Crowded Quotes

The bar was crowded with theorizing Sherlockians, who in the absence of any actual evidence had created grand machinations to explain the crime. Minor points of canonical disagreement became reasons for brutal murder. Some tried to piece together their theories in small groups, hoping that with enough brainpower and expertise they might arrive at a solution. Others jumped straight over the "investigation" phase and landed square at the end of the story they were creating, instantly accusing the man across the table of some vile treachery. And, moreover, actually employing phrases like "vile treachery" in doing so. Everyone was a suspect. But at the world's largest Sherlockian gathering, everyone was a detective as well. ~ Graham Moore

This life is a shadowy thing, lad. We live in a crowded space of lights and shadows, and when left to ourselves, we all too often fail to see the brightest light of all. ~ James Michael Pratt

I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn't there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It's under the spatula, it's slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee - ~ Lionel Shriver

Well, I wish I'd get out of my head, it's quite crowded enough with me in here. ~ Terry Pratchett

I think a lover, when broken, is given a gift
not a scar, not a poem, not a rhyme
(unless it fits.)
I think as humans, we see a set of hues
but when wounded, we see something more:
deeper shades of hurt and worry,
colors never seen before.
Because I can't imagine a child
could see the same black as a widower,
and I don't think healthy hearts
know the true meaning of blue.
When children close their eyes,
they see a color they call empty.
But in the eyelids of the bruised,
the empty black's a crowded room. ~ Katya Polo

Set a clear focus in your life , and fear will be crowded out. The more you fix your eyes on God's purpose for you, the more you will overcome your fear. ~ David Jeremiah

It was surprisingly crowded, a bunch of middle-aged people, mostly women, moving enthusiastically, if a bit awkwardly, to Prince's "Little Red Corvette," trying to find a way back to their younger, more limber selves. ~ Tom Perrotta

Welcome to Hell, where the living conditions went beyond crowded, the job sucked, and the pay sucked even worse. It was like living in, well, Hell. ~ Eve Langlais

Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn't look at me.

Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down.

The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they're right, but maybe they're not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway.

Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing.

And then rising from within me is a single thought:

I don't want to die.

All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. ~ Veronica Roth

Freedom-loving people around the world must say ... I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism. ~ Ronald Reagan

His penmanship was shamefully crabbed. Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The Way of Tao is this: It strives not, but conquers; It speaks not, but all is made clear; It summons not, but its house is crowded; It contrives not, but the design is perfect. ~ Laozi

One thing which even the most seasoned and discerning masters of the art of choice do not and cannot choose, is the society to be born into - and so we are all in travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries - or we may tremble out of fear of drowning. One option not really realistic is to claim sanctuary in a safe harbour; one could bet that what seems to be a tranquil haven today will be soon modernized, and a theme park, amusement promenade or crowded marina will replace the sedate boat sheds. The third option not thus being available, which of the two other options will be chosen or become the lot of the sailor depends in no small measure on the ship's quality and the navigation skills of the sailors. Not all ships are seaworthy, however. And so the larger the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor's fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles. A pleasurable adventure for the well-equipped yacht may prove a dangerous trap for a tattered dinghy. In the last account, the difference between the two is that between life and death. ~ Zygmunt Bauman

A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Paradoxically, that large screen in the cavernous, crowded
room creates intimacy. And violence is an intimate act. If you
are punching someone, or if you are pinpointing someone in
the telescope of your rifle, you are as close to your victim as to
a lover, trying to think like them, anticipate their moves, overcome
them. ~ D.K. Holm

A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence--the lapses of consciousness, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes--all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand [...] At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive. ~ Jon Krakauer

Marvel's got a crowded universe, and there are already so many characters hogging the spotlight that it's hard to break through that. First off, whatever character you're creating, odds are, there's already someone similar in one way or another. ~ Kurt Busiek

There is in every American, I think, something of the old Daniel Boone - who, when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness. ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate. ~ Norman Mailer

Middle school is like one of those highway restrooms in the middle of nowhere. It's dirty and smelly and it's crowded with strange people. ~ Anonymous

The air is crowded with birds
beautiful, tender, intelligent birds
to whom life is a song. ~ George Henry Lewes

You know, I endeavor to be more like my older brother. He's very magnetic. He's actually very much like 'Castle' in that people are attracted to him, and just want to be near him. You want to know where my brother is in a crowded room? He's the guy with the crowd around him. ~ Nathan Fillion

When you think about it, the Big Bang's a big like school, isn't it?
...
Well, I mean to say, one day we'll all leave here and become scientists and bank clerks and driving instructors and hotel managers
the fabric of society, so to speak. But in the meantime, that fabric, that is to say, us, the future, is crowded into one tiny little point where none of the laws of society applies, viz., this school.
-Ruprecht ~ Paul Murray

When that little clock on my wall says "Olaotan! Olaotan!! Olaotan!!! It's half past time to write", I only have three things at my disposal: A pen, A piece of paper, and a crowded mind. ~ Olaotan Fawehinmi

If you haven't time to respond to a tug at your pants leg, your schedule is too crowded. ~ Robert Breault

One response was given by the innkeeper when Mary and Joseph wanted to find a room where the Child could be born. The innkeeper was not hostile; he was not opposed to them, but his inn was crowded; his hands were full; his mind was preoccupied. This§ is the answer that millions are giving today. Like a Bethlehem innkeeper, they cannot find room for Christ. All the accommodations in their hearts are already taken up by other crowding interests. Their response is not atheism. It is not defiance. It is preoccupation and the feeling of being able to get on reasonably well without Christianity. ~ Billy Graham

This was the kind of guy who should be someone's first love. Someone who brought you flowers and refilled your water glass without your having to ask. Someone who watched you across the crowded rooms just to make sure you were okay. Someone who loved you quietly from a distance, without pressuring you or wanting you to change. ~ Una LaMarche

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don't remember nothing, don't remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone's ma. Ben may not be lying, he believes it's true, but who knows? ~ Patrick Ness

I excused myself from the conversation, walked away, and stuck my hands in my jacket pockets. I had no drink. I didn't fidget. I kept my head down and headed for the door. It wasn't that far. I just had to get by some people who wouldn't suspect a thing, because I didn't know any of them. I didn't have to grab my coat because it was still on my shoulders. If Shawn saw me, I would say I was just going for air or a smoke or something. I had been trying to quit, and he knew this, so maybe going out for air was a better excuse. Sure, it was probably eleven below, but it was crowded and he'd buy it because I'd made him believe that I'm shy. I could be out in the midnight winter chill and home within an hour. It would have been safe, and I would have been warm, and no Chinook would have hit me. ~ Sawyer Paul

It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete. People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder. Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun. It certainly was hot. Robert climbed down and fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top. Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us to start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time. He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of ~ Ernest Hemingway

Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell. As it might be pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough; until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come; breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God's throne. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

On Sunday, evening, May 2, 2015, in Garland, Texas, an active-shooter incident didn't end in a massacre. It ended when an armed police officer took the fight to the enemy, literally pushing toward them and killing the duo before they could massacre innocents in a crowded event center. Forget politics. Forget before and after. When the attack is initiated there is no negotiation, no thinking - only fighting, pushing, and close killing. The event in Garland wasn't quite the soft target the terrorists thought it would be. They didn't have the access to the defenseless civilians they thought they'd have. Defend yourself - now rather than later. Strength stops strength. Overwhelming strength stops massacres in their tracks. ~ Gary J. Byrne

The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows! ~ Elizabeth Bibesco

One of the great differences between childhood and manhood is that we come to like our work more than our play. It becomes to us if not the chief pleasure at least the chief interest of our lives, and even when it is not this, an essential condition of our happiness. Few lives produce so little happiness as those that are aimless and unoccupied. Apart from all considerations of right and wrong, one of the first conditions of a happy life is that it should be a full and busy one, directed to the attainment of aims outside ourselves....the first great rule is that we must do something – that life must have a purpose and an aim – that work should be not merely occasional and spasmodic, but steady and continuous. Pleasure is a jewel which will only retain its luster when it is in a setting of work, and a vacant life is one of the worst of pains, though the islands of leisure that stud a crowded, well-occupied life may be among the things to which we look back with the greatest delight. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky

She has a bookshelf for a heart, and ink runs through her veins, she'll write you into her story with the typewriter in her brain. Her bookshelf's getting crowded. With all the stories that's she's penned, of all the people who flicked through her pages but closed the book before it ended. And there's one pushed to the very back, that sits collecting dust, with its title in her finest writing, 'The One's Who Lost My Trust'. There's books shes scared to open, and books she doesn't close. Stories of every person she's met stretched out in endless rows. Some people have only one sentence while others once held a main part, thousands of inky footprints that they've left across her heart. You might wonder why she does this, why write of people she once knew? But she hopes one day she'll mean enough for someone to write about her too. ~ E.H.

Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists. ~ Samuel Johnson

beast. But first I detour toward the lanai and plop myself on a chaise. The sun is high up in the afternoon sky, not a cloud in sight. People have crowded the beach, just little colorful dots against the white sand. The ocean stretches as far the horizon without any islands visible ahead, ~ Kendal Taylor

The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. ~ Nicole Krauss

We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that were were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once. ~ Janna Levin

I consider that a man's brain is originally like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge that might be useful to him gets crowded out. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet. ~ Dalai Lama

The ballparks have gotten too crowded. That's why nobody goes to see the game anymore. ~ Yogi Berra

Even in a crowded room, likable leaders make people feel like they're having a one-on-one conversation, as if they're the only person in the room that matters. And, for that moment, they are. Likable leaders communicate on a very personal, emotional level. ~ Travis Bradberry

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.

Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?

...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is no ~ Clarence Darrow

For a nickel a month, Lady Jones did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning. ~ Toni Morrison

She had come to analysis because she was, as she put it, "ruining her children." ... "But you are so frustrating," she said. "I want you to take something away from me, and you keep giving it back." And what, I asked, was that "something" she wanted to give away? "The pain. The crazy," she said. She said there was a little shrine, somewhere in the north of Brazil. The land was dry, the town impossibly poor, but people would travel for hundreds of miles to get there, to leave candles, gifts, and ex- voto offerings thanking the saint for answered prayers, for healing, for having rescued them from distress. "I bring you my worries. I bring you my tears. I bring you the dreams I have. I want to leave them here. I want to hang them on your wall and return home healed. But everything I give to you, you give back. You say, like you just said, 'What is this "something" you want to give away?' " Years later I looked it up, the shrine. There were many like the one my Brazilian patient had described. One of them was a kind of cave or grotto, where pilgrims would leave little body parts carved from wood or wax: a foot, a breast, a head. From time to time the priest collected the wax objects and melted them down, making candles to be sold to other pilgrims. The walls and ceiling of the shrine were black with candle smoke and crowded with these suspended offerings. I think now that my Brazilian patient managed at least to give that away, the conjured image of a blackened shrine, hung with ~ DeSales Harrison

He couldn't have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.

This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn't exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The owner took her time unpacking the books she'd bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She'd never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'
Nicole Krauss

In a big city you become a ghost; you walk on the crowded streets and realise that you are a kind of transparent entity; an indistinct being, a thing which is not something! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

In a social environment that is ever crowded and impersonal, it is becoming increasingly important to reconsider the value of close personal relationships before we are driven to ask the forlorn question, 'Whatever happened to love?' ~ Desmond Morris

I didn't know there were this many math guys," Hale said as they stepped onto the crowded concourse.
Kat cleared her throat.
"And women," he added. "Math women. ~ Ally Carter

The houses in the better part of San Francisco, in those days, were all alike and all so ugly it was a wonder even their owners did not know it. (My father called it the better part of the city because he lived there.) Most of them were built on hillsides, with two or three of their corners standing on stilts. From the sidewalk you saw the doors a dozen feet above your head, the stairs leading up to them and a flat, bare expanse of pine sheathing enclosing the stilts. Each crowded against the next without an inch to spare, the houses themselves were narrow and looked taller than they actually were. If one of them had not occasionally been painted a dull brown instead of a dull green, or if a panel of brick had not been set here and there among the panels of wood, nobody could have told where his neighbor's left off and his own began. All of them rose straight from the sidewalks; there were no lawns, and no trees. A few blocks away there were well-proportioned and attractive houses, but the builders of our street had searched farther for their model - in a box factory, from the evidence. We were moderately rich, and nothing was too bad for us. ~ George Albee

Of course, with my parents, my three sisters, and Colston already sharing that one room, adding me to the mix made it just too crowded. So my sister Sara volunteered to sleep in my hospital room. When we were ready to settle in for the night, she headed back over to the hospital and climbed into my hospital bed. She tucked the pillows all around herself, got comfortable, pulled up the blankets, and fell asleep. She wasn't asleep long, however. She was in a hospital, after all. Throughout the night, in a hospital, doctors and nurses go on rounds. In the middle of the night a group of doctors and nurses on the night shift all shuffled into the room, talking about my case, and startled Sara from her slumber. She poked her head out of the covers. The doctors all collectively gasped and one of them said, "Who are you?"
She nervously laughed and said, "Oh! Sorry. I'm Noah's sister Sara. Noah stayed at the Mologne House tonight with our family."
"Oh, he did?" the doctor replied, sounding very surprised but pleased. "Well, that's huge!"
They were still standing in the room so Sara said, "Yeah, it is. So I am sleeping in here." She waited for them to get the hint. They started laughing and told her they would let her get back to sleep. ~ Noah Galloway

Throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down. ~ John D. MacDonald

The time was ordinary, 24 seconds, but the victory was historic. From that crowded little red house in Clarksville, out of an extended family of twenty-two kids, from a childhood of illness and leg braces, out of a small historically black college that had no scholarships, from a country where she could be hailed as a heroine and yet denied lunch at a counter, Skeeter had become golden, sweeping the sprints in Rome. ~ David Maraniss

Hello," said the beautiful elven maid. "I was just thinking, and I mean no offence, but - how can any fighting force crowded with the softer sex hope to prevail in battle?"
"Huh?" said Elliot, brilliantly. "The softer what?"
"I refer to men," said the elf girl. "Naturally I was aware the Border guard admitted men, and I support men in their endeavor to prove they are equal to women, but their natures are not warlike, are they? ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her - that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side. ~ George Eliot

Afterward, there was that long, crowded pause in which everyone decides that although they are very shaken, and possibly upside down, they are, to their surprise, still alive. ~ Terry Pratchett

The building was crowded with men and women packing stuff into boxes and bags, leather stuff, nylon, canvas, and rubber stuff, with brass rings and silver chains, steel buckles and studded straps. Elephant stuff. ~ Richard Schmitt

Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad. ~ Terry Pratchett

This man of his, yes, this man. Now Sam accepts his own desire. "I'm a gayrod," he shouts marching through crowded plazas. "I'm in love with a man, and I want men. That's what I want. I want man, man, man! ~ Barry Webster

We've been waiting for a format like triple-A where you can hear Crowded House, Joni Mitchell and R.E.M. ~ Vonda Shepard

Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The reason the way of the transgressor is hard is because it's so crowded. ~ Kin Hubbard

The temperature must have been in the nineties, and there seemed to be far, far too much air in the room. It was bunched and crowded, and in your face and eyes, and it made you think the room was a rush-hour tube train, and a lot of extra air had managed to sneak in just as the doors were closing. ~ Hugh Laurie

There are empty rooms, and then there are rooms that feel crowded, corner to corner, with absence. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

Lucian's father had warned him to fear idle men. Without the pride gained from a good day's work, they were left to their vices and the doubts that crowded their head. Their hatred. Their envy. ~ Melina Marchetta

I don't miss London much. I find it crowded, vast and difficult to get around. Cabs are incredibly expensive. ~ John Cleese

I imagine the center of the Earth must be a crowded place by now, but perhaps it is the spirits of those of us residing there that keep the Earth alive and green. ~ Neal Shusterman

If I'm talking to someone in a crowded room, I try to make this person feel as though we're the only ones present. I shut out everything else. I look directly at the person. Even if a gorilla were to walk into the room, I probably wouldn't notice it. ~ Mary Kay Ash

The time there was only the one warm-up room for everyone, a room so astonishingly hot and airless and noisy, so crowded with extraordinarily talented-seeming musicians, that everything had begun to spin like a merry-go-round, and a French cellist had reached out a languid hand to save Clementine's cello as it slipped from her grasp. (She was a champion fainter.) The ~ Liane Moriarty

As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being. ~ Lynne Truss

It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven. ~ Theodore Parker

In their death as in their life the Latins are more socially disposed than we, and the graves in their cemeteries almost always touch each other, they are so closely crowded together. ~ Willa Cather

The last thing I wanted to do was to sit in a crowded bar to watch my cousin get naked. ~ Charlaine Harris

The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events. ~ Bridget Riley

It felt so good that it crowded out all the bad things ~ Rainbow Rowell

When children are demonised by the newspapers, they are often described as feral,' wrote George Monbiot in the Guardian.6 'But feral is what children should be: it means released from captivity or domestication. Those who live in crowded flats, surrounded by concrete, mown grass and other people's property, cannot escape their captivity without breaking the law. Games and explorations that are seen as healthy in the countryside are criminalised in the cities. Children who have never visited the countryside live under constant restraint. ~ Gary Younge

I have been refused entrance on the buses because I would not pay my fare at the front and go around to the rear door to enter. That was the custom if the bus was crowded up to the point where the white passengers would start occupying. ~ Rosa Parks

The grand highway is crowded w/lovers & searchers & leavers so eager to please & forget. Wilderness. ~ Jim Morrison

London and the south-east of England are very crowded spaces. Wherever a new runway is placed, thousands will be affected. Residents in nearby Longford, Harmondsworth and Sipson, which lie to the north of Heathrow, face having their homes compulsorily purchased for land to build the new runway. ~ Tim Bowler

Emptiness crowded out joy and silence replaced meaning, but the Son is shining. ~ Jonah Books.com

A world that was crowded with people could still be a very lonely place. ~ Jodi Picoult

Trout aren't naturally as selective as they've become in crowded tailwaters - they've been trained to be like that by too much fishing pressure. I've seen tailwater fish that are so hysterical they'll refuse naturals. You wonder how they get enough to eat. ~ John Gierach

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train. ~ Phyllis McGinley

we have in this brief historical moment, this moment in between two modes of being, a very rare opportunity. For those of us who have lived both with and without the vast, crowded connectivity the Internet provides, these are the few days when we can still notice the difference between Before and After. ~ Michael Harris

GRASS

The grass is spreading out across the plain,
Each year, it dies, then flourishes again.
It's burnt but not destroyed by prairie fires,
When spring winds blow they bring it back to life.
Afar, its scent invades the ancient road,
Its emerald green overruns the ruined town.
Again I see my noble friend depart,
I find I'm crowded full of parting's feelings. ~ Bai Juyi

The imaginable had always been problematic. When I was a child the feel of things went into me: deep, narrow, intense. The grittiness of the street, the chalk-white air of the drugstore, the grain of the wooden floor in the storefront library, the blocks of cheese in the grocery-store refrigerator. I took it all so seriously, so literally. I was without imagination. I paid a kind of idiot attention to the look and feel of things, leveling an intent inner stare at the prototypic face of the world. These streets were all streets, these buildings all buildings, these women and men all women and men. I could imagine no other than that which stood before me. That child's literalness of the emotions continued to exert influence, as though a shock had been administered to the nervous system and the flow of imagination had stopped. I could feel strongly, but I could not imagine. The granite gray of the street, the American-cheese yellow of the grocery store, the melancholy brownish tint of the buildings were all still in place, only now it was the woman on the couch, the girl hanging out the window, the confinement that sealed us off, on which I looked with that same inner intentness that had always crowded out possibility as well as uncertainty. It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression. ~ Vivian Gornick

You're quite the frisky mittens," I tell her as we stop at a crowded crosswalk, waiting in the throngs of tourists taking in the city of sin.
Running her fingers across the front of my T-shirt, she says, "And I get the impression you like me so . . . hands on."
"Guilty as charged. ~ Lauren Blakely

I'm pretty sure that when babies are born in Oregon, they leave the hospital with birth certificates - and teeny-tiny sleeping bags. Everyone in the state camps. The hippies and the rednecks. The hunters and the tree huggers. Rich people. Poor people. Even rock musicians. Especially rock musicians. Our band had perfected the art of punk-rock camping, throwing a bunch of crap into the van with, like, an hour's notice and just driving out into the mountains, where we'd drink beer, burn food, jam on our instruments around the campfire, and sack out under the open sky. Sometimes, on tour, back in the early hardscrabble days, we'd even camp as an alternative to crashing in another crowded, roach-infested rock 'n' roll house.
I don't know if it's because no matter where you live, the wilderness is never that far off, but it just seemed like everyone in Oregon camped. ~ Gayle Forman

But the physical danger was judged to be less important than the psychological stresses. Eight humans, crowded together like monkeys for almost three Terran years, had better get along much better than humans usually did. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Down the pool they went until finally they were bunched and crowded against the end. And the feet and wildly plunging bodies followed them. A few frogs lost their heads and floundered among the feet and got through and these were saved. But the majority decided to leave this pool forever, to find a new home in a new country where this kind of thing didn't happen. A wave of frantic, frustrated frogs, big ones, little ones, brown ones, green ones, men frogs and women frogs, a wave of them broke over the bank, crawled, leaped, scrambled. They clambered up the grass, they dutched at each other, little ones rode on big ones, And then - horror on horror - the flashlights found them. Two men gathered them like berries. The line came out of the water and closed in on their rear and gathered them like potatoes. Tens and fifties of them were flung into the gunny sacks, and the sacks filled with tired, frightened, and disillusioned frogs, with dripping whimpering frogs. Some got away, of course, and some had been saved in the pool. But never in frog history had such an execution taken place. ~ John Steinbeck

Or, in the triumph of the crowded procession, have the helpless been trampled on, instead of being gently lifted aside out of the roadway of the conqueror, whom they have no power to accompany on his march? It ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Life is a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which a man is liable to find himself speeding back in the direction he came. ~ Peter De Vries

In the spring, during the Festival of Flora, when Rome was crowded with visitors from all over Italy, Clodius's mob found itself for once outnumbered by ordinary citizens who despised their bullying tactics. Clodius himself was actually jeered at the theatre. Unused to anything other than adulation from the people, according to Atticus he looked around him in astonishment at the slow handclapping, taunts, whistles and obscene gestures, and realised - almost too late - that he was in danger of being lynched. He retreated hastily, and that was the beginning of the end of his domination, for the Senate now recognised how he could be beaten: by appealing over the heads of the ~ Robert Harris

It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten. ~ Ben Shahn

Crazy Love is crazy good! Leslie What's brain is evidently crowded with strangeness, awfulness, wonderfulness, wildness, madness of all kinds ... and love. Lots of love. How lucky we are that her imagination runs deep, runs true, runs onto the page in crazily beautiful stories
and lucky, so very lucky, to be holding those stories right now in our hands. ~ Molly Gloss

I had recognized her. They had tried to tear her out, but she had lived in me--deep in my heart and secret, nameless and indescribable, yet never entirely gone. She had been a face in the window of every departing train, a form seen from the back on every crowded street, always just out of my sight, always turning away. And I had known her when she came to me, though I could not say it, and though the very thought had sent my mind skidding across the ice into unconsciousness. ~ Raphael Carter

There is no greatness where it's crowded. ~ Nicky Verd

Did you find anything special?' Blackie asked.

T. nodded. 'Come over here,' he said, 'and look.' Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. 'Old Misery's savings,' he said. 'Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.'

'What are you going to do? Share them?'

'We aren't thieves,' T. said. 'Nobody's going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a celebration.' He knelt down on the floor and counted them out - there were seventy in all. 'We'll burn them,' he said, 'one by one,' and taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. 'I'd like to see Old Misery's face when we are through,' T. said.

'You hate him a lot?' Blackie asked.

'Of course I don't hate him,' T. said. 'There'd be no fun if I hated him.' The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. 'All this hate and love,' he said, 'it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie,' and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things. 'I'll race you home, Blackie,' he said. ("The Destructors") ~ Graham Greene