The Wide Window Quotes & Sayings

Out of the brown mouth into a slanted easterly rain they head south along the shore, pushed toward it on a light chop, all but the pilot huddling under plastic sheeting that covers lumber, nails, window casings and plantains - the women sharing a seat, Reese behind them and the boatman behind him in a narrow-running balance. The land retreats as the dory crosses a wide bight toward the next point, rising and dropping on larger waves while a seaside village of thatch and palm passes thin and blurry in the drizzled distance. Two miles later another village appears, much the same but longer along the curve and then, past the point, the coast is tangled in mangrove, grass and sea grape. The passengers peer out of the plastic at a rain-erased horizon as the dory slices and slows in equal measure and the boatman bails with a cut jug the rolling puddle at his feet. — Michael Jarvis

Finding a prince might mean kissing a lot of frogs. Or kicking a lot of frogs out of your house. Falling might mean running headfirst into something you always wanted. Or dipping your toe into something you've been scared of your whole life. Happily ever after could be waiting in a field a mile wide. Or a window as narrow as seven minutes. — Kiera Cass

Its mouth was wide and its teeth were wickedly pointed. He managed a brief "Hey!" and jerked away from the window ... just as the rat hit the glass with a furry, wet thump. It slid down to the alley one floor below, where it staggered around in stunned surprise. — Michael Scott

The "Avenue," so called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the boughs the air was full of a purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle. — L.M. Montgomery

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. — Herman Melville

One June evening, when the orchards were pink-blossomed again, when the frogs were singing silverly sweet in the marshes about the head of the Lake of Shining Waters, and the air was full of the savor of clover fields and balsamic fir woods, Anne was sitting by her gable window. She had been studying her lessons, but it had grown too dark to see the book, so she had fallen into wide-eyed reverie, looking out past the boughs of the Snow Queen, once more bestarred with its tufts of blossom. — L.M. Montgomery

I grew up where, when a door closed, a window didn't open. The only thing I had was cracks. I'd do everything to get through those cracks - scratch, claw, bite, push, bleed. Now the opportunity is here. The door is wide open, and it's as big as a garage. — Dwayne Johnson

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day. — Edith Wharton

Perhaps the House had heard Harvey wishing for a full moon, because when he and Wendell traipsed upstairs and looked out the landing window, there
hanging between the bare branches of the trees
was a moon as wide and as white as a dead man's smile. — Clive Barker

Amundsen slept with his window wide open at night even in the winter, claiming to his mother that he loved fresh air, but really "it was a part of my hardening process." He organized small expeditions for himself and a few friends, such as overnight treks on skis under a star-studded sky, enlivened by the otherworldly swirling of the aurora borealis, into the winter wilds to improve his toughness. — Stephen R. Bown

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals ... It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leaves behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. — Tana French

When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.
Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. — Joseph Brodsky

Rina!" I shouted, but the radio was up loud -something sad and gooey- and she didn't hear me. I hit the horn, twice, startling the minivan with a Pro-Choice sticker in front of me, which quickly changed lanes. We kept cruising neck and neck, with Rina full-out brawling now, singing along with the radio, tears running down her face, completely oblivious to both me and the speed limit. I reached under my seat and searched around until I came up with an empty plastic Coke bottle, which I then hurled at her windshield. she jerked back from the wheel as it bounced off, then whipped her around, eyes wide, and finally saw me.
"Shit!" she screamed, hitting the automatic window control to open the one nearest me. "What the hell are you doing? — Sarah Dessen

Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a 'crime' to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn't have it all life long, he said. Then the rolling fields of the valley leading up to the hills seemed to sit in a rising mist of olive green: sunflowers, grapevines, swatches of lavender, and those squat and humble olive trees stooping like gnarled, aged scarecrows gawking through our window as we lay naked on my bed, the smell of his sweat, which was the smell of my sweat, and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was, and all around us Mafalda's chamomile-scented laundry detergent, which was the torrid afternoon world of our house. — Andre Aciman

Cobb was in a Klan group back in the 60's, and told me stories about how they used to throw live 'coons, possums, porcupines, or ganders into Black houses at night in attempts to run them out of Johnston and Harnett County. Cobb said that late one night, he and three or four other local rednecks snuck up on the house of one Black family, peered through the window and saw a huge Black woman sitting in front of a TV watching Gunsmoke, with a gang of children all around her.
The window was open and Cobb threw a live possum in her lap. Cobb said she squalled about the loudest and longest he'd ever heard, and jumped about four feet up in the air. Cobb then ran and jumped into a nearby ditch to observe what would happen next, and it wasn't long before they saw the Black woman bust out of the back door and run across a cotton field with a trail of children behind. Cobb said she was as wide as three rows of cotton, but fast and agile. She outran all the young'uns. — Frazier Glenn Miller

I'm happy I found an apartment where outside the window is the wide expanse of a roof. That feeling of the breeze, the alchemy of the cigarettes and the alcohol, those together are like a wormhole furrowed through my brain. — Rob Hart

The innocent seriousness with which she told her story and I'd listened to so often and myself told
wide eyed hugging in heaven together
hipsters of America in the 1950's sitting in a dim room
the clash of the streets beyond the window's bare soft sill. — Jack Kerouac

Maybe what I want ain't anywhere in the world, but I want it, so I think there is such a thing. I want a guy that's wide open. I want him to be a real guy, maybe even a tough guy, but I want a window in him. He can have his dukes up every other place but not with me. And he got to need the hell out of me. He got to be the kind of guy that if he aint' got me he ain't got nothing. And brother, that guys' going to have something! — John Steinbeck

Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cookies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them. (from) The High Window — Raymond Chandler

God bless the corners of this house, and be the lintel blest, and bless the hearth and bless the board and bless each place of rest, and bless each door that opens wide to stranger as to kin. And bless each crystal window pane that lets the starlight in, and bless the rooftree overhead and every sturdy wall. The peace of man, the peace of God, the peace of love on all. Amen. — Carolyn Brown

A window of opportunity might present itself in tomorrow's battle. The odds of that happening may be 0.1 percent, or even 0.01 percent, but if I could improve my combat skills even the slightest bit- if that window were to open even a crack- I'd find a way to force it open wide. If I could learn to jump every hurdle this little track meet of death threw at me, maybe someday I'll wake up in a world with a tomorrow. — Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Oh my Valentine! I was waiting for you next to my wide open window just as a flower bud waits for the spring air to bloom. — Debasish Mridha

LONDON. TRINITY TERM one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise longue, staring past her stockinged feet toward the end of the room, toward a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centered on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine. On the floor by the chaise longue, within her reach, the draft of a judgment. — Ian McEwan

She is trying to control me with fear, because she cannot control me any other way.
My eyes open wide. They burn as if they are on fire - no, as if they are made of fire. Eyes are the window to the soul. — Beth Revis

The music surged down the stairs like a flashing stream - it gathered in the corridor and burst like a waterfall through the wide entry doors. It splashed over a small, lonely figure crouching on the lowest step, dark and colorless like an un-moving lump of black, a little hillock with mad, unresting eyes. It was the old man who had freed himself with such difficulty from the unrelenting window. He crouched in the corner, lost and done for, with bowed shoulders and knees drawn high, as though he would never rise again - and over him, and away in gay and flashing cascades, the music splashed and danced, strong, pitiless, unceasing as life itself. — Erich Maria Remarque

Beyond the lake the waning moon has slowed,
And stands there like a window open wide
Into a hushed and brightly lit abode
Where something dreadful has occurred inside. — Anna Akhmatova

In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me . I know this is God. — Gao Xingjian

You look out of the car window on your right and are surprised to find that the narrow, worn strip that carries you has turned into a wide, smooth elegant road. The asphalt shines, and soon it separates out, rising to a hill with classy building, and you realize it leads to a settlement. — Mourid Barghouti

We are going to pick up our instruments and play Mozart,"
Honoria announced. "And we are going to do it with smiles on our
faces."
"I have no idea what any of you are talking about," Daisy said.
"I will play," Sarah said, "but I make no promises about a
smile." She looked at the piano and blinked. "And I am not picking
up my instrument."
Iris actually giggled. Then her eyes lit up. "I could help you."
"Pick it up?"
Iris's grin grew positively devilish. "The window is not far ... "
"I knew I loved you," Sarah said with a wide smile. — Julia Quinn

How Beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!
How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs!
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain, the welcome rain!
-Rain in Summer — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it's easy. The moral of "The Three Bears," for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand." [ ... ] and as the Baudelaire orphans sat and watched the dock fill with people as the business of the day began, they figured out something that was very important to them. It dawned on them that unlike Aunt Josephine, who had lived up in that house, sad and alone, the three children had one another for comfort and support over the course of their miserable lives. And while this did not make them feel entirely safe, or entirely happy, it made them feel appreciative. — Lemony Snicket

I'll not hurt thee, says Uncle Toby, rising with the fly in his hand. Go, he says, opening the window to let it escape. Why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me. — Laurence Sterne

Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane - while the other half of the window is wide open? — Wei Wu Wei

I lost Ike,' Aunt Josephine said, 'and I lost Lake Lachrymose. I mean, I didn't really lose it, of course. It's still down in the valley. But I grew up on its shores. I used to swim in it every day. I know which beaches were sandy and which were rocky. I knew all the islands in the middle of its waters and all the caves alongside it's shore. Lake Lachrymose felt like a friend to me. But when it took poor Ike away from me I was too afraid to go near it anymore. I stopped swimming in it. I never went to the beach again. I even put away all my books about it. The only way I can bear to look at it is from the Wide Window in the Library. — Lemony Snicket

Fancy your having no sunshine in London yesterday! Here it was glorious, like full summer, and I sat up with the window wide open, listening to the discourse of two amorous thrushes. — Marie Corelli

I was standing with my back to the door, and I saw Connie's eyes go wide. "Be still my heart," Lula said, looking past me, through the window to the sidewalk. I figured they were looking at either Johnny Depp or Ranger. My money was on Ranger. — Janet Evanovich

Their adventure would be exciting and memorable lie being chased by a werewolf through a field of thorny bushes at midnight with nobody around to help you. — Lemony Snicket

She eyed her brother, standing by the window with his legs braced wide apart, hands on the sill and back stubbornly set against her. She bit her lip and a calculating look came over her face. Quick as lightening, she stooped and her hand shot under his kilt like a striking snake.
Jamie let out a roar of sheer outrage and stood bolt upright with shock. He tried to turn, then froze as she apparently tightened her grip.
"There's men as are sensible," she said to me, with a wicked smile, "and beasts as are biddable. Others ye'll do nothing with, unless he have 'em by the ballocks. Now, ye can listen to me in a civil way," she said to her brother, "or I can twist a bit. Hey? — Diana Gabaldon

When you have only know someone for a few hours it is difficult to now what they would like to hear. — Lemony Snicket

Kyler half-jumped half-threw himself toward my open window. I was wussy. Closing my eyes, I balled my hands up near my chest and let out a little shriek. There was a sound of flesh hitting wood and my eyes flew open. He came through the open window, landing on his feet like a damn cat. He stumbled though and banged into my desk, causing books and my computer to shake.
He held his hands out to his sides and looked around slowly before his gaze settled on me. "I am awesome." I could barely breathe. "Yeah." A knock sounded on my bedroom door a second before it opened. Dad popped his head in, eyes wide. "I'm just making sure he made it up here alive." I nodded and Kyler flashed a grin. "I'm in one piece." "That's good to see." Dad started to close the door, but stopped. "Next time, use the front door, Kyler." "Yes, sir," Kyler said. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

But now, sitting on this airplane on my way back to the life I went on to fashion after she left, I think of her differently. I see her so many ways: sitting back on her heels at the side of the bathtub, singing softly as she washes Sharla and my backs; watching at the window for the six o'clock arrival of our father; wrapping Christmas presents on the wide expanse of her bed; biting her lip as she stood before the open cupboards, making out the grocery list; leaning out the kitchen window that last summer to call Sharla and me in for supper. Most clearly, though, I see her sitting at the kitchen table, in her old, usual spot. There is a cup of coffee before her, but she doesn't drink it. Instead, she stares out the window. I see the sharp angle of her cheekbone, the beautiful whitish down at the side of face, illuminated by the sun. Her hands are quiet, resting in the cloth bowl of her apron. She sits still as a statue - waiting, I can see now; she was always waiting. -What We Keep — Elizabeth Berg

She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city. — Ayn Rand

MEMRI allows an audience far beyond the Arabic-speaking world to observe the wide variety of Arab voices speaking through the media, schoolbooks, and pulpits to their own people. What one hears is often astonishing, sometimes frightening, and always important. Most importantly, it includes the newly-emerging liberal voices of reform and hope, as well as disturbing echoes of ancient hatreds. Without the valuable research of MEMRI, the non-Arabic speaking world would not have this indispensable window. — Richard Holbrooke

A softly-spoken German man points to a window on the third floor of a tall building and says, "My grandfather is sitting in that room."
Planting his feet wide apart, the man begins to wave, his arm sweeping through the air in a huge arc. We all step back to give him enough room.If I let my vision swim out of focus, this seems like an ordinary day with an ordinary man greeting someone he loves across the street.
"I'm not expecting to see him again," he says. But he waves on and on, hoping his grandfather has spotted him.
The Englishmen look away. — Joanna Campbell

I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the"mainstream" culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldn't think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it. — Jan Clausen

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly? — Stephen King

estate got to me first. Just as the song's reaching its peak, a fist pounds on my window. I stop singing and dive for the stereo controls, spinning the volume to zero. I wind down the window. Fat, cold raindrops bounce in off the door sill. Frogger leans in and fixes me with those big, wide-apart eyes that earned him his nickname. "What you singing to?" "Metallica," I say. I'm not ashamed of my Neil Diamond fan club membership. But it doesn't do me any favours — Rob Aspinall

I crawled back to bed, knowing I was done for. Hours later, the phone in our room started ringing. It was George. He was not happy.
"Room 312. Now!" he shouted.
Bouldy got up. I tried to pull myself together, splashing my face with water and hauling on my shorts and flip flops. It was a lovely day outside, the sun was scorching hot and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, but it might as well have been a pissing wet morning in St Albans for all I cared. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach as we made the Walk of Death to Room 312, which I knew was Paul and Gus's room.
When we walked in, I thought I'd arrived in downtown Baghdad. Water dripped from the ceiling. The board games were in pieces and all the plastic parts were scattered over the floor. The balcony window was wide open and I could see a bed upended by the pool outside. — Paul Merson

Seeing him jogging at the park had cracked the window so I could peek into his soul. Seeing him with his friends threw the window wide open.
He was so nineteen. — Jennifer Echols