Drainpipe Quotes

What do you mean, Jesus?' May Roper pulled the crocheted sea a little further up her legs.
'On the drainpipe. I've seen Him with my own eyes.'
'Have you been in the sun again, Brian?'
'Sheila Dakin thinks it's a sign.'
'A sign she's been at the sherry. ~ Joanna Cannon

I went through a period where I couldn't keep off the establishment's roofs, it was a serious urge I had. To look at a drainpipe and start shaking with excitement, nobody knows the feeling of hitting a prison roof, not unless you've done it. Let me tell you, it's like a lotto win - it's power. You're the governor; it's a kick in the teeth to the system. ~ Stephen Richards

Have you ever wondered
What happens to all the
poems people write?
The poems they never
let anyone else read?
Perhaps they are
Too private and personal

Perhaps they are just not good enough.

Perhaps the prospect
of such a heartfelt
expression being seen as
clumsy
shallow silly
pretentious saccharine
unoriginal sentimental
trite boring
overwrought obscure stupid
pointless
or
simply embarrassing

is enough to give any aspiring
poet good reason to
hide their work from
public view.

forever.

Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED.
Burnt shredded flushed away
Occasionally they are folded
Into little squares
And wedged under the corner of
An unstable piece of furniture
(So actually quite useful)

Others are
hidden behind
a loose brick
or drainpipe
or
sealed into
the back of an
old alarm clock
or
put between the pages of
AN OBSCURE BOOK
that is unlikely
to ever be opened.

someone might find them one day,
BUT PROBABLY NOT
The truth is that unread poetry
Will almost always be just that.
DOOMED
to join a vast invisible river
of waste that flows out of suburbia.

well
Almost always.

On rare occasions,
Some especially insistent
piec ~ Shaun Tan

We're in a blessed drainpipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die. ~ H.G.Wells

The male frog in mating season," said Crake, "makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs - it's been documented - discover if they position themselves in empty drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier and the small frog appears much larger than it really is."
So?"
So that's what art is for the artist, an empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid. ~ Margaret Atwood

Neville Chamberlain looked at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe. ~ Winston Churchill

Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe. ~ Barbara Holland

I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip and confidences. No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart. ~ Gustave Flaubert

She spent the rest of the way home despising New York: anonymity, in virtuous terror; and the squeaking drainpipe, all-night light, ceaseless footfall, subway corridor, numbered door (3C).
('Master Misery') ~ Truman Capote

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!' ~ Robert Bly

Dad used to say lots of funny things - like he was speaking his own language sometimes. Twenty-three skidoo, salad days, nosey parker, bandbox fresh, the catbird seat, chocolate teapot, and something about Grandma sucking eggs. One of his favourites was 'safe as houses'. Teaching me to ride a bike, my mother worrying in the doorway: "Calm down, Linda, this street is as safe as houses." Convincing Jamie to sleep without his nightlight: "It's as safe as houses in here, son, not a monster for miles."
Then overnight the world turned into a hideous nightmare, and the phrase became a black joke to Jamie and me. Houses were the most dangerous places we knew.
Hiding in a patch of scrubby pines, watching a car pull out from the garage of a secluded home, deciding whether to make a food run, whether it was too dicey. "Do you think the parasites'll be long gone?" "No way - that place is as safe as houses. Let's get out of here."
And now I can sit here and watch TV like it is five years ago and Mom and Dad are in the other room and i've never spent a night hiding in a drainpipe with Jamie and a bunch of rats while bodysnatchers with spotlights search for the thieves who made off with a bag of dried beans and a bowl of cold spaghetti.
I know that if Jamie and I survived alone for twenty years we would never find this feeling on our own. The feeling of safety. More than safety, even - happiness. Safe and happy, two things I thought i'd never feel again. Jared made us ~ Stephenie Meyer

Standing, balanced precariously on the narrow top of a drainpipe, you had to give a good leap up to grab hold of the narrow ledge, and then swing your whole body up and over.
It took some guts, and a cool head for heights.
Get it wrong and the fall was a long one, onto concrete.
In an attempt to make it harder, the school security officers had put barbed wire all around the lip of the roof to ensure such climbs were "impossible." (This was probably installed after Ran Fiennes's escapades onto the dome all those years earlier.) But in actual fact the barbed wire served to help me as a climber. It gave me something else to hold on to.
Once on the roof, then came the crux of the climb.
Locating the base of the lightning conductor was the easy bit, the tough bit was then committing to it.
It held my weight; and it was a great sense of achievement clambering into the lead-lined small bell tower, silhouetted under the moonlight, and carving the initials BG alongside the RF of Ran Fiennes.
Small moments like that gave me an identity.
I wasn't just yet another schoolboy, I was fully alive, fully me, using my skills to the max.
And in those moments I realized I simply loved adventure.
I guess I was discovering that what I was good at was a little off-the-wall, but at the same time recognizing a feeling in the pit of my stomach that said: Way to go, Bear, way to go.
My accomplice never made it past the barbed wire, but waited pati ~ Bear Grylls

Nobody goes "AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" when they sing it. Maybe because it puts the life adventure in such clear and simple terms. The small creature is alive and looks for adventure. Here's the drainpipe
a long tunnel going up toward some light. The spider doesn't even think about it
just goes. Disaster befalls it
rain, flood, powerful foces. And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started. Does the spider say, "To hell with that"? No. Sun comes out
clears things up
dries off the spider. And the small creature goes over to the drainpipe and looks up and thinks it really wants to know what is up there. ~ Robert Fulghum

Harper's face was buried in Mr. Truffle's fur and with each inhalation she smelled the last nine months of his secret cat life: must, dust, grave dirt, basements and tall grass, beach and drainpipe, Dumpster and dandelions. The ~ Joe Hill