Up On The Roof Quotes & Sayings

I smile. "Mr. Perfect Beautiful Hockey God?"

"Oh, shut up. You know it's true," she replies in a flat tone. "You should be the face of the NHL. They should put you on billboards in Times Square. You're hot and your charm levels are through the roof. — Victoria Denault

Every day, families in the United States face the stark choice between a roof over their heads and food on the table. Buying health insurance, owning a home, and saving up for college are just too far out of their reach. — Chris Van Hollen

He turned. And there, on the roof, was the dragon.
"There's a dragon on the roof!" he warbled. "Nobby, it's a dragon on the roof! What shall I do, Nobby? There's a dragon on the roof! It's looking right at me, Nobby!"
"For a start, you could do your trousers up," said Nobby, from behind the nearest wall. — Terry Pratchett

My dear Emma, How sweet to be under the same roof once more. It reminds me of our days at the Smallwood school, when you and I would sit outside and gaze up at the stars, you reminding me of all their names and me gazing at you. Do you recall that time I sneaked into your room late one night? And what we did? I am thinking of that now, as I write this note and prepare to sneak down to your room in a few minutes. As you read this, know that I am thinking of you. When you next see me, please acknowledge this note by pulling on your earlobe. Your delectable earlobe. W. — Julie Klassen

I'm a Frisbeetarian. We worship frisbees. We believe when you die your soul goes up on the roof and you can't get it down. — Jim Stafford

He turns another page, and I read:
I'M NOT ETHAN ...
... AND I'M NOT GOING TO GIVE UP ...
... UNTIL I CAN PROVE TO YOU ...
... THAT YOU ARE THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.
He flips to the next page.
SO KEEP SENDING ME AWAY ...
... BUT I'LL JUST KEEP COMING BACK TO YOU.
AGAIN ...
He flips to the next page.
... AND AGAIN ...
And the next:
... AND AGAIN.
Goose bumps rise to the surface of my skin. I shiver, hugging myself tightly.
AND IF YOU CAN EVER FIND IT IN YOUR TO FORGIVE ME ...
... I WILL DO EVERYTHING IT TAKES TO MAKE IT UP TO YOU ...
He closes the notebook and tosses it beside him. It lands on the roof with a dull thwack. Then, lifting his index finger, he draws an X across his chest.
Cross my heart. — Katie Klein

Humming and singing my new song, I led them up and down the stairs, pressing my fingers against the wall like I was about to push it over; down to the lobby, where I stood in a pot plant; and finally into the alley behind the studio, where I jumped on top of the car that had brought us from the hotel, leaving dents in the roof so the car would remember me. — Maggie Stiefvater

Don't you go up on the roof in that!" I exclaimed, sitting up abruptly. "That's your good woolen shirt!" He halted by the door, glared briefly at me, then, with the rebuking expression of an early Christian martyr, laid down his tools, stripped off the shirt, dropped it on the floor, picked up the tools, and strode majestically out to deal with the leak, buttocks clenched with determined zeal. I — Diana Gabaldon

The Praesidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an octagon, and not far above that, the octagon became a sixteen-sided polygon, and above that it became round. The roof of the Praesidium was a disk, or rather a lens, as it bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. It supported the megaliths, domes, penthouses, and turrets of the starhenge, which drove, and was driven by, the same clock-works that ran the dials. — Neal Stephenson

When someone mentions the gracefulness of the night sky, climb up on the roof and dance and say, like this? — Rumi

That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet. — Donna Tartt

The lion landed in the snow well below the outcrop, at least thirty feet below where he'd been lying on the tree branch. The same as jumping from the roof of a three-story building. I saw him just as he hit, disappearing in an explosion of soft snow. Before I could picture how broken he would be, he erupted from the snow in another leap that covered twenty feet, straight down the side of the hill we'd toiled up. His body began to ball up in mid-air and he crashed down into the snow again, only to reappear a moment later, stretched out and bounding. In a few seconds he was into the bottom of the draw and out of sight. — Pete Fromm

Piper decided to jump off the roof. It wasn't a rash decision on her part. This was her plan: Climb to the top of the roof, pick up speed by running from one end all the way to the other. Jump off. Finally, and most importantly, don't fall. She didn't make plans in the event she did fall, because if you jump off the roof of your house and land on your head, you really don't need any plans from that point on. Even Piper knew that. So that's what she did. She jumped clean off her roof. But before we get to what happens next, you'll probably need to know a thing or two about a thing or two ... — Victoria Forester

Just then, in that instant, I saw His eyes. I recognised them. They were the eyes of that trembling father in a smoke-filled room on the ninety-third floor of Tower One, dialing his little girls for the last time. Those were the eyes behind that calming voice singing 'Amazing Grace' in a crowded and slippery stairwell, trapped outside a roof door when the ceilings began to cave. The eyes of the people who stayed behind with the handicapped victims waiting for police officers who never made it up the stairs. Those were the eyes of firemen who pushed me to safety, the doctor who cared for me for more than a year free of charge, the therapist who visited my home regularly so that I could sleep a little, the children who loved me, the brother who prayed nonstop, and the pastor who became my friend. Those were the eyes of God. — Leslie Haskin

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters
Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought, now you'll have to think the same thing forever! — Allen Ginsberg

There was a fire drill at school the next day. I think I'm more afraid of the fire alarm than I am of a fire. When the fire alarm goes off, you jump out of your skin. Your heart pounds and your ears buzz and your brain melts and all you want to do is get away from that horrible noise. "Get up and walk quickly out the door and to your right," said Mr. Dooley. "Do not pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars," said Donald. I held my hands over my ears to drown out the fire alarm. Outside we stood around waiting for the bell that means we could come back in again. "Yay! The roof is on fire! No more school!" someone joked. "Anybody got a match?" said someone else. Mr. Dooley said that wasn't funny. He said if there really was a fire, we'd be smart to know what to do. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

She turned down her street once more, glaring at the garish lights someone had put up along their house. Might as well light the roof with "Santa Park Here". Sheesh. The closer she got to home, though, the lower her heart sank. The overly bright house looked suspiciously like ... No. Oh, no. He wouldn't. He had. Light up animated animals were dotted all over her lawn. The circle of life has apparently found our power outlet. And why the fuck is there a Star of David on my roof? She wasn't exactly the most church-going member of the community, but you'd think Simon would know what religion she was. After all, she knew exactly who was going to officiate at his funeral. She picked up her cell phone and called Emma. "I'm going to kill him. — Dana Marie Bell

Up here on the roof, so close to the stars, she felt young and alive and hateful. — Katharine McGee

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect. — George R R Martin

Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn't hard to understand. It wasn't something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d'etat - they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants. — Arundhati Roy

My dressing room was right on the water, and I would climb out of my window and walk around on the roof, whenever I needed time to think, or whenever I couldn't get a scene together. My father even came out there on the roof with me. We just walked around and talked up there, just to get away from everything, and nobody could get to us there. I really do love that place very much. It holds a very deep-rooted place in my heart. — Angie Harmon

Crouched on the roof between BEx and Liz, I wasn't a girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend; I looked at my watch and check my gear instead of crying. I had a mission objective and not a broken heart. — Ally Carter

Back in the day, I had this plan for the off chance that I was around for the whole end-of-the-world thing. It involved climbing up on my roof and blasting R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" as loud as humanly possible, but real life rarely turns out that cool. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy. You may ask 'Why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous?' Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition! — Sheldon Harnick

If someone told me I could hang out in da Vinci's studio while he painted the Mona Lisa or go up on Brian's roof with him at night - I'm on the roof — Jandy Nelson

The X had released its first wave of chemical optimism, I could feel it float up inside me like a big test balloon and splatter on the roof of my mouth, spraying good cheer. I could almost taste it, like a fizzy pink jelly. — Gillian Flynn

Hasty learning can lead to mistakes, and magical mistakes tend to be more spectacular than healing mistakes. My father used to use that reasoning to explain why apprentices of magi drink far less than the students of healing."
Veran grinned. "'Healers wake up with a sore head," he used to say; 'magicians wake up with a sore head, our toes burned black and the roof on the floor. — Trudi Canavan

The horsemen thatching the roof with feathers are a likeness of people who go forth into the world to seek riches and fortune. When they return their houses are bare, and so they go on for ever
The young man dragging up the trees to make a fire is a likeness of those who labour for others: much trouble they have, but they never warm themselves at the fire.
The three heads in the wells are three kinds of men. Some there are who give freely when they get freely; some who give freely though they get little; some who get much and give little--and they are the worst of the three... — Mary McGarry

I'm not a bad guy. If only I could stop hoping. If only I could say to my heart: Give up. Be alone forever. There's always opera. There's angel-food cake and neighborhood children caroling, and the look of autumn leaves on a wet roof. But no. My heart's some kind of idiotic fishing bobber. — George Saunders

This was why people got mated, Rehv suddenly thought. Fuck the sex and the social position. If they were smart, they did it to make a house that had no walls and an invisible roof and a floor that no could walk on-and yet the structure was a shelter no storm could blow down, no match could torch up, no passage of years could degrade.
That was when it hit him. A mated bond like that helped you through shit nights like this. — J.R. Ward

He was pierced and scourged and mocked. He was cursed and raised up on a tree, but He was in that ancient pose of victory.
An old man on a hill, a blind man between two pillars, the God Man on a cross.
Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.
Almost.
It is death by living.
The earth shook. The roof came down. The world changed. The armies fled.
That Moses kept his hands up. — N.D. Wilson

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. — George Carlin

My throat closes up then, and we're both silent, with only the rain on the roof to break up the quiet. I study the girl I knew, another casualty of this fight, wondering how the wounds of it will mark her.
"Clear skies, Sof." It's all I have left to say.
"Clear skies," she whispers. "I hope you find what you're looking for. — Amie Kaufman

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof, a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he,' or, 'This is she. — Virginia Woolf

He woke up frozen stiff. A cold dawn was lighting up the peaks on the other side of the valley, making them shine like giant lanterns. Above, through the broken bones of the roof, he could see the sky, clear now, a deep violet blue, waiting for the sun to breach the mountaintops. The snow clouds had gone, off to bother someone else. Where he lay was still dark, wrapped in leftover shadows. The wall, so deliciously warm when he'd fallen asleep, was like ice, sucking the heat out of him, but what had woken him were screams. Long piercing screams, over and over. — Stephen Deas

When the trees and the power lines crashed around you, when the very roof gave way above you, when the light turned to darkness and water turned to dust, did you call on Him?
When you called on Him, was He somewhere up there, or was He as near as your very breath? — Jan Karon

I am in Paris. Yes ma'am , I made it back. I came up from Berlin, stopped here ten days, fought a losing battle against my deepest inclinations, pulled myself out by the hair and went to Madrid ... Madrid is a lovely enchanting city, and there was almost ready for me a kind of penthouse full of sunlight, a roof garden, and so on. I gave one look at it all, returned to the hotel and went to bed and wept bitterly for eleven hours ... Why? Because I had seen Paris and could not endure the thought of being anywhere else ... — Katherine Anne Porter

I only ever had one friend who was a person. His name was Orchid Harm. He could read faster than anyone I ever met and he kissed as fast as reading. He had hair the color of beetroot and eyes the color of mangosteen and he was a Sunslinger like his Papo before him. They caught sunshine in buckets all over Plum Pudding, mixed it with sugar and lorikeet eggs and fermented it into something not even a little bit legal. Orchid had nothing to do all day while the sun dripped down into his stills. He used to strap on a wash-basket full of books and shimmy up onto the roof of the opera house, which is actually a giantess's skull with moss and tourmalines living all over it, scoot down into the curve of the left eye socket, and read seven books before twilight. No more, no less. He liked anything that came in sevens. I only came in ones, but he liked me anyway. — Catherynne M Valente

Who says the eternal being does not exist? Who says the sun has gone out? Someone who climbs up on the roof and closes his eyes tight, and says, I don't see anything. — Rumi

When we give of ourselves, our time, and our money, we're also giving up control. As a control freak myself, I know that sounds scary, but I've learned that the momentary lack of control forces me to look at what I do have and truly count my blessings. I have clean drinking water. I have food on my table. I have a roof over my head and clothes on my back. Suddenly, my panic-stricken mindset is replaced with gratitude. — Jen Lilley

Katy
I always had this plan for the off chance I was around for the end of the world. I'd climb up on my roof top, turn up the radio, blast R.E.M.'s It's The End of The World, and watch it all go down from my lofty perch.
Except real life rarely turned out that cool.
And it was really happening - it was the end of the world as we knew it, and I sure as hell didn't feel fine.
Everything had changed and we had been the catalyst for it all. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much - then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about.
But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal.
Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. — Tom Robbins

I'd be at someone's house or be up on the roof all day and I'd get lonely - stir crazy - and talk radio became this soothing voice in my life. But the idea that I was making $10 an hour and stacking drywall while these guys were making a few hundred thousand, and they were having a party, and there were Playmates and there were good times, I just couldn't imagine it. — Adam Carolla

Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once he had believed he was smart and might become something - not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi. — Katherine Boo

Rose: Who are you then? Who's that lot down there? [The Doctor ignores her] I said who are they?!
The Doctor: They're made of plastic. Living plastic creatures. They're being controlled by a relay device on the roof. Which would be a great big problem if- [he pulls a bleeping bomb out of his coat] -I didn't have this. So I'm gonna go upstairs and blow it up. And I might well die in the process. But don't worry about me, no. You go home, go on! Go and have your lovely beans on toast. [suddenly serious] Don't tell anyone about this 'cos if you do, you'll get them killed. [closes the door] [opens it again] I'm The Doctor, by the way. What's your name?
Rose: Rose.
The Doctor: Nice to meet you, Rose. [holds up the bomb, shaking it slightly while grinning.] Run for your life! — Russell T. Davies

Today we are all doing penance every day. We're working hard, trying to make money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, trying to maintain a good relationship or marriage, trying to keep our children safe and happy and educated, trying to keep the world from blowing itself up. We don't need any more penance. We need some joy, an ideal, encouragement, a philosophy worthy of us, a real community, neighbors to keep us from having to go it alone. We need our own religion: our sources of inspiration, hope, and healing. — Thomas Moore

One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them. Filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present : like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know, but I t felt as if something that grew in the ground - asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys. — Mark Helprin

Each of us is born to follow a star, be it bright and shining or dark and fated. Sometimes the path of these stars will cross, bringing love or hatred. However, if you look up at the skies on a clear night, out of all the countless lights that twinkle and shine, there will come one. That star will be seen in a blaze, burning a path of light across the roof of the earth, a great comet. — Brian Jacques

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. — C.S. Lewis

The rain was still crashing down, angrily machine-gunning the large windows; it poured through the gutters up in the tower and funneled along the flat roof, sounding like footsteps on the ceiling. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

He no sooner saw the woman than he saw the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light, the bed sheets billowing like clouds, the wisp of aromatic smoke winding from the chimney - only for every wrack of it - its lattice of crimson roof tiles, its gables and dormer windows, his happiness, his future - to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past. — Howard Jacobson

For the briefest moment, they came face to face. Their eyes locked. Then he broke the stare, swiveled, sank into a sitting position, chains clanking, with his knees up.
She watched him speechlessly as he set a cooler bag between his boots, like he was settling down to a picnic or something. An image of the contents as hospital blood bags, complete with juice straws, flashed through her mind.
Unfolding her legs, she made herself as comfortable as she could on the cold outer edge of the sill. An intangible and unnameable charge electrified the space between them, and at first, neither of them said anything.
[ ... ] Finally she heard him unzip the bag and watched him pull out a small cylinder.
"I thought you might like some crappy ice cream," he said. — Kelly Creagh

Trouble in a marriage," he later wrote, "is like monsoon water accumulating on a flat roof. You don't realize it's up there, but it gets heavier and heavier, until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in on your head. — Salman Rushdie

Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head. — Christy Hall

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside.
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown-
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down! — Robert Louis Stevenson

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap
her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears. — Patricia McCormick

Liall realized that this was the first time he had really been alone with Scarlet.
He stood up and held out his hand. The blanket dropped from his shoulders. "Come here."
Scarlet reached out to him tentatively and Liall quickly dragged him into his arms. He fits there perfectly, Liall thought, snug if not a little small. Scarlet did not respond at first, as if he would pull away, and for a moment Liall believed he had made a huge mistake. Then, surprisingly, Scarlet sighed and his arms went around Liall's back. Scarlet turned his head to rest his cheek against Liall's bare chest as hey listened to the rain batten on the roof.
"Thank you for saving my life." Liall murmured. — Kirby Crow

I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it.
And the truth of the matter is, I think that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way. They love live but it's all fucked up for them
We were up on that roof because we couldn't find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that ... It just fucking destroys you, man. — Nick Hornby

The roof of Pluto's shrine, which was covered with bones and diamonds. As far as Hazel knew, the bones had always been there. The diamonds were her fault. If she sat anywhere too long, or just got anxious, they started popping up all around her like mushrooms after a rain. Several million dollars' worth of stones glittered on the roof, — Rick Riordan

Perhaps I don't express myself very well. But you all demand so much from life--you're never satisfied. In the old days, a poor man was content if he had something to eat and a roof over his head. Nowadays, everything has to be so high-and-mighty. Everything you set your minds on, you have to have, whether you can afford it or not.... And everyone's up to their eyebrows in debt... A fat lot of use it is having schools, books and I don't know what! In the old days we used to be a lot more reasonable. — Hedin Bru

Ewan started with Dev's balls, licking and nuzzling them, feeling the texture of Dev's skin and hair against his lips and tongue. Of course he got a pube stuck somewhere in his mouth. He tried to ignore it at first, but he worried it was going to end up in his throat. "Sorry, hang on a sec." Ewan pulled away and reached into his mouth with a finger to catch the hair lodged somewhere on the roof of his mouth. "There. Got it!" "Is — Jay Northcote

Accepting experiences is through the understanding that everybody was born equal, no labels, no social status, no preconceptions just born a little person preparing to grow-up on what ever path is grown from development, environment and/or otherwise everybody has the right to have a roof over their head, three meals a day, a wage/payment which can support themselves and their families, a benefit system that cares for the disabled and people with mental illnesses, a government that looks out for all it's people, wars quenched not and man made barriers be fallen so every person knows the commonality of being human is that everybody is all different and let people be novices to other peoples experiences so another person gains anew. People all deserve the right to be equal. — Paul Isaacs

While most of humanity was scrabbling for a piece of bread,a roof over their head and a job that would allow them to live with dignity,Ralf Hart had all of that,and it only made him feel more wretched.If he looked back on what his life had been lately,he had perhaps managed two or three days when he had woken up,looked at the sun-or the rain-and felt glad to see the morning,just happy,without wanting anything,planning anything or asking anything in exchange.Apart from those days,the rest of his existence had been wasted on dreams,both frustrated and realized-a desire to go beyond himself,to go beyond his limitations;he had spent his life trying to prove something,but he didn't know what or to whom. — Paulo Coelho

We had an electrical fault about 500 miles into the trip and lost more than half our fuel. We had a fire on the roof. And missed Los Angeles by 3,500 miles at the end of the trip and ending up in the arctic in a snowstorm. — Richard Branson

I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in th shadowy room, looking out over the gray slates of the city, and up at the dark clouds leaning on the roof of Westminster Palace, I suddenly realized that George was wrong, and that my family was wrong, and that I had been wrong
for all my life. I was not a Howard before anything else. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love, I didn't want the rewards for which Anne had surrendered her youth. I didn' want the arid glamour of George's life, I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire. — Philippa Gregory

That's how, on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate-factory roof in 1950 ending up sitting in a row at ten o'clock on a spring morning, drinking Black Label beer supplied by the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank Prison. That beer was piss-warm, but it was still the best I ever had in my life. We sat and drank it and felt the sun on our shoulders, and not even the expression of half-amusement, half-contempt on Hadley's face - as if he was watching apes drink beer instead of men - could spoil it. It lasted twenty minutes, that beer-break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men. We could have been drinking beer and tarring the roof of one of our own houses. — Stephen King

I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance. — Erma Bombeck

Back in the cabin I light the fire and sit sighing and there are leaves skittering on the tin roof, it's August in Big Sur
I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake up I'm facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door and I suddenly remember them from long ago — Jack Kerouac

An evening up on the Empire State roof-the strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the 84th floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New York-a garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead city-and it looks adagio down there. — Dawn Powell

It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther.* The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of "all their cash and jewels and silver and gold" and, furthermore, "that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed ... and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies ... in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us" - advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler. — William L. Shirer

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.
'My own sons,' he said.
We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside. — Colum McCann

Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean? — Katherine Anne Porter

Nat is already laughing. We go through this every morning. She tells Nik I own a clown car.
I glower at her while I put my foot up onto Nik's lap and kick the passenger door while turning the ignition.
She starts.
Works every time.
Nik looks like he's not sure whether to laugh or get the hell out of the car.
We're on our way to work and Nat says, "Nik, turn on the radio."
He shakes his head and replies cynically, "I would but I'm scared the roof might fly off."
Nat and I burst into laughter. We laugh so much we both sob and laugh at the same time. — Belle Aurora

Gideon and I sit there in the dark, wordless for a while, only our ragged breaths disturbing the silence. Memories of my sister overwhelm me - I see her impish grin as she leans over me at the orphanage, tugging on my hair until I wake up. I remember us climbing up to the roof as kids, sitting cross-legged next to the herbs and vegetables our caretakers were growing while we read the English books Rose had "borrowed" from her class at school. And then there was L.A. - all of our hope for a better life so quickly crushed, but Rose never let despair overtake her. She was there after every single night to hold me until the pain went away. And later, when I got numb to it all, she still made a point of holding me, of promising me that one day things would be different. — Paula Stokes

I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. — Frances Farmer

Standing up on her wobbly legs, Blue began to use all of the protective visualizations she'd been taught by her mother. She imagined herself inside an unbreakable glass ball; she could see out, but no on could touch her.
She imagined white light piercing the stormy clouds, the roof, the darkness of Noah, finding Blue, armoring her.
Then she pulled the plug on the battery that was Blue Sargent.
The room went still. The papers settled. The light flickered once more and then strengthened. — Maggie Stiefvater

I don't even like the word 'indoors'. It doesn't make sense. According to you right now, by stepping through the doorway I'd be indoors. Yet I wouldn't actually be standing in the doorway. If it's supposed to refer to being inside a building, then they shouldn't have used the word 'door,' since last time I checked, doors don't make up every square inch of a building! And I'd assume that now, since I'm not indoors, you'd say I'm 'out of doors', right? But, shouldn't out of doors just be everywhere that's not directly under a door? You know what, from now on I insist that everyone refer to being in a building as being 'under-roof'. — Natalie Bina

Although, fanciful's origin circa 1627 made me still love the word, even if I'd ruined its applicability to my connection with Snarl. (I mean DASH!) Like, I could totally see Mrs. Mary Poppencock returning home to her cobblestone hut with the thatched roof in Thamesburyshire, Jolly Olde England, and saying to her husband, "Good sir Bruce, would it not be wonderful to have a roof that doesn't leak when it rains on our green shires, and stuff?" And Sir Bruce Poppencock would have been like, "I say, missus, you're very fanciful with your ideas today." To which Mrs. P. responded, "Why, Master P., you've made up a word! What year is it? I do believe it's circa 1627! Let's carve the year
we think
on a stone so no one forgets. Fanciful! Dear man, you are a genius. I'm so glad my father forced me to marry you and allow you to impregnate me every year. — Rachel Cohn

You been forgetting Who's in charge and who ain't. So here's what I'm gone do: I'm gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of. Then I'm gone send hail big as walnuts down on that mule, making it break its leg trying to bust out of there. Then, just so you know for sure it's Me you dealing with, the next morning after you put that mule down and buried it and you up on the ladder trying to nail the roof back onto the shed I'm gone to let that weak top rung, the one you ain't got around to fixing yet, I'm gone let it rot all the way through so you fall off and break your own leg, and I'm gone to send Florence and Lilly Mae to a birthing and the twins out to the far end of the field so you laying there half the day. That'll give you time to think real hard on what I been trying to tell you. — Hillary Jordan

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it. — David Mitchell

Ho threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.. — Allen Ginsberg

If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there, who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies; and wrenched them from the stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire, and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad - not twenty, by his looks - who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his head like wax. — Charles Dickens

Kandinski looked up. 'Do you read science fiction?' he asked matter-of-factly.
'Not as a rule,' Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: 'Perhaps I'm too skeptical, but I can't take it too seriously.'
Kandinski pulled at a blister on his palm. 'No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously.'
Accepting the rebuke with a smile at himself, Ward pulled out one of the magazines and sat down at a table next to Kandinski. On the cover was a placid suburban setting of snugly eaved houses, yew trees, and children's bicycles. Spreading slowly across the roof-tops was an enormous pulpy nightmare, blocking out the sun behind it and throwing a weird phosphorescent glow over the roofs and lawns. 'You're probably right,' Ward said, showing the cover to Kandinski. 'I'd hate to want to take that seriously.'
("The Venus Hunters") — J.G. Ballard

I looked up and saw myself in a most palpable vision ascending the altar steps, opening the tiny sacrosanct tabernacle, reaching with monstrous hands for the consecrated ciborium, and taking the Body of Christ and strewing Its white wafers all over the carpet; and walking then on the sacred wafers, walking up and down before the altar, giving Holy Communion to the dust. I rose up now in the pew and stood there staring at this vision. I knew full well the meaning of it. God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness, I was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! — Anne Rice

How do you keep a mattress on the roof of your car from flying?"
"Yeah, well, I don't know how many people know it, but a lot of people have learned that putting your arm up there to hold the mattress is not going to work. — Tom Magliozzi

That's my little piece of heaven. Go ahead."
Ciro followed Remo through the open door to a small enclosed garden. Terra-cotta pots positioned along the top of the stone wall spilled over with red geraniums and orange impatiens. An elm tree with a wide trunk and deep roots filled the center of the garden. Its green leaves and thick branches reached past the roof of Remo's building, creating a canopy over the garden. There was a small white marble birdbath, gray with soot, flanked by two deep wicker armchairs.
Remo fished a cigarette out of his pocket, offering another to Ciro as both men took a seat. "This is where I come to think."
"Va bene," Ciro said as he looked up into the tree. He remembered the thousands of trees that blanketed the Alps; here on Mulberry Street, one tree with peeling gray bark and holes in its leaves was cause for celebration. — Adriana Trigiani

I often said that writers are of two types.
There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.
And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.
No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener. — George R R Martin

"Joss"
"What?"
"What?" Dylan asked back.
"You just said my name."
"No I didn't"
"Sorry that was me."
I sat up, banging my head on the roof. "Who is that?"
"Hey, stay down here where the air is good, okay?" Dylan pulled me gently back down. "Hows your head?"
"Not good, I think."
"Um, okay, so you here me. Heather's right, you do think loud. I mean, I've never heard you before, but my Talent seems to be a lot more selective than her's. But now that she's got me turned in to you-"
"Who are you?"
"It's still me, Marshall. It's Dylan. I'm right here."
"My name's Joel."
"Joel?"
"Joss, what are you talking about?" He took my face in his hands. "Who's Joel?"
"The voice in my head, I guess."
"Jesus. — Susan Bischoff

When you die, you'll be wearing your white dress with red roses, and your hair will be long and falling around your shoulders. When they shoot you, up on your damn roof or walking alone on the street, your blood will look like another red rose on your dress, and no one will notice, not even you when you bleed out for Mother Russia. — Paullina Simons

Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out flat on my back. Still there was no breeze, but the steel had an element of coolness in it and dried my back of sweat, clotting up thousands of dead bugs into cakes on my skin, and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it. — Jack Kerouac

The Flight
Look back with longing eyes and know that I will follow,
Lift me up in your love as a light wind lifts a swallow,
Let our flight be far in sun or blowing rain
But what if I heard my first love calling me again?
Hold me on your heart as the brave sea holds the foam,
Take me far away to the hills that hide your home;
Peace shall thatch the roof and love shall latch the door
But what if I heard my first love calling me once more? — Sara Teasdale

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.
And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.
Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding. — Larry Niven

My wife said, 'Can my mother come down for the weekend?' So I said, 'Why?' And she said, 'Well, she's been up on the roof two weeks already.' — Bob Monkhouse

He was, as I'd expected, sitting on the most precarious slope of the roof, knees drawn up, arms around them, his expression unreadable as he gazed out over the stonewalled pastures, the barns and byres and cottages, to the smoke gray and velvet green and misty blue of the forest. Not so far away the waters of the lake glinted silver. The breeze was quite chill, catching at my skirts as I came up the slates and settled myself down next to him. Finbar was utterly still. I did not need to look at him to read his mood, for I was tuned to this brother's mind like the bow to the string. — Juliet Marillier

Until they stood at last by a crumbling wall, looking up and up and still farther up at the great tombyard top of the old house. For that's what it seemed. The high mountain peak of the mansion was littered with what looked like black bones or iron rods, and enough chimneys to choke out smoke signals from three dozen fires on sooty hearths hidden far below in dim bowels of this monster place. With so many chimneys, the roof seemed a vast cemetery, each chimney signifying the burial place of some old god of fire or enchantress of steam, smoke, and firefly spark. even as they watched, a kind of bleak exhalation of soot breathed up out of some four dozen flues, darkening the sky still more, and putting out some few stars. — Ray Bradbury

Love, she believed, had to come, suddenly, with a great clap of thunder and a lightning flash, a tempest from heaven that falls upon your life, like a devastation, scatters your ideals like leaves and hurls your very soul into the abyss. Little did she know that up on the roof of the house, the rain will form a pool if the gutters are blocked, and there she would have stayed feeling safe inside, until one day she suddenly discovered the crack right down the wall. — Gustave Flaubert

It was hard to stay angry when I felt so sad. I would rather have felt angry, but instead, all I could do was sob. Even though people had been coming over all day, the house seemed so lonely that I couldn't stand it.
The room grew somewhat dimmer. I didn't move as it grew dimmer still. Then, with a start, I hurried outside and ran to the alley in back of our house. Through a break between the buildings, I saw that the sun hung low over the horizon. I watched it until it started to hide between two trees in the distance. Then I climbed on a car and watched until only half of the sun was visible, and then a quarter, and then I felt a huge sickening panic inside of me and ran as hard as I could to a ladder I saw down the alley. I rushed up the ladder and climbed on the roof of somebody's garage. I saw the sun again, a quarter of it, and then a slice, and then it disappeared, the last time ever that the sun would set on a day my sister had lived. — Cynthia Kadohata

I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' — Tracy Letts

She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.
And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren't special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant for ever.
Hers was a memory made up of snapshots: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying goodbye behind a cracked windshield.
A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam's smile.
It was a life I didn't want to leave behind.
It was a life I didn't want to forget.
I wasn't done with it yet. There was so much more to say. — Maggie Stiefvater