Veranda Quotes & Sayings

And I knew what I wanted: I would settle in a hill station and write my novel. I had visions of myself at a table on a large veranda, my notes spread out in front of me next to a steaming cup of tea. Green hills heavy with mists would lie at my feet and the shrill cries of monkeys would fill my ears. The weather would be just tight, requiring a light sweater mornings and evenings, and something short-sleeved midday. Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming the reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? — Yann Martel

What I wanted was some dreamlike Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow where we could sit on the veranda forever and it would always be twilight in the temperate zones, in the most beautiful house. — William Kittredge

Had I the time to keep a diary, I'd use that time to better effect; sleeping on the veranda. — Soseki Natsume

When he had accompanied his father on drumming errands he noticed how high caste men and women treated them as inferior. They had to enter from the back door and wait near the kitchen or at a side veranda and sit on low benches or reed mats. They were never offered a decent seat. At meals times they were never invited to eat at the main table with the family or other guests. Instead, they had to eat the food served to them on the reed mat. This they ate in silence while the patrons sat at a lavishly laid table and enjoyed their food amidst chat and cheer. — Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

When afternoon came to Vidyasagar Road, wet clothes ... hung from a clothesline which stretched from one side to another on the veranda of the first floor. The line, which had not been tightly drawn anyway, sagged with the pressure of the heavy wet clothes that dripped, from sleeves and trouser-ends, a curious grey water on to the floor, and, especially in the middle, one noticed the line curved downwards, as if a smile were forming. — Amit Chaudhuri

If all else perish, there will remain8 a story-teller's world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of veranda and prahu which we enter, as we do that of Conan Doyle's Baker Street, with a sense of happy and eternal homecoming. — Selina Shirley Hastings

She brought her mouth close to his ear. "My name is Celaena Sardothien," she whispered. "But it makes no difference if my name's Celaena or Lillian or Bitch, because I'd still beat you, no matter what you call me." She smiled at him as she stood. He just stared up at her, his bloody nose leaking down the side of his cheek. She took the handkerchief from her pocket and dropped it on his chest. "You can keep that," she said before she walked off the veranda. — Sarah J. Maas

My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals. — Deborah Moggach

They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning. — Lauren Groff

The scent of Havana tobacco draped thick from the magnolia trees in the front yard. Ice cubes mingled and clinked against the sides of crystal tumblers. Patrick said hello to a group of men sitting on the veranda. I heard the pop of a champagne cork and laughter from inside. — Ruta Sepetys

Sam stood on the second floor veranda of the hotel, across from the pool, and looked out spotting Claire. His heart took a tiny leap in his chest when he first caught sight of her in the crowd around the pool, he zeroed in on her face instantly, like a computer program scanning faces. Her almond-shaped brown eyes captivated him, even at the great distance. When she stood up from the lounger, he instinctively reached down for the railing to grab on to something. It was the first time he'd seen her in a bathing suit. Wow. She looked lovely. Her exposed cafe latte colored skin glowed. Purple was her color, and it showcased her small, but curvy body the one he'd held tightly just a few short hours ago. — Carolyn Gibbs

The praying stopped, and Alford turned from that far near distance and walked out on to the veranda alone, thinking still of that self beyond his reach in a faraway place, as a loss, as something he had been deprived of. But how do you feel the loss of a self that you did not have to lose? How can you lose an Africa you did not know? But that was what he felt: the loss of not having had that loss to lose. — Earl Lovelace

In English and Arabic. Clearly, even personal shoppers had him pegged as a complete geek. The shopper also managed to find some supplies for our magic bags - blocks of wax, twine, even some papyrus and ink - though I doubt Bes explained to her what they were for. After she left, Bes, Carter and I ordered more food from room service. We sat on the deck and watched the afternoon go by. The breeze from the Mediterranean was cool and pleasant. Modern Alexandria stretched out to our left - an odd mix of gleaming high-rises, shabby, crumbling buildings, and ancient ruins. The shoreline highway was dotted with palm trees and crowded with every sort of vehicle from BMWs to donkeys. From our penthouse suite, it all seemed a bit unreal - the raw energy of the city, the bustle and congestion below - while we sat on our veranda in the sky eating fresh fruit and the last melting bits of Lenin's head. — Rick Riordan

Old Jiko is supercareful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she's just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she'll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so that you know she is telling you a joke. — Ruth Ozeki

It had been unusually hot all summer. Ben Cresswell could feel the sun scorching his thighs through his cricket whites as he sat on the clubhouse veranda, waiting for his turn at bat. Colonel Huntley sat beside him, mopping his red and sweaty face. He was wearing pads because he was next up at bat. He wasn't as good a batsman as Ben, but he was team captain, and in village cricket, seniority often took precedence over ability. Only — Rhys Bowen

Well do I remember that dark hot little office in the hospital at Begumpett, with the necessary gleam of light coming in from under the eaves of the veranda. I did not allow the punka to be used because it blew about my dissected mosquitoes, which were partly examined without a cover-glass; and the result was that swarms of flies and of 'eye-flies' - minute little insects which try to get into one's ears and eyelids - tormented me at their pleasure — Ronald Ross

There's nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love. I think it's shitty, just plain shitty. To love someone who doesn't return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it's unbearably boring. I'll tell you what's exciting: sweaty, passionate nights. But sitting on the veranda outside the home of a sleeping woman who isn't dreaming about you is slow moving and just plain sad. — Steve Toltz

Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on your veranda admiring your absurd petunias? — Anna Politkovskaya

Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on his bathing-suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet canvas of the springboard. There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that - songs from "Chin-Chin" and "The Count of Luxemburg" and "The Chocolate Soldier" - and because the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Neither Boncer nor Teddy comes out of the house, not even to watch from the veranda. Here, laying the dead to rest, like washing and feeding and birth, is women's work. — Charlotte Wood

In a moment, at the very center of the swept and cleaned veranda, she had drawn two intersecting triangles, one upward- pointing and the other downward-pointing. In one, god's grace descended from heaven to earth; in the other, the soul ascended, aspiring toward god. Because of Sitamma's faultless eye, both met in perfect harmony. — U.R. Ananthamurthy

It was a clear, moonlit night a little after the tenth of the Eighth Month. Her Majesty, who was residing in the Empress's Office, sat by the edge of the veranda while Ukon no Naishi played the flute for her. The other ladies in attendance sat together, talking and laughing; but I stayed by myself, leaning against one of the pillars between the main hall and the veranda.
'Why so silent?' said Her Majesty. 'Say something. It is sad when you do not speak.'
'I am gazing at the autumn moon,' I replied.
'Ah yes,' she remarked. 'That is just what you should have said. — Sei Shonagon

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Generally, that humble piece of furniture placed on the front veranda of the house officially belonged to the man of the household; the women never slept on it. — Swarnakanthi Rajapakse

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep. — Kiran Desai

Live close to nature and you'll never feel lonely. Don't drive those sparrows out of your veranda; they won't hack into your computer. — Ruskin Bond

Her heart sprang up into her throat.
Watching that shadow play was like paying a quarter for a peep show. Only she got it for free.
He thinks I'm pretty.
Butterflies did a dance around her heart before she could swat them away.
Behind the shade. his shadow unbuttoned those soft, worn, butt-hugging jeans and slid them down his lean hips. Charli sucked in a big gulp of air, then headed back to the veranda and her glass of wine.
With all the estrogen doing a conga line through her blood, she needed a drink.
Well, she really needed something else.
But she'd settle for a drink. — Candis Terry

When he sat on the Makepeace veranda, it was as if he'd gone to another country — Paula Fox

That very afternoon the police arrived at Cho Oyu in a line of toad-colored jeeps that appeared through the moving static of a small anxious sleet. They left their opened umbrellas in a row on the veranda, but the wind undid them and they began to wheel about - mostly black ones that leaked a black dye, but also a pink, synthetic made-in-Taiwan one, abloom with flowers. — Kiran Desai

The trouble was, I did know what I wanted from Grace Town. I wanted to sleep with her, sure. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. A few years from now, I wanted to marry her. And then, when we were old, I wanted to drink peppermint tea and read Harry Potter to our grandchildren with her on the veranda of an old house in the countryside as we watched a summer storm roll toward us. Was that so much to ask? — Krystal Sutherland

Better than sweet tea on a veranda. I want to live at Belmont! — Francine Rivers

Her Majesty to the theatre. The performance took place on a stage erected in the courtyard, and Her Majesty closed in one part of her veranda for the use of the guests and Court ladies. During the performance I began to feel very drowsy, and eventually fell fast asleep leaning against one of the pillars. I awoke rather suddenly to find that something had been dropped into my mouth, but on investigation I found it was nothing worse than a piece of candy, which I immediately proceeded to eat. On approaching Her Majesty, she asked me how I had enjoyed the candy, and told me not to sleep, but to have a good time like the rest. I never saw Her Majesty in better humor. She played with us just like a young girl, and one could hardly recognize in her the severe Empress Dowager we knew her to be. — Der Ling

I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn't exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years. — Dan Jenkins

I was staying at the Konchucos Tambo lodge, next to the Huascaran national park, near Chavin. Sitting here on its veranda, I was beginning to see where all those Latin American magical realists get their inspiration from: they don't need to make anything up; they just write down what's around them. — Mark Barrowcliffe

So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not. — Paulette Jiles

There's a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can't get anywhere else. — Haruki Murakami

She could not bear to lie in bed and wait, so she pestered the nurse until she could sit on a veranda, screened by a thick curtain of golden shower from the street, because she could assure herself she was not blind by looking through her glowing eyelids at the light from the sky. She sat there all day, and felt the waves of heat and perfume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But nostalgia for what? — Doris Lessing

A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it. — Mario Cuomo

Another minute passed, when suddenly something round fell with a soft but heavy thud upon the stone flooring of the veranda, and came bounding and rolling along past me. For a moment I did not rise, but sat wondering what it could be. Finally, I concluded it must have been an animal. Just then, however, another idea struck me, and I got up quick enough. The thing lay quite still a few feet beyond me. I put down my hand towards it and it did not move: clearly it was not an animal. My hand touched it. It was soft and warm and heavy. Hurriedly I lifted it and held it up against the faint starlight. It was a newly severed human head! — H. Rider Haggard

Antiseptic wash. He dosed himself with chlorodyne, took his own pulse, smoked a thermometer, and lay back on the couch with a suppressed groan. It was mid-afternoon, and he had completed his third round that day. He called the house-boy. "Take um big fella look along Jessie," he commanded. The boy carried the long telescope out on the veranda, and searched the sea. "One fella schooner long way little bit," he announced. "One fella Jessie." The white man gave a little gasp of delight. "You make um Jessie, five sticks tobacco along you," he said. There was silence for a time, during which he waited — Jack London

wax and seemed dumbfounded by the accident. Next thing he wanted to know 'how long it would take to' . . . I interrupted him again. Being hungry, you know, and kept on my feet too, I was getting savage. 'How could I tell,' I said. 'I hadn't even seen the wreck yet - some months, no doubt.' All this talk seemed to me so futile. 'Some months,' he said. 'Well, let us say three months before we can make a start. Yes. That ought to do the affair.' I flung out of his hut (he lived all alone in a clay hut with a sort of veranda) muttering to — Joseph Conrad

In fact, I don't even own a dish rack. I put all the dishes I wash into a large bowl or colander and place this on the veranda to dry. — Marie Kondo

And yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been. — Jane Austen

home. She would have sat in her armchair on the veranda with a pot of tea and a book. As if nothing had happened, as if the world out there were just as unchanged as her comfortable study. — Maxim Leo

Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good ... and there are gooseberries. — Anton Chekhov

Ancient, grizzled, wild-eyed, emaciated by fever, dragged his weary frame up the veranda steps and collapsed in a steamer-chair. Whisky and soda kept him going while he made report and turned in his accounts. — Jack London

To sit on the front steps - whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city - and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color. — Harvey Milk

Can I see you outside for a second?" Kat glared at Hale, then walked to the patio doors and out onto the veranda.
As Hale closed the door behind him, Kat heard Angus say, "Ooh, Mom and Dad are going to fight now. — Ally Carter

He strolled out onto the wide, semidark veranda, where couples were scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words and hazy laughter. — F Scott Fitzgerald

High time he had another tutor,' said Larry. 'You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby Dick on the front porch.' 'I'm sure he didn't mean any harm,' said Mother, ' but it was rather silly for him to do it on the veranda. — Gerald Durrell

Early in the morning Rikki-tikki came to early breakfast in the veranda riding on Teddy's shoulder, — Ruskin Bond

I certainly don't have any interest in being on a dark veranda with any man except my husband, unlike some women do. - Esther Norman — Barry Gray

Morning struck with the promise of a blazing summer's day. More of a threat than a promise. When you watch from a shaded veranda, sipping iced wine as the Red March summer paints lemons onto garden boughs - that's promise. When you have to toil a whole day in the dust to cover a thumb's distance on the map - that's threat. — Mark Lawrence

Maybe that's a haiku, maybe not, it might be a little too complicated," said Japhy. "A real haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles."

(The Dharma Bums, Chap. 8) — Jack Kerouac

I loved sitting on my veranda sipping quality scotch, puffing a Cuban cigar and watching Cuba on the horizon, or the oceanic vista. Did this late in the evenings many times. — Dirk Benedict

Anthony imagined a time before all that - a time when people sipped Earl Grey tea on a breeze cooled veranda and looked out upon endless countryside. — Alan Gibbons

They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely, and when it was finished he went out into the veranda and sat in the sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt better. — Rudyard Kipling

They'd reached St Thomas's and climbed the half-dozen wooden steps to the small veranda. Gamache — Louise Penny

She faced Chaol. The wind ripped a few strands of hair from her braid, and she tucked them behind her ears.
"No matter what happens," she said quietly, "I want to thank you."
Chaol tilted his head to the side. "For what?" Her eyes stung, but she blamed it on the fierce wind and blinked away the dampness.
"For making my freedom mean something." He didn't say anything; he just took the fingers of her right hand and held them in his, his thumb brushing the ring she wore.
"Let the second duel commence," the king boomed, waving a hand toward the veranda. Chaol squeezed her hand, his skin warm in the frigid air.
"Give him hell," he said. — Sarah J. Maas

In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose...Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria's dress, the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda...Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria's beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death... — F Scott Fitzgerald

She seemed out of place at the Fairweather. Too posh, as Susan said. Too well dressed. She never strolled along the shore or went bathing or brought a picture postcard. She just sat on the veranda all day with a book she never read, gazing out to sea. Probably wondering why on earth she came here. Susan had said. She looks as if she'd be more at home in Monte Carlo. I know- she's lost all her money gambling and she's waiting for the sea to warm up before she throws herself in. I hope she remembers to pay her bill first. — Vivien Alcock

Grub and Derek sitting on the veranda of the house in Dar es Salaam. Derek was a nationalized Tanzanian. He knew Swahili as well as he knew English. And he was liked and respected by almost all Tanzanians, including the Kigoma officials and my own field staff. He helped me to build up a new research center, where almost all the observations were made by the Tanzanian field staff. The — Jane Goodall

I saw you standing on a veranda you'd built with your own hands. And I loved you. — Nora Roberts

The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet. — Jack Kerouac

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants ... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes. — Bronislaw Malinowski