Fertile Ground Quotes

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction. ~ Alan Lightman

Events. Events in response to other events. Think about it. Nothing since the big bang has happened without a reason. And even the big bang might have come from something, because of something. One thing makes another thing, and then that thing makes the next thing. Look at these kids. These two brothers, still kids. They don't know themselves yet. They are acting in response, in reaction, passionate reaction to something that set them off, made them commit to violence. They would not be here if the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. The United States would not have had fertile ground for the lie it told about Irag, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, etc., etc., if not for Osama bin Laden and 9/11. Osama bin Laden would not have been able to recruit those men to learn how to fly planes and then crash them into buildings if not for propaganda about the persecution of the global Muslims, Afghanistan after the Russian invasion, Chechnya in the nineties, Bosnian genocides, or any instance of Islam under attack by the West, one culture trying to extinguish another. History is always a story of cause and effect. ~ Laleh Khadivi

It is asked whether, in fact, the leader makes propaganda, or whether propaganda makes the leader. There is a widespread impression that a good press agent can puff up a nobody into a great man.
The answer is the same as that made to the old query as to whether the newspaper makes public opinion or whether public opinion makes the newspaper. There has to be fertile ground for the leader and the idea to fall on. But the leader also has to have some vital seed to sow. To use another figure, a mutual need has to exist before either can become positively effective. Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear. ~ Edward L. Bernays

Irene Diamond's Fertile Ground is a provocative book. It stirs me to vigorous assent. It also triggers wide-eyed disbelief ... As it prods me to explosions of disagreement, it also provokes useful thought. ~ Janet Lembke

Why do we keep believing that we can control nature,even as it banishes us repeatedly from our homes in search of new fertile ground? ~ Maria Rodale

History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history. ~ Anne Michaels

Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems. The right wing has organized and manipulated such anger and resentment, turned it away from corporations, and directed it against the government, decrying high taxes and the inability of the state to solve problems such as social deterioration, homelessness, crime, and violence. In addition to the target of "failed liberal policies," immigrants make a convenient and tangible target for people's anger. Racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message…Right-wing populist themes are particularly effective at attracting working people disenchanted with the system. ~ Robert Wald Sussman

I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing. ~ Sarah Harrison

If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there's no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea - but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential. ~ Adrienne Maree Brown

Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground. ~ Marcus Buckingham

You can take the high moral ground intellectually, but if it ever happens to you personally, I don't know that I could honestly say that I wouldn't want to kill someone who took someone away from me. So, it's a rich, fertile ground for great characters and great storytelling. That was the impetus. ~ Richard LaGravenese

Thou art fertile ground, and I will plant a garden in thee. ~ Orson Scott Card

By studying human history, we can realize how much of human stupidity has fallen on fertile ground. Is gravity guilty for such an occurrence too? ~ Eraldo Banovac

You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show. ~ David Lee Roth

What one person can do is to plant the seeds of love and outrage in the hearts of a movement. And if those hearts are fertile ground, those seeds of love and outrage will grow into a revolution. ~ Tim DeChristopher

The human mind is like a fertile ground were seed are continually being planted. The seeds are opinions, ideas, and concepts. You plant a seed, a thought grows, and it grows. The word is like a seed and the human mind is so fertile! ~ Miguel Ruiz

Manifestation of life we desire
can easily be compared to sowing seeds.
A seed sprouts depending on whether it has been thrown
into a fertile ground or sand,
and the same goes for our soul's desire.

For the seeds to sprout and grow,
they need a healthy, fertile land, without unnecessary ballast,
which on the level of the mind are the outlived patterns, fears
and limitations we have taken upon ourselves as our own.

Just like the farmer ploughs his field and enriches the soil,
it is up to us to maintain the best possible conditions
for the sprouting and development of our being.

Let us remove the rocks and sand from our field,
maintain the fertile soil,
devote the time to caring for our spirit and mind,
and our field of life will prosper in abundance. ~ Petra Poje - Keeper Of The Eye

We need to remind each other that the cup of sorrow is also the cup of joy, that precisely what causes us sadness can become the fertile ground for gladness. ~ Henri Nouwen

When the spiritual and natural orders are in cohesion, it is fertile ground for the miraculous, freedom from poverty, righteous living, healthy homes and happy holiness. Governments are righteous. Pollution and disease are eradicated from society. The perfect cohesion of Eden is restored. ~ John Crowder

Heartache is very fertile ground for song-making but so is happiness, so is absolute bliss. ~ K.d. Lang

Dreams are the flowers of imagination which bloom on the fertile grounds of the mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor's preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum r ~ Roger Allam

Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control ... A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often. It is ... fertile ground for learning, adaptation, and evolution ... The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen. ~ Kevin Kelly

Oh, it's mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It's one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can't see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they're not, we can look at what scientists are saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger. ~ Annie Dillard

I learned that the Canadian government is very supportive of their native artists. As a rule, at least half of the play list played on Canadian radio stations must be of national origin and any non-Canadian headlining artists must include at least one national act on their bill. This kind of support has established Canada as a creatively fertile ground for some of music's greatest artists. The ~ Rudy Sarzo

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. ~ Walter Isaacson

Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today! ~ Chinua Achebe

America is the most fertile ground of opportunity. ~ Debasish Mridha

Wounds are the fertile ground where flowers of kindness and wisdom will grow and thrive. ~ Debasish Mridha

Hope is like air if not built on a fertile ground. A ground that requires attention and nurturing. You cannot stop working on that ground even if the hope is sprouting higher into the sky. ~ Michael Bassey

To be sure, there are hunter-gatherer societies that don't exhibit the elaborately organized violence denoted by the term "war." But often what turns out to be lacking is the organization, not the violence. The warless !Kung San were billed in the title of one book as The Harmless People, yet during the 1950s and 1960s, their homicide rate was between 20 and 80 times as high as that found in industrialized nations.114 Eskimos, to judge by popular accounts, are all cuddliness and generosity. Yet early this century, after westerners first made contact with a fifteen-family Eskimo village, they found that every adult male had been involved in a homicide. One reason the !Kung and most Eskimo haven't waged war is their habitat.115 With population sparse, friction is low. But when densely settled along fertile ground, hunter-gatherers have warred lavishly. The Ainu of Japan built hilltop fortresses and, when raiding a neighboring ~ Robert Wright

A free economy is as essential to society as democratic political institutions. A strong market-based economy is the fertile ground for democratic freedoms that we think are important. ~ Lee R. Raymond

The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests who game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor do they hold as the first Christians did, that all land should be held in common. Rather, they do not consider it as a thing that can be parceled out.

"We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man's strength could create good to be marketed, that a woman's beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace.

"This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of -- the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly ~ Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions. ~ Richard Dawkins

Rivulet, seek a better place for your limpid waters to reflect the brightness of the sun, for the desert will one day dry you up," the god of waters would have said, if perchance one existed. "Crows, there is more food in the forests than among rocks and sand," the god of the birds would have said. "Plants, spread your seeds far from here, because the world is full of humid, fertile ground, and you will grow more beautiful," the god of flowers would have said. ~ Anonymous

Gray space is fertile ground for fiction. When I can see both sides of an argument and feel strongly in both directions, then there's a story there, then I can write real characters that I care about and believe in and champion on both sides. ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground. ~ Werner Herzog

The Democrats, fearful of his grassroots campaign, blamed him for the election of George W. Bush, an absurdity that found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the thought-terminating clichés of television. ~ Chris Hedges

Our minds work like a garden. It is fertile ground that accepts any and everything we plant. Good or evil, constructive or destructive, our lives will bear the fruit of the seeds we plant in our minds. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

There are many types of teachable moments in life. Contentment is not always the most fertile ground to garner self-knowledge. At times, bitter memories can force us to change and teach us to avoid duplicating past conduct that led to regret and remorse. The greater the degree of anxiety that we assign to periods of uncertainty and distress the less likely we will resort to duplicating these problematic experiences in the future. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Illiteracy is a fertile ground for manipulation ~ Thabiso Monkoe

This is the secret of accompaniment. I will hold a mirror to you and show you your value, bear witness to your suffering, and to your light. And over time, you will do the same for me, for within the relationship lies the promise of our shared dignity and the mutual encouragement needed to do the hard things.
Whatever you aim to do, whatever problem you hope to address, remember to accompany those who are struggling, those who are left out, who lack the capabilities needed to solve their own problems. We are each other's destiny. Beneath the hard skills and firm strategic priorities needed to resolve our greatest challenges lies the soft, fertile ground of our shared humanity. In that place of hard and soft is sustenance enough to nourish the entire human family. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

Bible literacy matters because it protects us from falling into error. Both the false teacher and the secular humanist rely on biblical ignorance for their messages to take root, and the modern church has proven fertile ground for those messages. Because we do not know our Bibles, we crumble at the most basic challenges to our worldview. Disillusionment and apathy eat away at our ranks. Women, in particular, are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers.1 ~ Jen Wilkin

Consciousness provides the fertile ground where seeds of greatness are born. ~ Garey Gordon

We have to be bold in our national ambitions. First, we must win the fight against poverty within the next decade. Second, we must improve moral standards in government and society to provide a strong foundation for good governance. Third, we must change the character of our politics to promote fertile ground for reforms. ~ Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

There is no more fertile ground for revolution than the educated unemployed ~ Mark Tully

Sun Tzu said: We may distinguish six kinds of terrain, to wit: (1) Accessible ground; (2) Entangling ground; (3) Temporizing ground; (4) Narrow passes; (5) Precipitous heights; (6) Positions at a great distance from the enemy. ~ Sun Tzu

The wheel of Time wrote the first half of the poetry of mass destruction on the black board of the ashes of a funeral ground by dint of a pair of pens of nuclear bombs. ~ Manmohan Acharya

To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with
what else
mica. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Sara flinched as his hands slid around her waist, pulling her to his naked body. The heat of his skin sank through the insubstantial layer of her shift. He was aroused, throbbing hard and forcefully erect against her. "Open your eyes," he said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
She forced herself to comply, staring straight ahead into his chest. Her heart thumped so violently that it seemed to batter against her ribs.
As if he could read her mind, Derek lowered his mouth to her hair and held her tightly. "Sara... I'm going to take care of you. I'll never hurt you, or force you to do something you don't want." He took a long breath and forced himself to add reluctantly, "If you want this to stop, then tell me. I probably won't be kind. But I'll wait."
She would never know how much the words cost him. It went against his nature to deny himself what he wanted so badly. He had been deprived of too much when he was young- it had made him selfish to the core. But her needs had become too important to him, her affection too precious to risk.
Sara looked up at him, reading the truth in his face. Gradually her body relaxed against his. "You must tell me how to please you," she said softly. "I-I don't know anything... and you know too much."
His black lashes lowered over a flick of green fire. A wry smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. "We'll find some middle ground," he promised, and kissed her. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your irreverence: in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only the love of water? What are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead leaves and plastic. How ashamed water is to be what you have made it. What have you done to its beauty, its graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass? ~ Conchitina Cruz

People have their own reasons for dying. It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a rock. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then. ~ Haruki Murakami

One of my favorite dishes in the world used to be steak tartare, which is raw ground beef seasoned and then served. ~ Eric Schlosser

I've never stood on a piece of ground as throbbingly, even pornographically, generative. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief. ~ Yiyun Li

Yet, upon the whole, the space I traversed is unlikely to become the haunt of civilized man, or will only become so in isolated spots, as a chain of connection to a more fertile country; if such a country exist to the westward. ~ Charles Sturt

and behind them came the women, and then the children with sticks and stones in their hands. There was a line of fury on the ground, slithering forth. Someone ~ Alice Hoffman

It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto's streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realized standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there. ~ Rachel Cusk

When I turned toward the hurt in the silence, I entered a kind of tenderness that was not sore, not wounded, but rather powerfully present.I sat up straight. The silence had tilled hard ground into soft soil. I sunk deep into the soft ground, where the source of life was revealed--wordless, nameless, without form, completely indescribable. And then--I dare to say it--I was 'completely tender.' To ease below the surface of my embodiment--my face, my flesh, my skin, my name--I needed to first see it reflected back at me. I had to look at it long enough to see the soft patches, the openings, the soft, tender ground. Would I survive the namelessness--without my body, without my heart--while engaging the beautiful, floral exterior of my life? Fear and caution were attempting to shut down the experience of uncoupling my heart from mistreatment and discrimination--from the disregard, hurt, and separation that I experienced and accepted as my one-sided life. I was going back to the moment before I was born, when I was connected to something other than my parents or my people. ~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Each nation has its own peculiar method of work. Some work through politics, some through social reforms, some through other lines. With us, religion is the only ground along which we can move. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Every boy wants someone older than himself to whom he may go in moods of confidence and yearning. The neglect of this child's want by grown people ... is a fertile source of suffering. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

To distract himself he started making a mental list of all the ways he could leave Chapel Bluff.
He could go by train. Plane. Motorcycle.
Last night Beverly had invited all three of them - him, Ryan, and Tyler - to stay for dinner. Matt had refused. Ryan had likewise refused because his wife had dinner waiting for him at home. Tyler had leapt at the chance.
Matt had been the one who'd decided to put distance between himself, Kate, and Beverley. Even so, it rankled that Tyler had slipped right into his empty spot at the dinner table. That Kate had found someone so much more charming than him to talk to. That Kate seemed so delighted to turn her back on him.
He could leave by four-wheeler. Mountain bike. Skateboard.
"You're a design genius, young lady." Tyler said to Kate. "That's a perfect place for that sideboard."
"Why thank you," Kate replied.
Matt ground his teeth and imagined leaving by Greyhound bus.
He'd even have settled for a horse.
Hot air balloon.
Donkey cart. ~ Becky Wade

We were too young- and the ground too muddy- for our small part of the earth to move. ~ Chris Bohjalian

It won't do to be afraid of failure. Failure is the mother of success; a long journey begins from the ground beneath his feet. ~ Gen Urobuchi

Straw mulch, a ground cover of white clover interplanted with the crops, and temporary flooding all provide effective weed control in my fields. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

At first I thought I'd walked into a tree, but then that tree became a person, who was also recovering on the ground, and then I saw that it was her and she saw that it was me ... ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated. ... Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent. ~ Evan Thompson

He smiled up at me, his eyes twin golden flames. "I do so prefer hand-to-hand combat with you," he said, catching my other wrist when I swung my fist down. "I like how close it brings us, Princess."
I shrieked my frustration – my irritation – at him. At myself. "There is something so wrong with you!"
"Probably, but you know what?" He lifted his head off the ground. "That's the part you like the most. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do. ~ Alan Moore

The doorway into the silent land is a wound. Silence lays bare this wound. We do not journey far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition, and this is precisely why not a few abandon a contemplative practice like meditation as soon as it begins to expose this wound; they move on instead to some spiritual entertainment that will maintain distraction. Perhaps this is why the weak and wounded, who know very well the vulnerability of the human condition, often have an aptitude for discovering silence and can sense the wholeness and healing that ground this wound.

There is something seductive about the contemplative path. "I am going to seduce her and lead her into the desert and speak to her heart" (Hosea 2:14), says Yahweh to Israel. It is tempting to think it is a superior path. More often, however, the seduction is to think we can use our practice of contemplation as a way to avoid facing our woundedness: if we can just go deeply enough into contemplation, we won't struggle any longer. It is common enough to find people taking a cosmetic view of contemplation, and then, after considerable time and dedication to contemplative practice, discover that they still have the same old warts and struggles they hoped contemplation would remove or hide. They think that somewhere they must have gone wrong.

Certainly there is deep conversion, healing, and unspeakable wholeness to be discovered along the contemplative path ~ Martin Laird

As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer on my ground. ~ David S. Landes

What seems dangerous often is not - black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight - this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments onshore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe. ~ Amy Hempel

One day you will have to tell me where you acquired this aversion to walking on solid ground," said Dominic. "Try having a baby sister whose idea of a good time involves pit traps and land mines," I advised. ~ Seanan McGuire

The aggressive person fights. The passive one runs away. But the assertive person stands ground, assesses the situation, adapts, and acts with purpose and passion. Be that person. ~ Charles F Glassman

Why is it so important for you to give back? I honestly feel like it's our responsibility as citizens of the world to ground ourselves in selflessness and all do our part. ~ Solange Knowles

Salvations spring up from the ground. ~ Nicola Neal

I would say, my influences go back a little further than some folks. I think what your influences are can certainly help you. It's like a tree with really deep roots; the firmer they're planted in the ground, the better foundation you have to build upon. ~ Charlie Worsham

Short putts are missed because it is not physically possible to make the little ball travel over uncertain ground for three or four feet with any degree of regularity. ~ Walter Hagen

The expression should come from within oneself, conveying the spiritual - something between earth and heaven. And if one runs, one should not seem to touch the ground. ~ Natalia Makarova