and then far out the faint, sheer line turns, rustling over the slack, the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over the clam beds, slippery logs, barnacle-studded stones, dragging the shining sheets forward, deepening, pushing, wreathing together wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures spilling over themselves, lapping blue gray green lavender, never resting, not ever but fashioning shore, continent, everything. And here you may find me on almost any morning walking along the shore so light-footed so casual. — Mary Oliver

Walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world - what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us. — Marilynne Robinson

On that day, in jungle hamlets and mountain villages, in cacophonous slums and sprawling refugee camps, on worn concrete floors and under roofs thatched of rice straw and banana leaves, in clay brick homes, on rutted, red dirt roads, and on scorching swaths of sand, children cried and screamed and sang and giggled and toddled and ran and fell and got back up and climbed on their mothers' laps and pulled their siblings' hair and gazed out in wonder at the big, bright world that swirled around them. Millions of boys and girls whose lives were reclaimed whose stories were allowed to continue, who were not mourned or grieved or buried, but instead were loved and held and fretted over and scolded and prepared for the challenges of living, of surviving, all because of a man they had never met and whose name they would likely never know. — Adam Fifield

If somewhere beneath the blood, the past must beat in me to make a rhythm of survival for itself - to go on as this half-life which echoes as a second pulse inside the ticking moments of my existence - if this is what must be, why is the pattern of remembered instants so uneven, so gapped and rutted and plunging and soaring? I can only believe it is because memory takes its pattern from the earliest moments of the mind, from childhood. And childhood is a most queer flame-lit and shadow-chilled time. — Ivan Doig

Before I was famous, when I was just working in Gilbert's Lodge, everything was moving in slow motion. — Eminem

But she was my project - I must answer for her - " "No. She's a free woman now. She must answer for herself." "How free can she ever be, in that body, driven by that metabolism, that face - a freak's life - better to die painlessly, than to have all that suffering inflicted on her - " Miles spoke through his teeth. With emphasis. "No. It's. Not." Canaba stared at him, shaken out of the rutted circle of his unhappy reasoning at last. — Lois McMaster Bujold

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight. Clarksville — John Steinbeck

Being proud and being nationalistic are, for me, completely different things. — Jean Reno

She was as sturdily made as a captain's chair, yet drew water with graceful wrists and ran dancing across the rutted road on curved white ankles. — Louise Erdrich

Men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them ... In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals ... What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? — John Steinbeck

The Werewolf crossed the rutted path just as Bill pedaled into the middle of Neibolt Street. Blood splattered its faded jeans, and looking back over his shoulder, filled with a kind of dreadful, unbreakable fascination that was akin to hypnosis, Richie saw that the seams — Stephen King

Every day I see lot of things cluttered in my surroundings. But that neither stresses me nor does it puts me down. Instead, it tells me that things will give you trouble if you see it as trouble. — Ashish Patel

That's why I'm an actress - escaping into a world. — Julie Walters

The sled runners had been replaced by wheels and they traveled on a rutted, muddy road that formed a dark line between two fields of snow that occasionally showed a patch of matted, tangled weeds. Seeing them got her thinking. She wiped her face with the blanket and, digging her brush out of a nearby pack, began the arduous process of clearing the snarls from her hair.

She pulled, grunted, and then sighed. Modina looked over with a questioning expression, and Arista explained by letting go of the brush and leaving it to hang.

Modina smiled and crawled over to her. "Turn around," she said, and taking the brush, the empress began working the back of Arista's head. "You have quite the rat's nest here."

"Be careful one doesn't bite you," Arista replied. — Michael J. Sullivan

My father was ruined by hard drink - he sat on an icicle. — Bob Monkhouse

The one ring road around the airfield is paved, but heavily rutted and potholed. Every few days a street-sweeper makes its way around, polishing the rutted surface with brushes and water. — Glenn Dean