Quotes & Sayings About Top Of The Hill

There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset. — Gustave Flaubert

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree ... unless that tree's growing on top of a hill. — John DePrey

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto — Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Yea and I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. He was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled the stone, the shameless thing. And he once more kept heaving and straining, and the sweat the while was pouring down his limbs, and the dust rose upwards from his head. — Homer

Branches and bushes and mud and sunlight on the top of a hill with a boy who knows more than he will say. — Ally Condie

In the loveliest town of all where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla. — E.B. White

The hallowing of Pain
Like hallowing of Heaven,
Obtains at a corporeal cost
The Summit is not given
to Him who strives severe
At middle of the Hill
But He who has achieved the Top
All
is the price of All — Emily Dickinson

Just before the top of the hill she stopped, breathed deeply, and tried to muster her scattered sense of calm, like a bride checking her veil in the last mirror before the aisle. — Edward St. Aubyn

I wish I could do to you what you did to me, he wished. But it can't be done to an android because they don't care. If I had killed you last night, my goat would be alive now. There's where I made the wrong decision. Yes, he thought; it can all be traced back to that and to my going to bed with you. Anyhow, you were correct about one thing; it did change me. But not in the way you predicted.
A much worse way, he decided.
And yet I don't really care. Not any longer. Not, he thought, after what happened to me up there, toward the top of the hill. I wonder what would have come next, if I had gone on climbing and reached the top. Because that's where Mercer appears to die. That's where Mercer's triumph manifests itself, there at the end of the great sidereal cycle.
But if I'm Mercer, he thought, I can never die, not in ten thousand years. Mercer is immortal. — Philip K. Dick

I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying to find the Fascist trench. 'Where are the enemy?' Benjamin waved his hand expansively. 'Over zere.' (Benjamin spoke English - terrible English.) 'But where?' According to my ideas of trench warfare the Fascists would be fifty or a hundred yards away. I could see nothing - seemingly their trenches were very well concealed. Then with a shock of dismay I saw where Benjamin was pointing; on the opposite hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred metres away at the very least, the tiny outline of a parapet and a red-and-yellow flag - the Fascist position. I was indescribably disappointed. We were nowhere near them! At that range our rifles were completely useless. — George Orwell

You'll come to my grave? To tell me your problems?"
My problems?
"Yes.'
And you'll give me answers?
"I'll give you what I can. Don't I always?"
I picture his grave, on the hill, overlooking the pond, some little nine foot piece of earth where they will place him, cover him with dirt, put a stone on top. Maybe in a few weeks? Maybe in a few days? I see myself sitting there alone, arms across my knees, staring into space.
It won't be the same, I say, not being able to hear you talk.
"Ah, talk ... "
He closes his eyes and smiles.
"Tell you what. After I'm dead, you talk. And I'll listen. — Mitch Albom

As though it had come to the top of the hill and gone over a precipice, — Roald Dahl

The bicycle saves my life every day. If you've ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you've ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you've ever wondered, swooping down bird-like down a long hill, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary human touching the gods, then we share something fundamental. We know it's all about the bike. — Robert Penn

Call it Mooristan,' Aurora told me. 'This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. — Salman Rushdie

As for the flood carving Grand Canyon, why don't they explain to us why the top of the Canyon is 4,000ft higher than where the river (Colorado River) enters the canyon? Why don't they explain to us how rivers miraculously flowed up-hill for millions of years to finally cut the groove deep enough so they could flow downhill? — Kent Hovind

Indeed, the city has been excavated continuously by German archaeologists since 1906 (Kuhrt 2010, 1:234). Hattusa was located both within the center of Anatolia and the middle of the Hittite territory in a strategic hill-top position (van de Mieroop 2007, 121). As such, Hattusa was the center of Hittite religion (discussed further in depth below), and it was ideally located in the middle of Anatolia's agricultural breadbasket — Charles River Editors

That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed. — Jhumpa Lahiri

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity. — D.H. Lawrence

When you first get a hill in sight, look at the top of it only once. Then imagine yourself at the bottom of the other side. — Florence Griffith Joyner

If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom. I — Tim O'Brien

They stood there, King of the Hill, Top of the Heap, Ruler of All They Surveyed, Unimpeachable Monarchs and Presidents, trying to understand what it meant to own a world and how big a world really was. — Ray Bradbury

Biking is about rhythm and flow. It's the wind in you face and the challenge of hammering up along hill. It's the reward at the top and the thrill of a high-speed descent. Biking lets you come alive in both body and spirit. After awhile the bike disappears beneath you and you feel as if you're suspended in midair. — Gary Klein

The snowmen stood in bunches, in families, and the breeze generated by the car snatched at their striped scarves. Snowmen fathers and snowgirl mothers with their snowchildren and snowpuppies. Top hats were in abundance, as were corncob pipes and carrot noses. They waved the crooked sticks of their arms, saluting Mr. Manx, Wayne, and NOS4A2 as they went by. The black coals of their eyes gleamed, darker than the night, brighter than the stars. — Joe Hill

All of a sudden, life became too much to bear. Just like that, for no particular reason. Because there was a child's corpse in the fridge on rue Parthenais. Because I had to start all over again from scratch, one more time. Because I had rolled my rock to the top of the hill and now it was rolling back down again. The times before, I'd always managed to put on a brave face. But there comes a time when you just don't feel strong enough to look for another place to live and go shopping again for clothes and dishes and cutlery and scouring pads and toilet paper. This was one of those times. When I got back to the hotel, I asked the Barbie at reception for the key to the minibar. It burned in the palm of my hand. I slapped it back down on the counter and ran out. I had to find a meeting. — Bernard Emond

She remembered a story she had once heard: a woman had gossiped about her neighbors and later regretted what she said. She went to the rabbi and asked how she might take back her words. He instructed her to take a feather pillow to the top of the highest hill and tear it open, letting the feathers fly every which way. Then, the rabbi said, she should return to him and he would tell her what to do. She did as he said and when she returned, he told her to go outside and gather the feathers. But that's impossible, she cried. They're already scattered all over the village. He looked at her and smiled. The same is true of your words, he said. — Tova Mirvis

After the satyrs filed in to dinner, the Hermes cabin brought up the rear. They were always the biggest cabin. Last summer it had been led by Luke, the guy who fought with Thalia and Annabeth on top of Half-Blood Hill. For a while, before Poseidon had claimed me, I'd lodged in the Hermes cabin. Luke had befriended me ... and then he'd tried to kill me. — Rick Riordan

So if you're drowning, keep your life jacket on and fight. But once you're able to swim, don't convince yourself you forgot how to. Take your life jacket off, front-crawl your way to the shore, walk off that beach, and set your GPS to the top of a hill, because you WILL conquer the climb. — Lilly Singh

Mariana went off for a walk in the direction of the small church she could see in the distance. She climbed a path that led to the top of a green hill. Below her she could see a solitary ploughman driving his furrow along a green slope. It was after seven o'clock, but this man still went to and fro behind his brown horse, bent over the handles of his plough. She wondered who he was, ploughing so late alone; what he thought of as he turned and re-turned in the air that was beginning to darken. She stood and watched his solitary form moving back and forth. Perhaps he watched her too as she climbed the slope. Their figures contained in this dark bowl of evening, unique in all years, may have remained for ever clear in their distinct far-separated minds - one creature watching another across the dark hill in the coming night and each wondering what life the other led, and what face a clearer sight would show. — Gamel Woolsey

Recuerdo
We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood; all this was thrilling. — Ishmael

I lived on the top of one hill and the school was at the top of another hill. Nobody ever went to school by car - we didn't have any cars during the war. So that to and from school was itself a training. — Roger Bannister

I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before - so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. — Henry David Thoreau

My friend, when you're above the law, when you are the law. the phrase about ends justifying means has a real meaning. Put yourself in their place. If you felt that the state which you worshiped above your God was endangered by the life of one insignificant man, would you hesitate to have him shot? I can tell you that you wouldn't. That's the danger of Fascism, of state-worship. It supposes an absolute, an egocentric unit. The idea of the state is not rooted in the masses, it is not of the people. It is an abstract, a God-idea, a psychic dung-hill raised to shore up an economic system that is no longer safe. When you're on the top of that sort of dung-hill, it doesn't matter whether the ends are in reality good or bad. The fact that they are your ends makes them good
for you. — Eric Ambler

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved. — Stephen Fry

If you're laboring up a steep hill, imagine that a towrope is attached to the center of your chest, pulling you steadily toward the top. — Jeff Galloway

But this was no ordinary clothesline. It had been strung right through the trees, on up to the porch of Frost's cabin--and at the top end was tied a bell. When someone down below tugged hard, the bell rang right outside the cabin. This was a signal to Frost that it would be worth his while to walk on down the hill. But as Frost got well into his seventies, he sometimes did not hear the bell. Gillie did, though. At its ting-a-ling, the dog would stretch and get to his feet, then go and find his master. Gillie would tug gently at the toe of Frost's sneaker. When Frost got the dog's signal, he would start down to the white farmhouse. — Doris Faber

Mine, said the stone,
mine is the hour.
I crush the scissors,
such is my power.
Stronger than wishes,
my power, alone.

Mine, said the paper,
mine are the words
that smother the stone
with imagined birds,
reams of them, flown
from the mind of the shaper.

Mine, said the scissors,
mine all the knives
gashing through paper's
ethereal lives;
nothing's so proper
as tattering wishes.

As stone crushes scissors,
as paper snuffs stone
and scissors cut paper,
all end alone.
So heap up your paper
and scissor your wishes
and uproot the stone
from the top of the hill.
They all end alone
as you will, you will. — David Mason

....One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare. — Robert Lowell

many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying - launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon. These — H.P. Lovecraft

[Currahee was more a hill than a mountain, but it rose 1,000 feet above the parade ground and dominated the landscape.] A few minutes later, someone blew a whistle. We fell in, were ordered to change to boots and athletic trunks, did so, fell in again - and then ran most of the three miles to the top and back down again. They lost some men that first day. Within a week, they were running - or at least double-timing - all the way up and back. — Stephen E. Ambrose

The graveyard was at the top of the hill. It looked over all of the town. The town was hills - hills that issued down in trickles and then creeks and then rivers of cobblestone into the town, to flood the town with rough and beautiful stone that had been polished into smooth flatness over the centuries. It was a pointed irony that the very best view of the town could be had from the cemetery hill, where high, thick walls surrounded a collection of tombstones like wedding cakes, frosted with white angels and iced with ribbons and scrolls, one against another, toppling, shining cold. It was like a cake confectioner's yard. Some tombs were big as beds. From here, on freezing evenings, you could look down at the candle-lit valley, hear dogs bark, sharp as tuning forks banged on a flat stone, see all the funeral processions coming up the hill in the dark, coffins balanced on shoulders.
("The Candy Skull") — Ray Bradbury

YOU WERE MY FAVORITE THING
AND IN IMAGINATION YOUR DEATH WILL NOT EXIST
IT IS ALL 'AS IF' FROM NOW ON
AS IF YOU ARE NOT GONE
YOU WILL BE THE GIRL BESIDE ME
NEVER MORE THAN A HEARTBEAT LENGTH AWAY
THE WOMAN WHO WILL BE THE HILL OF MY BED
A CLIMB TO THE TOP
AND SUCH VIEWS TO MAKE LITTLE THINGS OF
LITTLE US THAT WILL BE PART YOU AND PART ME
AND WHOLE IN THOSE TWO THINGS
AS IF YOU ARE NOT GONE
AND WILL BE WITH ME TO GET THE WRINKLES
THE WHITE HAIR
THE SPINE SHAPED LIKE A ROCKING CHAIR
AS IF YOU ARE NOT GONE
AND SO WILL HAVE THE LOVE OF GOING IN MY ARMS
WARM AND WITH ME
YES, YOU ARE MY FAVORITE THING
YOU ALWAYS WILL BE. — Tiffany McDaniel

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
perfect place for talking on earth
the top of a tolerably deserted
tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the
top of a flying hill is a fairy tale. — G.K. Chesterton

The setting sun
With yellow radiance lighten'd all the vale;
And as the warriors moved, each polish'd helm,
Corslet or spear, glanced back his gilded beams.
The hill they climbed, and halting at its top,
Of more than mortal size, towering, they seem'd
A host angelic, clad in burning arms. — John Home

If taking one-self seriously as a woman means committing to a life of grooming, pumicing, pruning and polishing one's exterior for the benefit of onlookers, then I may as well leave my unwieldy rucksack to the top of a bleak Scottish hill and make my home there under a stone, where I'll fashion shoes out of mud and clothes out of leaves. — Miranda Hart

At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift. Peasants ran out of a cottage near by, shouting with laughter because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it. — Rebecca West

A man on a hiking trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains came to the top of a hill and saw, just below the crest, a small log cabin. Its aged owner was sitting in front of the door, smoking a corncob pipe, and when the traveler drew close enough he asked the old man patronizingly: "Lived here all your life?" "Nope," the old mountaineer replied patiently. "Not yet." — James Keller

Between the villages of Aubiere and Romagnat in the ancient Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over the top of a high hill. To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a philosopher to explain. In this case it is undoubtedly, for some reason, one of exalted expectation. — Hervey Allen

In the old days, Zen was not really practiced so much in a monastery. The Zen Master usually lived up on a top of the mountain or the hill or in the forest or sometimes in the village. — Frederick Lenz

I checked Delores, she appeared to be running on a lake top, a girl on a fairy horse sprinting across fresh water. As I looked, Delores let go of the bay's mane and sat straight up, riding only with her legs and hips, her arms out as if to fly. She tilted her head back, too, and she looked so perfect doing it that I didn't dare try to copy her. This was something only for her, something I could only witness, and she galloped down that hill with her soul somewhere up in the sky above her. We both knew it, and we never had to mention it. T — Joseph Monninger

Have peace now,' she said, 'until the morning! Heed no nightly noises! For nothing passes door and window here save moonlight and starlight and the wind off the hill-top. Good night!' She passed out of the room with a glimmer and a rustle. The sound of her footsteps was like a stream falling gently away downhill over cool stones in the quiet of night. Tom — J.R.R. Tolkien

Me dad planted that tree,' she said absently, pointing out through the old cracked window.
The great beech filled at least half the sky and shook shadows all over the house.
Its roots clutched the slope like a giant hand, holding the hill in place. Its trunk writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels. I had thought such trees to be as old as the earth, I never dreamed that a man could make them. Yet it was Granny Trill's dad who had planted this tree, had thrust in the seed with his finger. How old must he have been to leave such a mark? Think of Granny's age, and add his on top, and you were back at the beginning of the world. — Laurie Lee

There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were seniors they did it better, faster, and further. We laughed, because we were still doing it, and all they could do was talk. If our goals were not met, there was next year, but it never occurred to us that one day there would not be a next year, and that the guys sitting on the hoods of their cars at the top of the hill, wishing they could have one more year, willing to settle for one last game, could one day be us. — Tucker Elliot

I should see the garden far better," said Alice to herself, "if I could get to the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it - at least, no it doesn't do that - " (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), "but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, this turn goes to the hill, I suppose - no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house! Well then, I'll try it the other way." And so she did: wandering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but always coming back to the house, do what she would. Indeed, once, when she turned a corner rather more quickly than usual, she ran against it before she could stop herself. — Lewis Carroll

The ladder of success is never crowded at the top. — Napoleon Hill

She stands on top of the hill again. A small round piece of gold in her hands: the compass. A disk of brighter gold on the horizon: the sun rising. She opens the compass and looks at the arrow. Tears on her face, wind in her hair. She wears a green dress. Her skirt brushes the grass when she bends down to put the compass on the ground. When she stands up again her hands are empty. Xander waits behind her. He holds out his hand. "He's gone," he tells her. "I'm here." His voice sounds sad. Hopeful. No, I start to say, but Xander tells the truth. I'm not there, not really. I'm only a shadow watching in the sky. They're real. I'm not anymore. — Ally Condie

Terror was a fire that held you trapped in the top floor of a burning building; the only way to escape it was to jump. — Joe Hill

One can hardly help another to the top of the hill without climbing there himself. — Spencer W. Kimball

The flat top of the hill was scattered with the bodies of dead men in the uniforms of Sounis and Eddis. The outposts of both armies had met here. As I stood staring, I thought, These are my dead. All of them. The battle hadn't been unanticipated or forced on me, as the raid in the villa had been. I had chosen it. These men, Eddisian and Sounisian alike, had died for my decisions.
When the magus stepped from the bushes toward the back part of the hill, I was more than horrified. I was perilously close to distraught.
...
When he pulled away and looked into my face, I knew that he would tell me that I was Sounis and that I needed to pull myself together.
"Your uncle," he said, "in all the years I saw him rule, never had a moment of self-doubt. Never a regret for a single life lost. Do you understand?"
I understood that I didn't want to be my uncle. — Megan Whalen Turner

When they reached the top of the hill they turned and looked down at the valley. Moominhouse was just a blue dot, and the river a narrow ribbon of green: the swing they couldn't see at all. "We've never been such a long way from home before," said Moomintroll, and a little goose-fleshy thrill of excitement came over them at the thought. — Tove Jansson

Scott Medlock is the 'Top Gun' of sports artists. He truly is the best of the best. — Jim Hill

Most of the Masters at The Zone would have given both of their testicles for the right to top the Ice Queen. — Joey W. Hill

'300' was a real turning point in my career. Until then, I felt like a steam train that was slowly chugging to the top of a hill. Now I'm over that hill, my career seems to have its own momentum. — Gerard Butler

You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others ... — Robert Louis Stevenson

At the crest of a low hill, her father looks over his shoulder: vehicles are backed up as far as he can see, carryalls and vans, a sleek new cloth-top wraparound V-12 — Anthony Doerr

Get out well, but not too quickly, move through the field, be comfortable. Strategy-wise, go with your strengths. If you don't have a great finish, you must get away to win. I've always found it effective to make a move just before the crest of a hill. You get away just a little and you're gone before your opponent gets over the top. Also, around a tight bend, take off like holy hell. I've done that a number of times. You should not be flying down the home straight. Most of your efforts should have been put forth earlier. — John Treacy

We are not at the pinnacle of our power, of our existence. We have scrambled to the top of an ant-hill at the bottom of the world's highest mountain. We have long way still to climb." - The Blue Mountain — G.R. Matthews

When, from the top of any high hill, one looks round the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one not only ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained, but one is astonished that any such thing as disaffection or irreligion should prevail. — William Cobbett

Myself I love a thunderstorm better than anything. Sometimes I will run to the top of the hill to whirl around and around on my Indian Rock in the wind, it is like a dance I can not stop. The smell of the lightning goes into your nose and down your whole body. Old Bess says if you get hit by lightning yet live you will have special powers, well I could use some of those. So I don't care if I get hit or not. — Lee Smith

Was it really just an hour ago that he'd licked me into nirvana at the top of the hill? We'd been buying condoms and planning an afternoon of hot sex, and now we were on a witch-hunt. Seeking retribution. Out for blood. — Sofia Grey

Twelve o'clock! It is the natural centre, key-stone, and very heart of the day. At that hour, the sun has arrived at the top of his hill; and as he seems to hang poised there a while, before coming down on the other side, it is but reasonable to suppose that he is then stopping to dine; setting an eminent example to all mankind. — Herman Melville

Jaron stood on top of a hill, staring blankly into the distance and taking in every detail of the scene unfolding below him. To his back the sun was setting, casting its last rays over the field below and painting the sky around him in a vast array of red and gold. He shuddered slightly as a cool breeze blew gently through the tall grass of the field, nipping sharply at his cheeks which had gone numb from standing exposed to the elements for too long. It was a seemingly perfect fall day, and he couldn't help but feel that it was somewhat ironic that it was on this day life as he knew it was coming to an end. — K.R. Fajardo

You don't just fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else. — Lance Armstrong

the chambers and passages of the cave system. A track led past both entrances, and round up onto the hill-top, up which sloping trail Yana now wearily pulled herself. Some huts were private dwelling places while others were the domain of certain crafts. Community meetings were held either outside in a large space deliberately left clear in the centre of the huts, or during cold or inclement weather, in the larger of the two entrance chambers of the cave system. Yana moved aside the leather windbreak sheltering the entrance to the hut which was her family's home and walked down the four stone-flagged steps to the floor of the sunken hut. A strong herbal odour hung in the air. Ignoring it, Yana dropped her kill by the fire, and made her way to the occupied sleeping platform at — Julie Reilly

I wanted everything for him. I wanted to see him achieve every dream, embrace every desire. I wanted to protect him from anyone who would cause him harm or a moments pain, tear them apart with my bare hands. Never let him out of my sight, even as I wanted him to stretch out his wings as far as they could go and soar. And at the bottom, top and middle of it all, I just wanted to stand there, just that way forever. Not disturb him. Just look at him and love him. Do nothing but simply love him for everything he is, a creation too perfect to be anything but God's gift to the rest of us. — Joey W. Hill

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process. — Roald Dahl

One by one the angels had come to the top of Har Megiddo where I sat, holding her body close to mine after she'd died. I'd fought alongside them in battle, but up close, when they stood quietly watching us, they looked as beautiful as they looked unreal. the angels weren't supposed to feel emotions, but they were all weeping. All of them. Their tear stained their flawless faces like rain running in rivulets across stone. Azrael was the only one of then who came to me, knelt in front of me and took her from my arms. He was the angel of death come to carry his sister home. I din't want to give her up, knowing it would be the last time I ever saw her face. I had died on that wretched hill with her. — Courtney Allison Moulton

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. — Evelyn Waugh

There were nights for instance, especially in August, where the view of the full moon from the top of the Acropolis hill or from a high terrace could steal your breath away. The moon would slide over the clouds like a seducing princess dressed in her finest silvery silk. And the sky would be full of stars that trembled feebly, like servants that bowed before her. During those nights under the light of the August full moon, the city of Athens would become an enchanted kingdom that slept lazily under the sweet light of its ethereal mistress. — Effrosyni Moschoudi

On the road leading from his ranch to Samantha's, Wyat t drove his surrey up a small hill and caught his breath as the beauty of the large crescent moon dangling just out of reach over the crest A full moon would have been plump with luminescence, yet the pearly surface of the sickle still cast enough light to shadow his surroundings and seemed close enough that once he drove to the top of the hill, he'd be able to touch the bottom horn or at least toss a rope around it. He slackened the reins, slowing the horse, knowing that the higher he climbed, the sooner the illusion of closeness would disappear and he wanted to preserve for a moment the fantasy that the moon was within his grasp.
The stars, by contrast, were distant pricks of diamond light farther out than a man could dream. He sighed. Life as a rancher or as a rancher's wife was not moon and stars easy or romantic. What would put stars in Samantha's eyes? — Debra Holland

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it - to remember, to keep in mind - as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain - to the end of the story - and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands. — Frank Conroy

I've been around a long time, and when I was at the top of the hill, I was very ahead of my time! Evidence of that is that my music is still current today - you know, rappers sample it all the time. So, rather than compromise my artistic integrity, I concentrated on movies. — Isaac Hayes

Mythologically speaking, if there's anything I hate worse than trios of old ladies, it's bulls. Last summer, I fought the Minotaur on top of Half-Blood Hill. This time what I saw up there was even worse: two bulls. And not just regular bulls - bronze ones the size of elephants. And even that wasn't bad enough. Naturally they had to breathe fire, too. — Rick Riordan

No mountain is too high, but so many people can't climb even a hill. There is always a way to the top, but so many people can't even get the mid and many miss the way. Life is real and the journey of life comes with rules. Mind the real and distinctive rules that lead to success and you shall get to the very peak of the mountain of success surmounting all barriers, challenges and puzzles along the journey to success with a great degree of ease! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Then at the top of the hill, the road forks.
Which just figures.
"You gotta be kidding." I say.
One part of the road goes left, the other goes right.
(Well, it's a "Fork" ain't it?) — Patrick Ness

I really enjoyed staying at an encampment at the top of a hill in the Samburu Reserve in Kenya. You reach it on a small plane; there is no electricity, no city noises and you sleep and shower under the Milky Way, with moths fluttering around a kerosene lamp, knowing that there are elephants and lions roaming free in the valley. — Cherie Lunghi

They stood high on top of the hill overlooking the glen, the water rushing by, the sheep grazing on the green grass across the burn, and white clouds passing overhead against the blue sky.
He still had hold of her arm, but then he released her, cupped her face with both hands, and kissed her. — Terry Spear

You have to start somewhere,' he said. 'You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there you see the next hill. — Brad Stone

VII
From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen
from the earth,
And so my village is as large as any town,
For I am the size of what I see
And not the size of my height ...
In the cities life is smaller
Than here in my house on top of this hill.
The big buildings of cities lock up the view,
They hide the horizon, pulling our gaze far away from the
open sky.
They make us small, for they take away all the vastness our
eyes can see,
And they make us poor, for our only wealth is seeing. — Fernando Pessoa

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. — Raymond Chandler

I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Not so much that I wanted to give up rock writing, but I also wanted to try something new. So I moved to a crumbling stately heap on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in southwest France, about 60 miles from Bordeaux: wine instead of cocaine. — Sylvie Simmons

I live with my family on the top of a hill in the country, and during the days, my house is quiet, save for the occasional excitement of the FedEx truck heading up the driveway. I write. — Dani Shapiro

When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me.
Jordan ...
I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away. — Jeanette Winterson

At the top of the hill stood a cross and a little below at the bottom was a stone tomb. In my dream, just as Christian came up to the cross his burden loosened from his shoulders and fell off his back. It tumbled and continued to do so down the hill until it came to the mouth of the tomb where it fell inside and was seen no more. Christian was so glad and overjoyed and in his excitement he said, He has given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death. — John Bunyan

Very often, you know, you stop walking because you say, 'Well, I'm tired of climbing this hill. I'm never going to get to the top.' And you're only two steps from the top. — Morgan Freeman

VIEW FROM A HILL
I am not yet quite over it.
I am lying down on top of it.
Surveying behind me a wasteland
Of dried-up promise.
While the lights below twinkle
With dull mocking uncertainty.
There isn't much left to look forward to,
And the looking forward of the past has been belied. — John Tottenham

I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Flipping through the 'Toronto Star' one day in 2008, I noticed a piece about a phenomenal boxer from the Philippines who had won several different titles in several different weight divisions. Manny Pacquiao's rise from heart-crushing poverty to the top ranks of his sport was astounding. — Dan Hill