Screen Door Quotes & Sayings

What Jessica said - hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them - was: "We're going to be married. We're trying very hard to have a baby."
All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. "I don't care. Have his baby. I'll love you both - just come with me Jess, please ... I need you ... "
She flips a red lever on her intercom. Far away a buzzer goes off. "Security." Her voice is perfectly hard, the word still clap-echoing in the air as in through the screen door of the Quonset office wth a smell of tide flats come the coppers, looking grim. Security. Her magic word, her spell against demons. — Thomas Pynchon

You tell him for me: if he fucks with you, if he lays one Russian knuckle on you, your buddy is coming after him and someone's gonna need a screen door to fish out the pieces. — Damon Suede

He glanced at the screen. It was from Mark.
CAN'T FIND TY.
Julian frowned and thumbed a reply while jogging up the steps after Emma. DID YOU LOOK IN HIS BEDROOM?
There was an ornate knocker on the front door in the shape of a wild-haired, wild-eyed Green Man. Emma lifted it and let it fall as Julian's phone beeped again.
DO YOU TAKE ME FOR A BUFFOON? OF COURSE I DID.
"Jules?" Emma said. "Is everything all right?"
"Buffoon?" he muttered, his fingers flying over the touch pad.
WHAT DOES LIVVY SAY?
"Did you just mutter 'buffoon'? Emma demanded. Julian could hear footsteps approaching from the other side of the door. 'Julian, try to act not weird, okay? — Cassandra Clare

He was sick of the noise and sight of so many people and determined to go quietly away, but it so happened that just at that moment the crowds about the door were particularly impenetrable; he was caught up in the current of people and carried away to quite another part of the room. Round and round he went like a dry leaf caught up in a drain; in one of these turns around the room he discovered a quiet corner near a window. A tall screen of carved ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl half-hid - ah! what bliss was this! - a bookcase. Mr Norrell slipped behind the screen, took down John Npier's A Plaine Discouverie of the Whole Revelation of St John and began to read. — Susanna Clarke

You are the most stubborn woman I've ever met, Bailey Hart."

"You should probably get out and meet more women then," she muttered, letting the screen door slam shut behind her. — T.J. Kline

Television is just like making a hole in the wall. All kinds of stuff comes in, on the screen, that we would never allow to come in through the door. — Albert Borgmann

Fuck!" He hit the door frame. It hurt. He did it again.
"Problems?"
"Yeah," said Gabriel. "Nick took the car."
Michael didn't even look up from the screen. "Huh. Didn't you do the same thing this morning?"
"Don't talk to me like I'm a little kid."
Now his brothers eyes flicked up. "I'm sorry, was that a mature adult punching the front door? — Brigid Kemmerer

With another curse, I'm out of the truck, slamming the door to piss Pigpen off. He follows as I go up the stairs, then brushes past me when I pause. He grins at me over his shoulder before opening the screen door. — Katie McGarry

Watching him lumber back toward the apartment building, I got so mad I did something I can't explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I'd seen Grover make on the bus, a sort of warding-off-evil gesture, a clawed hand over my heart, then a shoving movement toward Gabe. The screen door slammed shut so hard it whacked him in the butt and sent him flying up the stair case as if he'd been shot from a cannon.
Maybe it was just the wind, or some freak accident with the hinges, but I didn't stay long enough to find out.
I got in the Camaro and told my mom to step on it. — Rick Riordan

Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep. — Christopher Morley

It was love, and it hit me so hard I leaned against the screen door that still stood between us, just to stay vertical. The universe was good because he was in it. I loved the hole in his jeans and the dirt on his bare feet and the scab on his elbow and the scar that laces through one eyebrow. Gat, my Gat. — E. Lockhart

I walked through the house to the back porch and found the screen door covered top to bottom, side to side, with cats meowing for food ... They were so thick on the door I could barely see the light between them. — Earl B. Russell

When it made the distinctive screech that only an old country screen door could make, another layer of lead came off his chest. That was a sound of home. Of history and memory and comfort. — Susan Fanetti

Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child. — Khaled Hosseini

I would climb him like a tree and bang him like a screen door in a hurricane. — Leisa Rayven

I let the front door slam shut behind me and the fly screen rattle. It was as if each door was kicking me out of the old life I'd lived in that house. I was being thrown out into the world, new. The broken, leaning gate creaked open, let me out, and I gently placed it shut. I was gone, and from down the street, maybe fifty yards away, I looked back for a second at the house where I lived. It wasn't the same any more. It never would be. I kept walking. — Markus Zusak

You coming?" he asked her, leaning in through the door. And then he finally really looked at me. He came to a complete halt - not just his body, but his energy. His eyebrows went right up. "Oh," he said. I sort of flicked my hem at him, assuming what I fondly considered an enigmatic look. "This okay?" I asked. "Oh," he said again, stepping inside the house. The screen door hit him when it closed. "Yeah. Yeah, that works." It kind of looked like he was beginning to sweat. — Kristen D. Randle

Has anybody ever told you you're an evil woman?" -Reece "Who, me?" -Erin "Yes, you." -Reece "Li'l ole me?" -Erin "Sadistic goddess you, yes." -Reece "Do you want me to stop?" -Erin "Do you want me to hold you down and bang you like a screen door?" -Reece "Don't threaten the sadistic goddess, Reece." -Erin — Angela Knight

People buy pathetic substitutes for community - sound waves in a speaker, particles bombarding a screen - all pretending to be friends or the folks next door. The vacuum they leave when the screen goes dark, when the recording ends, is filled with a loneliness worse than ever before." "What's the answer?" "Flesh and blood touching flesh and blood. Life touching life. Yours, mine, everybody's. — Tony Hendra

Does this public display of affection with my daughter on my front porch mean I'm stuck with you now?" he asks, opening the screen door for Harper.
I'm not sure if I should laugh, so I hold back. "I'm afraid so. — Trish Doller

I know for me like I have a reputation of being kind of tough, I have a reputation of also being the girl next door, kind of sweet but I have standards and my thing is, it's me on that screen and I don't have control over everything in this and I'm grateful and thankful. — Nia Long

Patients, beings who want to be rehabilitated, send me questions See? I answer them real fast, 1 2 3 done Like so You get?' Toby said, his pale green fingers clattering across the keyboard.

'I think so,' I said, shifting in my chair.

'Okay hear we go First question: I just moved to a new city and there's a school next door All the kids, every last student, wear the same clothes Are they all related Is this one of those mafia families I need to be careful around You know the answer? Toby asked, swiveling to face me.

'Perhaps,' I said after thinking a moment. It took a second to distinguish when the question ended and when Toby's remarks started.

'You sure, I can check real quick 1 2 3 I check that fast,' Toby said, his words zooming out of his mouth while Google search engine popped up on his computer screen. — K.M. Shea

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse. — Andre Leon Talley

When one is sitting in his bedroom and, happening to glance out the window, sees his little brother walking slowly down the driveway, he immediately jumps up, knocks over a stack of magazines piled up beside him, and runs through the doorway and down the hall. He throws open the front door, slams his body, against the screen, and hearing the tap tap tap behind him, jumps over the porch steps and down to the driveway. He stands several yards in front of his brother. He considers running, but doesn't. His arms and legs are shaking. His bottom lip between his teeth, he walks slowly and carefully, making not a sound. He stops, reaches one arm out, and pokes Gabriel Witter on the left shoulder with his index finger. He smiles the slightest of smiles.
Book Title #89: Where Things Come Back — John Corey Whaley

Westray sat down near the door, and was so engrossed in the study of the building and in the strange play of the shafts of sunlight across the massive stonework, that half an hour passed before he rose to walk up the church.

A solid stone screen separates the choir from the nave, making, as it were, two churches out of one; but as Westray opened the doors between them, he heard four voices calling to him, and, looking up, saw above his head the four tower arches. "The arch never sleeps," cried one. "They have bound on us a burden too heavy to be borne," answered another. "We never sleep," said the third; and the fourth returned to the old refrain, "The arch never sleeps, never sleeps."

As he considered them in the daylight, he wondered still more at their breadth and slenderness, and was still more surprised that his Chief had made so light of the settlement and of the ominous crack in the south wall. — John Meade Falkner

Grain isn't structured like a screen door that you're looking through, but pixels are. Film-based grain is just all over the place, one frame totally different from the next. So your edges are coolly sharp and have a different feeling, an organic feeling rather than this mechanic feeling you get with digital. — Greg MacGillivray

And then he was there, staring at me from behind the screen door. I'd like to say he no longer affected me, that seeing him was a disappointment. But it wasn't true. I felt as strongly about him as I had on that first day I'd seen him in calculus class. — Candace Bushnell

Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus. — Vladimir Nabokov

He'd hung up.
The words end call printed across the screen on my phone confirmed it.
At least a minute later my bedroom door swung open to smack against my knees and Marc stuck his head around the edge to see what he'd hit. He found me still staring at my phone my robe gaping open across one thigh. "You have to push the buttons to make that work " he said his expression completely serious.
"Thanks smart-ass. — Rachel Vincent

Just as the door opens, I look intently at the screen and act like I'm still chatting with her mother. '--And she stuck her finger in my ass when she was blowing me, which was fucking incredible. I never thought I'd enjoy having anything up there, but--'
Grace screams in horror. — Elle Kennedy

Sony and Nickelodeon knew they wanted to create a TV show that was a platform for a band they would have for Sony. They knew what they wanted, and it took two years of auditions and screen tests and countless people coming in and out the door until they finally settled on the four of us. — James Maslow

Every obstruction of the course of justice,
is a door opened to betray society, and bereave us of those blessings which it has inview ... It is a strange way of doing honour to God, to screen actions which are a disgrace to humanity. — Laurence Sterne

Everybody seemed to like Skype except him, Tony thought, closing his office door then settling in front of his screen. His dislike was both personal and professional. Everybody looked weird on Skype. Everyone, frankly, looked like a potential patient. There was something very unsettling about that fish-eyed stare. Even people he liked looked deranged. From a professional perspective, the trouble was you could never see enough of the person you were in conversation with to gauge their body language. They might be giving off all sort of signals you'd be aware of in what his boss had taken to calling "F2F encounters," but the Skype interface could hide a multitude of clues. — Val McDermid

But not every dog was Boo Radley. Sometimes a dog was just a dog. Sometimes a cat was just a cat. Still, I opened the screen door and stuck a red sticker on Lucille's head. — Kami Garcia

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene. — Kristen Henderson

There's little to see, but things leave an impression. It's a matter of time and repetition. As something old wears thin or out, something new wears in. The handle on the pump, the crank on the churn, the dipper floating in the bucket, the latch on the screen, the door on the privy, the fender on the stove, the knees of the pants and the seat of the chair, the handle of the brush and the lid to the pot exist in time but outside taste; they wear in more than they wear out. It can't be helped. It's neither good nor bad. It's the nature of life. — Wright Morris

He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day. — Ramona Ausubel

A Gift for You
I send you ...
A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond.
You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time. — SARK

I've never vied for power in the family before. Pointing a box at the garage door and saying "Open!" was never a big deal, but holding that television tuner and realizing I alone control what is flashed on the screen brings out the Iacocca in me. — Erma Bombeck

Randall, the gay alcoholic in the house next door, boldly peeps through my windows. 'Boy, you sure rock in that chair a lot,' he said last week, his face pressed against my screen.
This time I was lying on my bed with Katherine's cats. I'm watching them while she's out of town. I can be very mushy, and he watched me kissing them and saying that all the other cats in the neighborhood were jealous of their beauty. — David Sedaris

In addition, help your children learn self-discipline by such activities as learning to play a musical instrument or other demanding skill. I am reminded of the story of the salesman who came to a house one hot summer day. Through the screen door he could see a young boy practicing his scales on the piano. His baseball glove and hat were by the side of the piano bench. He said, "Say, boy, is your mother home?" To which the boy replied, "What do you think?" Thank heavens for conscientious parents! — Joe J. Christensen

He got up and stalked out of the house, slamming the screen door.
My mother explained.
He has a gentle heart, she said. It is simply that he is homesick and such a large man. — William, Saroyan

Little brats yellin 'Trick or Treat' all through my screen door,
When y'all should be at home sleep,
Instead of at my front porch 15 deep.
The jack o' lantern came in handy ...
I can turn my porch light out like I ain't got no candy.
But ain't that somethin?
You buy a Halloween costume and a pumpkin,
Almost gave your children a heart attack.
It's a tradition, but who the hell started that? — Kam

I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett. — John D. MacDonald

So if she was still alive after everything, what was she living for? To be terrified of life outside her front door? To hide behind a computer screen and miss out on the best gifts she'd been given? — Lenora Worth

Don't hold your breath, sweetheart. You'll die. Guaranteed, I shouted over my shoulder as I pulled open the screen door with new resolve. — J. Sterling

Theres a woman in Arkansas that's such a bad cook, that a swarm of flies got together and repaired her screen door. — Gary Busey

Opened his door. "That's not what I - " "Is that my baby?" Carol Matthews stepped from the screen — Cate Beauman

If I were a poet, that's what I'd write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, "How's it going, how's the kids?" They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare. — Janet Fitch

a few times, and then pushed the screen door open. "Let's go," Stern said. As they crossed the porch — John Sandford

God! I hated this business of being grown-up. I hated having to make decisions where I didn't know what was behind the door. I wanted a world where heroes and villains were clearly labeled. Where ominous music comes on-screen so you can't possibly mistake him. Where someone asks you to choose between playing with the beautiful princess in the fragrant garden and being eaten by the hideous monster in the foul-smelling pit. Not exactly a difficult one, now is it? Not something that you would agonize over, or that would make you lose a night's sleep? — Marian Keyes

The low-tone clarinet moans. The door upstairs opens again. Stella slips down the rickety stairs in her robe. Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stare at each other. Then they come together with low, animal moans. He falls to his knees on the steps and presses his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes go blind with tenderness as she catches his head and raises him level with her. He snatches the screen door open and lifts her off her feet and bears her into the dark flat. — Tennessee Williams

Venerable architecture critic Witold Rybczynski, for instance, suggests in his book How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit that "the first question you ask yourself approaching a building is: Where is the front door?" But this is by no means the first architectural question many among us will ask; it is altogether too straightforward a query for a segment of the population. Some of us deliberately and strategically seek out, say, an attic window within reach of a strong tree branch or an unlocked storm shelter leading down into someone's basement, even a badly fit screen door that looks easy to slip through around back. Perhaps you even did this yourself as a teenager, just looking for a new way to sneak out of the house past your bedtime or to avoid the all-seeing gaze of your girlfriend's parents. — Geoff Manaugh

If I had questioned Harris further - "What do you mean when you say sex doesn't have to mean anything? Do people engage in it for no reason at all? Does it just happen, like a gurgle in the stomach, a can rattling down the street, or a screen door blowing shut in the breeze?" - perhaps he would have conceded that sex does have trivial meanings: a little pleasure, a little fun, a little relief from boredom and desire. This wouldn't be much of a concession. Sex would mean something, but only in the way that eating a peanut means something, chewing on an ice cube means something, scratching an itch means something. There would be no more call to rhapsodize about the touch of a man and a woman than to compose sonnets about the communion of a picnicker with his mayonnaise. — J. Budziszewski

I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in. — Ray Bradbury

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription - this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I'd finished writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her and and went out. The next time I saw her, she was on TV. That's how you identify the dead here in Derry - no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope. — Stephen King

How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give 'em. — Shel Silverstein