Backyard Adventures Quotes

Call it walking meditation or a neighborhood stroll; by whatever name
suits you, rediscover the art of meandering. ~ Gina Greenlee

Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diablism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity
that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures. ~ Angelina Jolie

I signaled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother. ~ Roald Dahl

With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville's Fantastic Tales, Sorel's Francion, Burton's Anatomy, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Amory's John Buncle, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann's Tomcat Murr, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey's Doctor, Melville's Moby-Dick, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe's ornate novels, Bely's Petersburg, Joyce's Ulysses, Witkiewicz's Polish jokes, Flann O'Brien's Irish farces, Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren, Patchen's tender novels, Burroughs's and Kerouac's mad ones, Nabokov's later works, Schmidt's fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard's later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palin ~ Steven Moore

My earliest recollection is of coming upon some rabbit tracks in the backyard snow. I must have been three or so, but I had never seen a rabbit and can still recall the feeling of being completely captivated by the tracks: Someone had been here. And he left these prints. And he was alive. And he lived somewhere nearby, maybe even watching me at this very moment.
Four decades later, I do not need to be reminded that rabbits are often a nuisance to farmers and gardeners. My point is that when you look at a rabbit and can see only a pest, or vermin, or a meal, or a commodity, or a laboratory subject, you aren't seeing the rabbit anymore. You are seeing only yourself and the schemes and appetites we bring to the world
seeing, come to think of it, like an animal instead of as a moral being with moral vision. ~ Matthew Scully

Inherent in this rejection of evolution is the idea that your curiosity about the world is misplaced and your common sense is wrong. This attack on reason is an attack on all of us. Children who accept this ludicrous perspective will find themselves opposed to progress. They will become society's burdens rather than its producers, a prospect that I find very troubling. Not only that, these kids will never feel the joy of discovery that science brings. They will have to suppress the basic human curiosity that leads to asking questions, exploring the world around them, and making discoveries. They will miss out on countless exciting adventures. We're robbing them of basic knowledge about their world and the joy that comes with it. It breaks my heart. ~ Bill Nye

It's not a good idea to always look for new frontiers, especially when you have opportunities in your existing businesses, in your own backyard. ~ Kumar Mangalam Birla

Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get there at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it. And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things, they say-even their looks-will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools.
-The Professor ~ C.S. Lewis

All my books reflect travel adventures of some kind, and all have a soul: a spiritual or mystical underpinning. ~ O.R. Melling

On this side of the wall is our house; in our backyard there is nothing. Nothing but red dust and round-headed black ants streaming and one juicy banana trunk stabbed brown--jab jab jab--never dead. I am always looking over the wall for Tissa. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

I think of these imperial adventures like welfare programs; you start them with all good intentions, they never end, they go on forever and get more expensive as they go on. ~ Andrew Sullivan

As the year goes on, certain deputies - and others, high in public life - will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours' manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke
to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.
While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just's cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker. ~ Hilary Mantel

I've a right to think," said Alice sharply.
"Just about as much right," said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly."
~ Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 ~ ~ Lewis Carroll

She read about amazing people she could never be, met friends she would never see, go on incredible adventures she would never have, in mystical places that didn't exist. Slipping inside the minds of others, feeling their every heartbeat, their passion and sorrow. Spending a life hopping between the pages, living a life less ordinary. Getting the life she had always dreamed of had never been so easy. ~ Raven Lockwood

Consider developing your whole self with the same raw focus and intensity that you develop a particular skill set. Get focused. Go out, have adventures. Run, jump, skin your knee, fall in love, root loudly for the away team at a baseball game, barely escape a crash of stampeding rhinos, live to see another day. Experience things big and small. Go for a walk. The world is full of wonders. ~ Anthony Holden

Let the dust take me when the adventure's done and I shall make the dust glitter for all eternity with my marvelous fury. ~ Gore Vidal

An even, straight path is attractive. Its predictable routine perpetuates with no extra effort required. It becomes autopilot that leads to endless same old thing.

An uneven, windy path is unavoidable to many. Its unforeseen, exciting adventures require balance, adjustment, alertness and attention. A path that leads to a rewarding dream of your life. ~ Miriam Hurdle

You'll never make it out there. You weren't made for South Pole adventures."
Flora gave her an icy look. "I think I know by now what I was made for. ~ Chris Kurtz

AS SHE HEALED, the women changed tactics and stopped their berating. Now they brought their embroidery and crocheting, and finally they used Ethel Fordham's house as their quilting center. Ignoring those who preferred new, soft blankets, they practiced what they had been taught by their mothers during the period that rich people called the Depression and they called life. Surrounded by their comings and goings, listening to their talk, their songs, following their instructions, Cee had nothing to do but pay them the attention she had never given them before. They were nothing like Lenore, who'd driven Salem hard, and now, suffering a minor stroke, did nothing at all. Although each of her nurses was markedly different from the others in looks, dress, manner of speech, food and medical preferences, their similarities were glaring. There was no excess in their gardens because they shared everything. There was no trash or garbage in their homes because they had a use for everything. They took responsibility for their lives and for whatever, whoever else needed them. The absence of common sense irritated but did not surprise them. Laziness was more than intolerable to them; it was inhuman. Whether you were in the field, the house, your own backyard, you had to be busy. Sleep was not for dreaming; it was for gathering strength for the coming day. Conversation was accompanied by tasks: ironing, peeling, shucking, sorting, sewing, mending, washing, or nursing. You couldn't learn age, ~ Toni Morrison

A childhood filled with adventures, happiness and unabated love.
If only I could remember ... ~ Lynda Fisher

It's nice to look forward to, isn't it - a life of work and play and little daily adventures side by side with somebody you love? ~ Jean Webster

I was sitting outside in our backyard on a summer day, I was around six, and suddenly the whole world dissolved before my eyes and I found myself in a timeless world of light. ~ Frederick Lenz

Jesus let the disciples know that they were striving in the wrong direction. They were trying to climb up a ladder that they instead should be climbing down. ~ Jennifer L. Lane

We can't be fully transformed in our own backyard. We need to journey. ~ Seth Barnes

Before we learn what's right, we put our trust in the wrong people, and it's never good to start life's adventures, especially important ones like marriage, when we're too young even to know ourselves. ~ Kristen Ashley

If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse. ~ Max Brooks

I'm walking off the dance floor when I see him. Peter, in a suit, standing to the side, beside the dogwood tree. He looks so handsome I can hardly stand it. I cross the backyard, and he watches me the whole time. My heart is pounding so hard. Is he here for me? Or did he just come because he promised my dad?
When I'm standing in front of him, I say, "You came."
Peter looks away. "Of course I came."
Softly I say, "I wish I could take back the things I said the other night. I don't even remember all of them."
Looking down, he says, "But you meant them, right? So it's a good thing you said them then, because somebody had to and you were right."
"Which part?" I whisper.
"About UNC. About me not transferring there." He lifts his head, his eyes wounded. "But you should have told me my mom talked to you."
I take a shaky breath. "You should have told me you were thinking about transferring! You should've told me how you were feeling, period. You shut down after graduation; you wouldn't let me in. You kept saying everything was going to be fine."
"Because I was fucking scared, okay!" he bursts out. He looks around to see if anyone heard, but the music is loud, and everyone is dancing; no one is looking at us, and it's like we are alone here in this backyard.
"What were you so scared about?" I whisper.
His hands tighten into fists at his sides. When he finally speaks, his voice comes out raw, like he hasn't used it in a while. "I was sc ~ Jenny Han

I made up adventures and divesed a life for myself so as to live, at least somehow, a little. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. ~ David Mitchell

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.

I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.

But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.

As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.

But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.

Maybe God wasn't intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.

The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.

The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to 'believe' like a grown-up.

I mean, what does a child know about faith?

It took a low point a ~ Bear Grylls

I haven't done anything--yet. ~ William Dean Howells

One poor chap, who had no other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest pride in the remembrance: 'Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once.' But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the boys could say that, and so that cheapened the distinction too much." ~From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Scene where the neighbor boys were lamenting over Tom's apparent drowning. ~ Mark Twain

Huskies get in trouble. Huskies are well-known to be escape artists. Why? Because they were bred to go long-distance. They're not bred to be in the backyard and just look beautiful because they have blue eyes. ~ Cesar Millan

Psychotherapy can be one of the greatest and most rewarding adventures, it can bring with it the deepest feelings of personal worth, of purpose and richness in living. ~ Eda LeShan

Like all great adventures, this one started with someone trying to get laid. King Menelaus didn't go to Troy for the baklava. ~ Mark Leiren-Young

Life's adventures make great reading! ~ Denise Robbins

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind. ~ Algernon Blackwood

Many great people have experienced some kind of failure. They build on the lessons from failing to become great. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays a great role in all political conflicts. If the man who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem, he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchman with the "dangerous Communists" of outer life, or the official plus the prosperous man with the "grasping capitalists." In this way he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such warring elements. If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a "projection." Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, just as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals. Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships. ~ C. G. Jung

When you go into the other guy's backyard you cannot hope to win on points. ~ Lennox Lewis

William Waltz will take me through 'the buzz and clamor in a forest of hearts.' Adventures in the Lost Interiors of America is an adventure, I will go on this adventure with Waltz as a skillful, faithful, compass-true guide. I love this book. ~ James Tate

Beyond the slumpstone wall lay a backyard, a swimming pool. Dappled with morning light and tree shadows, the water glimmered in shades of blue from sapphire to turquoise, as might a trove of jewels left by long-dead pirates who had sailed a sea since vanished. ~ Dean Koontz

I know so much is going to happen here, but I just don't know how. It feels like Paris is full of so many adventures just waiting to be had. ~ Rachel Kapelke-Dale

One may do many things in a long life. I also played a great deal of tennis and brought up three children. There's time for all sorts of adventures. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Vaguely she was aware of her moans floating across the backyard as her entire body tightened around him, then released, sending bits of her consciousness flying in all directions like the stars in the sky above. Her nails dug into his shoulder through his shirt as she anchored herself to him, as the orgasm pulsed through her. She felt the ripples of his own climax inside her, and then he collapsed over her, bringing both legs into the hammock and pulling her against his side.
"Perfect," he murmured, and in a few minutes, his breathing evened out. ~ Emma Jay

When you look through a window you gasp at the beautiful tree in the backyard or the magical sunrise coming over the horizon, No one looks at a window and is taken away by the complexity of the transparency of millions of atoms joined together to form, from our perception of a crystal clear yet structural opening to the exterior, the same is with life, if you spend your whole life being a medium to enable others then you will be nothing but a sheet of glass, overused, underappreciated, and fragile to opportunity ~ Addison Killebrew

And I sat there at the patio,
while the whole of universe,
was getting engulfed,
in the whitest whiteness of snow.

Down, near my rough paw,
is soft snow,
mannering a fidgeting embryo.

I monitored the snow that plunged,
on the soil of my backyard,
and realized it melting fast.
Was that the temperature or,
my eyes on it overcast?

While I think of this melted exalt,
I am obliged to ask,
What ought happens to the thoughts?
Where do they get tossed?
When they are forgot?

Scorched?
Scoffed?
Deformed?
Unadorned? ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Reading takes the reader to faraway lands, new cultures, new and exciting adventures; you meet new friends and enemies; it takes the reader from the heights of the imagination to the depths of human emotions; all without taking a single step. ~ Carlos Salinas