Threshing Quotes & Sayings

One of the first sights that shocked me, when I came to Israel in 1921, was an Arab turning over a field with a very primitive plow; pulling the plow were an ox and a woman. Now, if it means that we have destroyed this romantic picture by bringing in tractors, combines, and threshing machines, this is true: we have. — Golda Meir

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old. — Clyde Tombaugh

But I can't see how anyone could believe that you killed the bear with a pitchfork,' I said.
'I didn't. I only wounded it - badly, I think, but not enough to put it out of action. It came blundering towards me, I stepped aside and it crashed head-first into the river - I could hear it threshing about in the darkness. I picked up a big stone - poor brute, I hated to do it but I had to finish it off. It gave just one groan as the stone hit it and then went down. I held the lantern high; I could see the bubbles coming up. And then I saw the dark bulk of it under the water, being carried along by the current.'
'But you didn't have a lantern,' I said.
'He didn't have a bear,' said Topaz. — Dodie Smith

Nightlife is not for sissies, except of course for career sissies; an evening out requires at least a full day of minute preparation ... People move to New York to invent themselves, and nightclubs provide a runway for the results. It's easy to spend twenty hours per day slaving in a Pennsylvania coal mine or threshing some Nebraska oat crop; going out in New York is work. — Paul Rudnick

You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping. — Rudyard Kipling

See in the mind's eye
wind blowing chaff on ancient threshing floors
when men with fans toss up the trodden sheaves,
and yellow-haired Demeter, puff by puff,
divides the chaff and grain: how all day long
in bleaching sun strawpiles grow white: so white
grew those Akhaian figures in the dustcloud
churned to the brazen sky by horses' hooves
as chariots intermingled, as the drivers
turned and turned - carrying their hands high
and forward gallantly despite fatigue. — Homer

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears. — Kahlil Gibran

Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine. — Margaret Atwood

I have been taking my daily walk round the island, and visited the sugar mill and the threshing mill again. — Fanny Kemble

In the meantime, when he went on his way back, the seed had grown into a tree which reached up to the sky. Then thought the peasant, 'As thou hast the chance, thou must just see what the angels are doing up there above, and for once have them before thine eyes.' So he climbed up, and saw that the angels above were threshing oats, and he looked on. — Jacob Grimm

Autumn arrives like a warrior with the stain of blood upon his brazen mail. His crimson scarf is rent. His scarlet banner drips with gore. His step is like a flail upon the threshing floor. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

6So she went down to the threshing floor and did just as her mother-in-law had commanded her. 7. And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and o his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of grain. Then she came softly and uncovered his feet and lay down. — Anonymous

The ancient ritual of the earth; ploughing and planting, reaping and threshing. The fundamental business remains unaltered; it is only the methods and tools that science is changing. — Patience Strong

When the Lord Jesus Christ comes to purge His threshing floor, He shall punish all who are not His disciples with a fearful punishment. All who are found impenitent and unbelieving - all who have held the truth in unrighteousness - all who have clung to sin, stuck to the world, and set their affection on things below - all who are without Christ. All such shall come to an awful end. Christ shall burn up the chaff! — J.C. Ryle

I couldn't find any straw to step upon, so I stepped upon more men. The resentment increased, so did my forward movement. I lost my footing and sat down with sharp abruptness. Unfortunately, it was on a man's head. The next moment he had risen on his hands and knees in wrath, and I was flying through the air. What goes up must come down, and I came down on another man's head.
What happened after that is very vague in my memory. It was like going through a threshing-machine. I was bandied about from one end of the car to the other. Those eighty-four hoboes winnowed me out till what little was lift of me, by some miracle, found a bit of straw to rest upon — Jack London

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery. — Clyde Tombaugh

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue. — Christian Nestell Bovee

History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward. — Han Suyin

It would be autumn, and our fathers would be out threshing in the fields. We would walk through the mulberry groves, past the big loquat tree and the old lotus pond, where we used to catch tadpoles in the spring. Our dogs would come running up to us. Our neighbours would wave. Our mothers would be sitting by the well with their sleeves tied up, washing the evening's rice. And when they saw us they would just stand up and stare. "Little girl," they would say to us, "where in the world have you been? — Julie Otsuka

It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins. — W.P. Kinsella

If he was wood, he was a flail, and I was grain on the threshing floor.
I was a thousand grains, my thoughts blown like chaff. All that was left was the taste of salt. — Sarah Micklem

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond. — Ernest Hemingway,

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner...The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the days' work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents - how much rain, frost and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more the wicked abound, so much the more must we suffer with them in patience; for on the threshing floor few are the grains carried into the barns, but high are the piles of chaff burned with fire. — Pope Gregory I

If a pig goes upon the threshing-floor, or a field, or a garden, and the owner of the meadow, or the field, or the garden smites it so that it die, he shall give it back to its owner; but if he does not give it back, he becomes a thief. — Orson Scott Card

Though your threshing floor grind a hundred thousand bushels of corn, not for that reason will your stomach hold more than mine. — Horace