Down Range Chico Quotes

At first of course everybody had been quiet, fearful. The funeral procession snaked its way through the drab, slushy little city in dead silence. The only sound was the slap-slap-slap of thousands of sockless shoes on the silver-wet road that led to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Young men carried seventeen coffins on their shoulders. Seventeen plus one, that is, for the re-murdered Usman Abdullah, who obviously could not be entered twice in the books. So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that's all the little procession amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace. Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections.

Of all the sugar crystals carried by the ants that winter morning, the smallest crystal of course went by the name of Miss Jebeen. ~ Arundhati Roy

I look at Thich Nhat Hanh and I look at Marshall Rosenberg, and they're more concerned about the long range. And that long range means that you have to sit down with people who don't think like you. I want to reach people who don't think like me. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Democracy is the Free World's whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes. ~ Arundhati Roy

I swear, one range fire and you've turned into a timid little baby kitten afraid of his own shadow."
Reza swore under his breath, wishing Emily wasn't standing right there watching Teague show his ass - figuratively, of course. He wondered how long it would be before Teague tried to hit on her.
The thought made Reza's spine stiffen as he glanced over at her.
Emily raised both eyebrows, her lips twitching. "Range fire?"
Heat crawled up Reza's neck, along with a strong desire to throttle Ben Teague. "I may or may not have been involved in an accident involving a small fire here at Fort Hood."
"Ha," Teague snorted and grabbed his helmet. "He burned down three hundred acres of training area last year."
"It was an accident," Reza snarled. ~ Jessica Scott

And then, on the very borders of the Unknown Lands, there lay a range of low volcanoes, which lit up, far away in the outer darkness, the Black Hills, where shone the Seven Lights, which neither twinkled nor moved nor faltered through Eternity; and of which even the great spy-glass could make no understanding; nor had any adventurer from the Pyramid ever come back to tell us aught of them. And here let me say, that down in the Great Library of the Redoubt, were the histories of all those, with their discoveries, who had ventured out into the monstrousness of the Night Land, risking not the life only, but the spirit of life. ~ William Hope Hodgson

My parents were told by the principal of West Barnstable Elementary School and my teacher that I was a bright boy whose spelling was in the retarded range and whose handwriting was the worst they'd ever seen. I find it embarrassing that I spell so badly. I will do almost anything to avoid being embarrassed, but no effort either on my part or on the part of any teacher has ever dented my utter bafflement when it comes to choosing which letters to put down, how many, and in what order. ~ Mark Vonnegut

Obi-Wan Kenobi opened his eyes to find himself staring at what he strongly suspected was Anakin's butt.

It looked like Anakin's butt - well, his pants, anyway - though it was thoroughly impossible for Obi-Wan to be certain, since he had never before had occasion to examine Anakin's butt upside down, which it currently appeared to be, nor from this rather uncomfortably close range. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

What the hell was that?" he asked no-one in particular. "Did they ram us?"
"Uh – negative, sir." Marnetti offered, reading an instrumental assessment from his display, "It seems we were hit by some kind of pulse wave generated by their jump."
"Their jump? – You mean by arriving they nearly killed us?"
Marnetti nodded, continuing, "Range 0.5 kilometers, Captain. Holding steady. No recognized weapons activity."
"Damage report." He ordered, feeling his way back into his seat, eyes glued to the viewscreen.
"Shield 2 down, 1 is buckling." Pluddeman choked.
"Power stable, all systems holding steady," Marnetti added, now rubbing some bruises.
"Any communications?"
"Nothing, sir. Static on all frequencies."
"What are they doing?"
"Nothing, sir. Waiting maybe."
"Waiting, my ass!" Dayne barked. "They must be sizing us up! ~ Christina Engela

Members of the Coyote Clan are not easily identified, but there are clues. You can see it in their eyes. They are joyful and they are fierce. They can cry louder and laugh harder than anyone on the planet. And they have an enormous range.
The Coyote Clan is a raucous bunch: they have drunk from desert potholes and belched forth toads. They tell stories with such virtuosity that you'll swear you've been in the presence of preachers.
The Coyote Clan is also serene. They can float on their backs down the length of any river or lose entire afternoons to the contemplation of stone.
Members of the Clan court risk and will dance on slickrock as flash floods erode the ground beneath their feet. It doesn't matter. They understand the earth re-creates itself day after day. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

I went after him and picked him off with a right, like a predator and was all over him like a rash! I was in to him with a right hand lead and out to inflict pain, but it wasn't all one-sided! This guy was on a wing and a prayer when he threw a chopping right hand that whizzed past me with him on the other end of it ... I was blessed, or something!
I had to turn it on and step it up, because if he connected with one of those shots then I was chicken fodder! I could see that his wasted efforts were tiring him by the second. I boxed him from range and kept tying him up, I was now in to a rhythm, I swung lefts and rights, all of them smashing in to his head with an unrelenting ferocity.
By now his face was covered in blood and he was about to go down when the ref stepped in and stopped it. I won; I had defeated Goliath. ~ Stephen Richards

Billy ran around with a rare old crew
And he knew an Arsenal from Tottenham blue
We'd be a darn sight better off if we knew
Where Billy's bones are resting now

Billy saw a copper and he hit him in the knee
And he took him down from six to five foot three
Then he hit him fair and square in the do-re-mi
That copper won't be having any family

Hey Billy son where are you now?
Don't you know that we need you now?
With a rat-tat-tat and the old kowtow
Where are Billy's bones resting now?

Billy went away with a peace-keeping force
'Cause he liked a bloody good fight, of course
Went away in an old khaki van
To the banks of the River Jordan

Billy saw the Arabs and he had 'em on the run
When he got 'em in the range of his sub-machine gun
Then he had the Israelis in his sights, went a rat-tat-tat
And they ran like shites

Hey Billy son where are you now?
Don't you know that we need you now?
With a rat-tat-tat and the old kowtow
Where are Billy's bones resting now?

One night Billy had a rare old time,
Laughing and singing on the Lebanon line
Came back to camp not looking too pretty
Never even got to see the holy city

Now Billy's out there in the desert sun
And his mother cries when the morning comes
And there's mothers crying all over this world
For their poor dead darling boys and girls
< ~ Shane MacGowan

I'm an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it's like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son's life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I've always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way, just as helpless as you were to stop your giggles when they came on you at that poetry reading, Frannie. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she'd say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I've read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader's Digest, but it's me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what we think… those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right. I can't get over that. It's like a bl ~ Stephen King

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail for replacement in as many decades ~ Aldo Leopond

It is often said that if you have a room with a view, you will feel peaceful and relaxed, but if the room is a caravan hurtling down a steep and twisted road, and the view is an eerie mountain range racing backward away from you, while chilly mountain winds sting your face and toss dust into your eyes, then you will not feel one bit of peace and relaxation. ~ Lemony Snicket

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice ... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. ~ Gilbert Highet

Colorado and Wyoming are America's highest states, averaging 6,800 feet and 6,700 feet above sea level. Utah comes in third at 6,100 feet, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho each break 5,000 feet, and the rest of the field is hardly worth mentioning. At 3,400 feet, Montana is only half as high as Colorado, and Alaska, despite having the highest peaks, is even further down the list at 1,900 feet. Colorado has more fourteeners than all the other U.S. states combined, and more than all of Canada too. Colorado's lowest point (3,315 feet along the Kansas border) is higher than the highest point in twenty other states. Rivers begin here and flow away to all the points of the compass. Colorado receives no rivers from another state (unless you count the Green River's' brief in and out from Utah).Wyoming's Wind River Range is the only mountain in North America that supplies water to all three master streams of the American West: Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia rivers. ~ Keith Meldahl

I ask you to come down to earth," said the Baron in a calm, rather faint voice, "and to take up the duties of your station!"
"I have no intention of obeying you, my Lord Father," said Cosimo. "I am very sorry."
They were ill at ease, both of them, bored. Each knew what the other would say. "And what about your studies? Your devotions as a Christian?" said the father. "Do you intend to grown up like an American Savage?"
Cosimo was silent. These were thoughts he had not yet put to himself and had no wish to. Then he exclaimed: "Just because I'm a few yards higher up, does it mean that good teaching can't reach me?"
This was an able reply too, though it diminished, in a way, the range of his gesture; a sign of weakness.
His father realized this and became more pressing. "Rebellion cannot be measured by yards," said he. "Even when a journey seems no distance at all, it can have no return."
Now was the moment for my brother to produce some other noble reply, perhaps a Latin maxim, but at that instant none came into his head, though he knew so many by heart. Instead he suddenly got bored with all this solemnity, and shouted: "But from the trees I can piss farther," a phrase without much meaning, but which cut the discussion short.
As though they had heard the phrase, a shout went up from the ragamuffins around Porta Capperi. The Baron of Rondo's horse shied, the Baron pulled the reins and wrapped himself more tightly in his cloak, ready to leave. ~ Italo Calvino

I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I had found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. . . . I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books. ~ Carl Sagan

The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically - and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propu ~ Henry Miller

I also thought about that seminar classmate on Adam's ninth birthday. Adam had insisted on going to a pizza-and-games arcade for his party. The only person he'd invited besides his sisters was someone I'll call Lonnie, whom Adam claimed to be his girlfriend. Although I had often heard Adam sing about Lonnie, I had never met her, or seen Adam interact with any girl. I was afraid that he would start humping her leg the second she came in range. These were fears I'd sustained since before he was born; I though all people with Down syndrome were grossly overaffectionate. I was grossly wrong. ~ Martha N. Beck

I walked past the lady in yellow robes and the maid bringing her a letter, past the soldier with a magnificent hat and the girl smiling at him, thinking of warm lips, brown eyes, blue eyes. Her brown eyes stopped me.
It's the painting from whose frame a girl looks out, ignoring her beefy music teacher, whose proprietary hand rests on her chair. The light is muted, winter light, but her face is bright.
I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something-- she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, "Don't!"
I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency. But her urgency filled the corridor. "Wait," she was saying, "wait! Don't go!"

...

She had changed a lot in sixteen years. She was no longer urgent. In fact, she was sad. She was young and distracted, and her teacher was bearing down on her, trying to get her to pay attention. But she was looking out, looking for someone who would see her.
This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music.
Interrupted at her music.- as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?
I had something to tell her now "I see you," ~ Susanna Kaysen

Very close by the CMS shops, hidden about a quarter mile away in the woods, was the prison's rifle range. Correctional officers could spend quality time with their firearms down there, and the hammering of multiple rounds was typical background noise during our workdays. There was something unsettling about toiling away for a prison while listening to your jailers practice shooting you. ~ Piper Kerman

All praise and honor! I confess
That bread and ale, home-baked, home-brewed
Are wholesome and nutritious food,
But not enough for all our needs;
Poets-the best of them-are birds
Of passage; where their instinct leads
They range abroad for thoughts and words
And from all climes bring home the seeds
That germinate in flowers or weeds.
They are not fowls in barnyards born
To cackle o'er a grain of corn;
And, if you shut the horizon down
To the small limits of their town,
What do you but degrade your bard
Till he at last becomes as one
Who thinks the all-encircling sun
Rises and sets in his back yard? ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The huge sadness of the northern plains rolled down on him
and
There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe,but nothing could be done about it,and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.
Close Range, Brokeback Mountain and other stories. ~ Annie Proulx

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are "pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours." Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along. ~ Anne Fadiman

I guessed that one day the restrictions I imposed on myself would end. But first, it seemed that my range of possible activities would have to iris down to zero before I could turn myself around. Then, when I was static and immobile, I could weigh and measure every exterior force and, slowly and incrementally, once again allow the outside in. And that would be my life. ~ Steve Martin

Early youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train. ~ Bruce Catton

I want to show my range before I fall into any typecasting. I've turned down a lot of things trying to wait. But at the end of my career, whether that be tomorrow or 40 years from now, I would like to look back and be able to say, 'Ah, I never fell into any gimmicks.' ~ Troy Garity

Could you explain something for me, then?" She gestured around vaguely. "You gave orders in terms of 'up' and 'down,' 'port' and 'starboard,' yet the ships of your fleet are in a wide range of aspects. You are upside down relative to the ships in Captain Tulev's force, for example. How do they know which way you mean?"
Desjani, unseen by Rione, rolled her eyes at the Co-President's ignorance, but Geary just pointed at the display. "It's a standard convention, Madam Co-President, one every sailor learns by heart. It had to be established to provide a common frame of reference in an unbounded three-dimensional environment." He sketched the shape of Kaliban's system. "Every star system has a plane in which its planets or other objects orbit. One side of that plane is labeled 'up,' and the other side 'down.' So up and down within the system doesn't change regardless of how your ship is oriented. By the same token, the direction toward the star is 'starboard' while the direction away from the star is 'port.'" Geary shrugged. "I've been told that early on they tried to use 'starward' instead of 'starboard,' but the older expression stuck. ~ Jack Campbell

I have very good advice to give to kids this age, which is, you shouldn't listen to your mum or dad and you just have to work it out for yourself. And the reason I've taken the age range down this year, and I never would have done it 10 years ago, is what I've seen with the success of Willow Smith. You don't have to be so cutesy anymore. ~ Simon Cowell

You see, Lady Celia?" he said in his harsh rasp. "A man can do anything he wants if he has a woman alone."
Her pleasure died instantly. Had this just been about teaching her a lesson?
Anger roared up in her. How dare he? Remembering the pistol, she shoved it up under his chin and cocked the hammer. "And if he does, the woman has a right to defend herself. Don't you agree?"
The surprise on his face was immensely gratifying, but it didn't last long. Eyes narrowing, he leaned closer to hiss, "Go ahead then. Fire."
She swallowed. Though there was no ball, the powder alone would do serious damage. She could never...
While she hesitated, he removed the pistol from her numb fingers. His glittering gaze bore into her. "Never brandish a gun unless you're prepared to use it."
She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling suddenly exposed. "Most men would be cowed by the very sight of a pistol," she muttered.
"I wasn't."
"You're not most men," she said tightly.
He acknowledged that with a curt nod. Then he walked over to one of the pots, aimed down at the dirt, and fired. When the smoke cleared from the muzzle flash, he noted the lack of a hole in the dirt and faced her.
"Powder." He glared at her. "Did it occur to you that unless you fired at point-blank range, you might merely anger the man you're aiming for?"
"I only need it for men who get close to me," she bit out.
"All the same, the next time you need to protect yourself, ~ Sabrina Jeffries

When you narrow down your range and are looking through just that narrow aperture of the lens, the intensity of what you see is so much greater. ~ Michael Snow

When I was a young woman with four children, I was always living ahead of myself," she said. "Everything I was doing was projected toward the future, and I was so busy, busy, busy, preparing for tomorrow, for the next week, for the next month. Then one day, it all changed. At thirty-eight years old, I found I had breast cancer. I can remember asking my doctor what I should plan for in my future. He said, 'Diane, my advice to you is to live each day as richly as you can.' As I lay in my bed after he left, I thought, will I be alive next year to take my son to first grade? Will I see my children marry? And will I know the joy of holding my grandchildren?" She looked out over the water, barefoot, her legs outstretched; a white visor held down her short, black hair. "For the first time in my life, I started to be fully present in the day I was living. I was alive. My goals were no longer long-range plans, they were daily goals, much more meaningful to me because at the end of each day, I could evaluate what I had done. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

We were on a family holiday to Cyprus to visit my aunt and uncle. My uncle Andrew was then the brigadier to all the British forces on the island, and as such a senior military figure I am sure he must have dreaded us coming to town.
After a few days holed up in the garrison my uncle innocently suggested that maybe we would enjoy a trip to the mountains. He already knew the answer that my father and I would give. We were in.
The Troodos Mountains are a small range of snowy peaks in the center of the island, and the soldiers posted to Cyprus use them to ski and train in. There are a couple of ski runs, but the majority of the peaks in winter are wild and unspoiled.
In other words, they are ripe for an adventure.
Dad and I borrowed two sets of army skis and boots from the garrison up in the hills and spent a great afternoon together skiing down the couple of designated runs. But designated runs can also be quite boring. We both looked at each other and suggested a quick off-piste detour.
It was all game…age eleven.
It wasn't very far into this between-the-trees deep-powder detour that the weather, dramatically, and very suddenly, took a turn for the worse.
A mountain mist rolled in, reducing visibility to almost zero. We stopped to try and get, or guess, our directions back to the piste, but our guess was wrong, and very soon we both realized we were lost. (Or temporarily geographically challenged, as I have learned to call it.)
Dad and I ~ Bear Grylls

The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms. ~ Simon Winder

I wanted to be a spy," Olga said, shrugging. "I applied to the CIA. I was turned down. I did not meet the psychological profile. Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Basically, I have a hard time taking orders from idiots."

"Don't think of me as an idiot and I won't give you an idiotic order," Sophia said. "But if I give you one, you'd better do it. Because it's probably going to mean surviving or dying."

"You I don't mind," Olga said. "Or I wouldn't have joined your crew. Don't ask me about Nazar. So I was in Spain with the troupe. When the Plague hit, they shut down travel. And all my guns were in America. In a zombie apocalypse. I was quite upset."

"You should have seen Faith when they told her she had to be disarmed in New York," Sophia said. "Then they gave her a taser and that was mistake. What kind of guns?"

"I like that your family prefers the AK series," Olga said. "I really do think it's superior to the M16 series in many ways. Much more reliable. They say it is less accurate but that is at longer ranges. The round is not designed for long range."

"I can hit at a thousand meters with my accurized AK," Sophia said. "It's a matter of knowing the ballistics. It's not real powerful at that range, but try doing the same thing with an M4. I'll wait."

"Oh, jeeze, you two," Paula said. "Get a room."

"So continue with how you got on the yacht," Sophia said. "We don't want our cook getting all woozy with ~ John Ringo

The only way to defend language is to attack it ... ' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers. ~ Alain De Botton