Great Cross Country Quotes

The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West ... And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, ... a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream. ~ John Steinbeck

No story is more beautiful than the Gospel, even though it is a story full of pain and nails and hate and blood and sin and murder and betrayal and forsakenness and unimaginable agony and death. It is the story of what happens to the most beautiful thing, Perfect Love, when it enters our world: it comes to a Cross, to the crossroad between good and evil. All our most beautiful stories are like the Gospel: they are tragedies first, and then comedies; they are crosses and then crowns. They are crosses because they are conflicts between good and evil. That is the fundamental plot of every great story. To say "that story is beautiful" means "that story resembles the Gospel." If you are bored by the Gospel, that puts no black eye on the Gospel, but on you. Most likely, it means you have never listened to it. You must have heard it, but hearing is far from the same thing as listening ... ~ Peter Kreeft

My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was ... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say. ~ Warren Spector

The fact that men have a same origin and live in the same universe means that they are representatives of a same unity. Deep down, they are also related (or connected) among them; that they consider (or not) themselves as strangers, this just depends on the feeling (or sensation) that dictate their relationships. In their country, two fellow coutrymen whose paths berely cross (or see each only only briefly) with inferrence, would effusively rush themselves up (or throw themselves) into each other arms if they would happen to meet in a desert, among Cannibles. ~ African Spir

Old trees want to hurt you. It doesn't matter if you're snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, or just taking a walk in the woods. Old trees want to hurt you, and I think they'd kill you if they could. ~ Stephen King

Every time you prefer the pleasures of this world to the joys of heaven, you spit in the face of Christ; every time when to gain in your business, you do an unrighteous thing, you are like Judas selling Him for thirty pieces of silver; every time you make a false profession of religion, you give Him a traitor's kiss; every word you have spoken against Him, every hard thought you have had of Him, has helped to complete your complicity with the great crowd which gathered around the Cross of Calvary, to mock and jeer the Lord of life and glory. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Only think of two things - the report of the pistol and the tape. When you hear one, run like hell until you break the other. ~ Sam Mussabini

At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure - even at a time of the month when this could not be true - that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together. I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice - he read the Scriptures every morning - and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, mad ~ Alice Munro

We mean to say that Symbolism and Decadence - the negative attitude to which is indisputable to everyone except the "participants" - are genetically connected with everything brilliant and sublime created by the "unbound personality" during this period of time, from the Renaissance up to the development of electrical engineering; contrariwise, the border which they cannot cross is laid down where man understood that he was always "bound." The great continent of history, the continent of real deeds, practical needs, and more than all that, of received religion and the established Church - that is whose shore this stinking monster can never crawl into, that is where we are fleeing to from it, that is where man can always save himself. Where the monastery wall rises this surge of the faithless waves of history - no matter how strong it may become and how far it may spread around - will stop and fall back.

("On Symbolists & Decadence") ~ Vasily Rozanov

waiting for the bus
waiting for a bus
under shadeless tree,
blacks, hispanics, asians ~
the tired, the poor,
the great unwashed,
the huddled masses
yearning to breathe free ~
anchored with bags
waiting for their ride home
or to a wedding,
funeral, baptism,
maybe a second job

they glance
nervously, repeatedly
at wristwatches,
cell phones,
the time-table,
the axis of the sun,
the bus is late
as usual

finally it stops,
braking with an owl's screech,
opening its door
with a cobra's hiss

they reach for their wallets, purses
for coins and tokens to hand sharon martinez,
the ferrywoman of 14th Street,
to cross the broad way sticks

i'm not too proud
to draw my poetry
from the crowd ~
from the wretched refuse,
the tempest-tossed homeless
the common people
huddling under bus shelters ~
for the sacred, my friend, does not dwell
in churches, temples, mosques or synagogues ~
it dwells most profoundly
in the stink and sweat
of poverty ~ Beryl Dov

You can either invade a country or leave them alone and trade with them. When goods cross borders, armies don't. ~ John Stossel

All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice ~ G.K. Chesterton

The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people. ~ A. B. Yehoshua

SHE TOLD THE TRUSTEES, who had surely vacationed in the Caribbean, about the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his people's becoming slaves in their own country.
This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on.
He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there.
He was told that of course there were.
In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn't want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I've survived beach bunny cheerleaders, a sluthunting , ex-boyfriend, and five years of cross-country camp. I'm not afraid of some throwback to ancient myth with astrocious highlights and a Barbra Streisand nose. ~ Tera Lynn Childs

Sometimes, she said, she could recognize a place just by the quality of the light. In Lisbon, the light at the end of spring leans madly over the houses, white and humid, and just a little bit salty. In Rio de Janeiro, in the season that the locals instinctively call 'autumn', and that the Europeans insist disdainfully is just a figment of their imagination, the light becomes gentler, like a shimmer of silk, sometimes accompanied by a humid grayness, which hangs over the streets, and then sinks down gently into the squares and gardens. In the drenched land of the Pantanal in Mato Grosso, really early in the morning, the blue parrots cross the sky and they shake a clear, slow light from their wings, a light that little by little settles on the waters, grows and spreads and seems to sing. In the forests of Taman Negara in Malaysia, the light is like a liquid, which sticks to your skin, and has a taste and a smell. It's noisy in Goa, and harsh. In Berlin the sun is always laughing, at least during those moments when it manages to break through the clouds, like in those ecological stickers against nuclear power. Even in the most unlikely skies, Ângela Lúcia is able to discern shines that mustn't be forgotten; until she visited Scandinavia she'd believed that in that part of the world during the winter months light was nothing but the figment of people's imagination. But no, the clouds would occasionally light up with great flashes of hope. She said this, and stood up, adopting a ~ Jose Eduardo Agualusa

I'm a great fan of Chesterton, you know. He once said that he became a Catholic because we're the only religion that sees no contradiction between a pint, a pipe, and a cross. ~ Michael D. O'Brien

In a world such as ours, where we have to cross the great divide of otherness or we will not survive, love is perhaps the most critical aspect that is there in our humanity, to both activate and to practice. ~ Jean Houston

Make great account of your precious trials, both interior and exterior; it is thus that the garden of Jesus is adorned with flowers, that is, with acts of virtue. ~ Paul Of The Cross

As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy. ~ David Cross

We were to have enough Christianity to fight the Communists and save the Republic, as long as we didn't take it all too seriously. We weren't there to carry a cross; we were there to earn a badge. We weren't to be about Christ and kingdom, just God and country. This notion of Christian America stood in the backdrop of the culture wars of the last generation. ~ Russell D. Moore

But that's the thing Artie. What if Romani isn't a man " Amelia said leaning forward.
"Great. We'll alert Scotland Yard and tell them they're looking for a vampire. Or a werewolf. I'm assuming you've cross-referenced this with the lunar cycles."
"What if it's a name " Amelia said undaunted. She spread the files across the desk. "A name that has been used by a lot of people for a very long time."
"Excellent." Her boss pushed the files aside and returned to his order and his lists and his life. "You cracked it. Great work. I'll call the Henley right away and tell them Leonardo's Angel Returning to Heaven was stolen by a name. ~ Ally Carter

I think you're a good person," I say quietly, before slipping the bed to retrieve my clothes. He exhales, and his eyes meet mine.

"All I know is that I want to be the person you and your dad think I am. Maybe even more than I want to be a great pitcher. ~ Julie Cross

Enter with the torch in the stadium. 80,000 people screaming. I was waiting downstairs for the start for 10 hours; I was so tired with the torch. I give the torch to the combined ski cross country that they win gold in Lillehammer in 1994. ~ Alberto Tomba

Cross Country: No half times, no time outs, no substitutions. It must be the only true sport. ~ Chuck Norris

Little Britain may truly be called the heart's core of the city; the stronghold of true John Bullism. It is a fragment of London as it was in its better days, with its antiquated folks and fashions. Here flourish in great preservation many of the holiday games and customs of yore. The inhabitants most religiously eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, hot-cross-buns on Good Friday, and roast goose at Michaelmas; they send love-letters on Valentine's Day, burn the pope on the fifth of November, and kiss all the girls under the mistletoe at Christmas. Roast ~ Washington Irving

Kevin is right about his cat. It's all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can't answer Kevin: 'Why did my cat die?' Answer: 'Damned if I know.' There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We're all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw. ~ Philip K. Dick

Individual heart cells beat at their own rate when separated from one another, a phenomenon easily observed beneath a microscope. It has long been known that when they are pushed together, they will synchronize their pulses. Recent studies have shown, however, that heart cells begin to synchronize slightly before they touch. It is not known how they signal across this distance. Some scientists speculate that this method of communication may be able to cross great distances and may explain how social animals bond, or how pets seem to sense when their masters are coming home, or even how people fall in love, one heart calling to another. ~ Pete Nelson

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can't plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head. ~ Ian McDonald

All of a sudden, there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films. It's usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

But little or great, suffering accepted and offered to Our Lord produces peace and serenity. When it is not accepted, the soul is out of tune and its internal rebellion is shown externally in gloom or bad temper. We have to make a conscious decision to take up and carry the little Cross of every day with determination. Suffering can be sent to us by God to purify many things in our past life or to strengthen our virtues and to unite us to the sufferings of Christ our Redeemer, who, in his innocence, suffered the punishment due to our sins. ~ Francis Fernandez

I think our storytellers - our songwriters should be great storytellers, and they should be mountain climbers and explorers, because music is something that can cross all different borders. ~ Jason Mraz

To take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us. ~ John Henry Newman

We are foolish to expect to serve God without opposition: the more zealous we are, the more sure are we to be assailed ... Glory be to God, we know the end of the war. The great dragon shall be cast out and for ever destroyed, while Jesus and they who are with him shall receive the crown. Let us sharpen our swords to-night, and pray the Holy Spirit to nerve our arms for the conflict. Never battle so important, never crown so glorious. Every man to his post, ye warriors of the cross, and may the Lord tread Satan under your feet shortly! ~ Charles Spurgeon

Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean when you think about it jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research blood sweat tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.

But get on any flight in the country and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who in the face of all that incredible achievement will be willing to complain about the drinks. ~ Jim Butcher

My first car was kind of sad. My first car was when my parents had completely worn out their Toyota Corolla that they had for 16 years or something. They gave me, for my 19th birthday, this really ancient Toyota. So that was my first car. And I loved it. I thought it was amazing, and I drove it cross-country. It was not aesthetically appealing in any way. It was it fast. It did not handle well, but it lasted forever. I drove cross-country and back, and then I gave it to my sister, and she drove it for another 10 years. ~ Ethan Hawke

It is a great thing," says the author of the Imitation, forestalling St. John of the Cross, "a very great thing to be able to do without all solace, both human and divine, and to be willing to bear this exile of the heart for the honor of God, and in nothing seek self, and not to have regard to one's own merit. What great thing is it to be cheerful and devout when grace comes to thee? This is an hour desirable to all."3 This purgation of the sense comes ~ San Juan De La Cruz

I think of the separation between life and Paradise as a river," Mirdin said. "If there are many bridges that cross the river, should it be of great concern to God which bridge the traveler chooses? ~ Noah Gordon

To be a genuine individualist requires a great deal of strength and courage. It is never easy to chart new territory, to cross new frontiers, or to introduce subtle shadings to an established color. ~ Toller Cranston

She had accomplished great things despite imperfection. ~ Katie Cross

Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways. ~ Terri Windling

I care not for the body which may rot. Yet, for the transgression of the spirit, of moral ethics, of life, liberty and the soul itself, I must and shall cross the line of battle or lose the very reason not to. ~ The Great Pacifist

I was fuzzy on the details, but I knew the basic outline. I knew how I wanted to be, it was simply a question of being who I wanted to be.
I thought I had had it all figured out before. I'd had the plan perfectly clear in my head. I wasn't going to cross into thirty without the triple crown in hand: serious boyfriend, career, and great friends..
It was time to accept that maybe, just maybe, I didn't have to have it all figured out by the time I turned thirty. Maybe I could just work on me, and see what else fell into place.
I was pretty sure that was otherwise known as living. ~ Megan Crane

The people who illegally cross into the country are from countries that have very close ties to al Qaeda, whether it's Yemen or Afghanistan, Pakistan, China. It is an absolute national disgrace. ~ Rick Perry

You could drive around the island of Tahiti in two hours, in a day, in two days. You could pass the slower cars, the pick-up trucks with their loads of mothers and kids in ragged T-shirts, the bicycles turning in lazy circles by the side of the road, the bony yellow dogs trying to cross – if you never stopped, the drive could take less than two hours, provided that you weren't entering or leaving Papeete during the morning or late afternoon traffic jams. At the other extreme, you could visit every relative living around the island – your aunt who ran the general store in Papeari, your uncle who worked at the gas station in Mahina, your countless cousins who were expecting babies or who had just given birth, your grandmother who lived with your aunt who lived with your great-aunt...this type of tour de l'ile could take an entire day or two or three days. ~ Lillian Howan

I had never been out of the country before. And maybe this trip didn't technically count because, well, America had officially imploded and I hadn't needed a passport to cross the border, but I was more than a little disappointed we hadn't run into a mariachi band yet. Donde esta el Zombies? ~ Rachel Higginson

All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking ... ~ Deborah Tannen

When I was about 14 or 15, and running in a pretty muddy cross country race, one of my shoes stuck in the mud and came off. Boy, was I wild. To think that I had trained hard for this race and didn't do up my shoelace tightly enough! I really got aggressive with myself, and I found myself starting to pass a lot of runners. As it turned out, I improved something like twenty places in that one race. But I never did get my shoe back. ~ Robert De Castella

I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. ~ Jim Butcher

I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we're so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don't come with a thunderbolt attached. ~ Jean Hanff Korelitz