Lawns Quotes

In the past, I walk between green lawns, surrounded by golden stone.
In the past, I am brilliant and I am happy and my every tomorrow is madness.
In the past, words shimmer around me on silver threads and I pluck them like summer peaches.
In the past, the universe is a glitterball I hold in the palm of my hand. I am the axis of the world.
In the past, I am soaring, and falling, and breaking, and lost. ~ Alexis Hall

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests. ~ Alice Sebold

The man who worries morning and night about the dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions. ~ Liberty Hyde Bailey

You don't really mean that about having everyone leave you alone," she said sweetly. "You seem like such a friendly and outgoing guy. I'll make sure to mention how great you are to everyone over the next couple of days. Before you know it, the whole street will be knocking on your door and introducing themselves. It won't be a month before you're hosting the neighborhood barbecue. You'll also be picking up prescriptions, mowing lawns and eating macaroni salad with every meal so you won't hurt their feelings." She batted her eyelashes at him as he seemed to pale before her eyes. "Welcome to the neighborhood. ~ Liliana Hart

And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who only loved trim lawns. And the imbecile carried the princess into slavery. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene ― colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. 'All these people,' said Japhy, 'they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it's all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea. They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.' He had a million ideas, he had 'em all. ~ Jack Kerouac

I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too - well-tended lawn. ~ William Henry Hudson

Be sure to lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick-growing variety. Be sure that there is plenty of space for lawns and gardens, reserved large areas for football, hockey and parks. Earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedan mosques and Christian churches. ~ Jamsetji Tata

Ye country comets, that portend No war, nor prince's funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grasses fall ... ~ Andrew Marvell

The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me. ~ James Russell Lowell

A tortoise is, I suppose, a Jewish pet. It knows its place. Out on the lawn. It doesn't bark. It doesn't tear the Dralon. ~ Maureen Lipman

My earliest memory is a picnic in the park near our house, which was next to Wimbledon Common. Why on earth we went to a park when we lived so near the common is a mystery, but it had formal gardens and lawns - perhaps it was that very difference that took my parents there. ~ Martin Clunes

I don't force it. If you don't have an idea and you don't hear anything going over and over in your head, don't sit down and try to write a song. You know, go mow the lawn ... My songs speak for themselves. ~ Neil Young

Sometimes I felt the whole world was converging on this little room. And as I became more intoxicated and frustrated I'd throw open the bedroom window as the dawn came up, and look across the gardens, lawns, greenhouses, sheds and curtained windows. I wanted my life to begin now, at this instant, just when I was ready for it. ~ Hanif Kureishi

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

If an alien lands on your front lawn and extends an appendage as a gesture of greeting, before you get friendly, toss it an eightball. If the appendage explodes, then the alien was probably made of antimatter. If not, then you can proceed to take it to your leader. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

-I have to admit that ever since I started to rip-up the lawns of rich people I have felt a lot calmer! ~ Andrew James Pritchard

You could make an analogy to a security guard who, three weeks prior, was mowing lawns for a living. The second he puts a uniform on and that badge, he's a man. I imagine the majority of us have felt the wrath of the over-zealous security guard guy. Is there something lying dormant in the man, that's waiting to be pumped up with that kind of power? I don't know. Does it reveal him? I don't know. Does it change him? I don't know. ~ Johnny Depp

Here was my first lesson on the resolutely maintained untidiness and ill-health of the English upper orders. In baggy evening dress and old before their time, they displayed gapped and tangled teeth in loosely open mouths. Gently shedding dandruff, they lurched across the lawn. When they stood at the bar they looked like Lee Trevino Putting. ~ Clive James

We didn't have a whole lot of money when I was growing up either. I would always ask for magic books or magic tricks for my birthday or for Christmas and the rest of the year I either had to mow lawns or find part time jobs to help supplement the cost of doing magic. ~ Lance Burton

Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you've come to mow its lawns. ~ David Sedaris

Life was good.
The sun setting on a sweet summer's day, the smell of freshly mowed lawns, the sounds of children playing--
A house across the river, on the Jersey-side. A beautiful wife and a baby girl.
The American Dream come true.
[Honey, I'm home!]
But dreams have a nasty habit of going bad when you're not looking.
---
Max Payne 1 ~ Sam Lake

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers. ~ Edward Abbey

I just listened to the music, and breathed in the day, and remembered things. Things like walking around the neighborhood and looking at the houses and the lawns and the colorful trees and having that be enough. ~ Stephen Chbosky

So you walk along Bunker Hill, and you shake your fist at the sky, and I know what you're thinking, Bandini. The thoughts of your father before you, lash across your back, hot ire in your skull, that you are not to blame: this is your thought, that you were born poor, fled from your Colorado town because you are poor, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.
Yes, it's true: but I have seen houses in Bel-Air with cool lawns and green swimming pools. I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed. I have seen golf clubs on Sixth Street in the Spalding window that make me hungry just to grip them. I have grieved for a necktie like a holy man for indulgences. I have admired hats in Robinson's the way critics gasp at Michelangelo. ~ John Fante

If the guy out in the woods with the Michigan Militia is a real estate negotiator, instead of some crackpot, and has a normal life, that's unnerving. You don't want to think it's as normal as the guy next door, hedging his lawn. It's easier to demonize or separate them off from 'us.' ~ Michael Moore

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation. ~ John McWhorter

It's pretty cool to be able to hang out with the President and have the race-winning car on the South Lawn. ~ Buddy Rice

These days every morning begins like a joke
you think you have heard before,
but there is no one telling it
whom you can stop.
One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar,
then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon,
then about a kangaroo who walks into a bar.
Each one takes up an entire day.
The sun looks like a prank Nathanael West
is pulling on the world; on the drive to work
cars are swinging comically from lane to lane.
The houses and lawns belong in cartoons.
The hours collapse into one another's arms.
The stories arc over noon and descend
like slow ferris wheels into the haze of evening.
You wish you could stop listening and get serious.
Trouble is you cannot remember the punch line
which never arrives till very late at night,
just as you are reaching for the bedside lamp,
just before you begin laughing in the dark. ~ Billy Collins

The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city's southern limits.
I feared an aged that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many useless hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers and we put ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilation and culture. Ours was the land of poetry flowers, and nightingales - and poets searching for rhymes in history's junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had trafric jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government officee. the streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn't our own. Still our country wasn't our own. ~ Jasmin Darznik

Take delight in a thing, or rather in anything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is. A child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer lawn, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. ~ Charles Edward Montague

Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures Whilst the landscape round it measures, Russet lawns and fallows grey, Where the nibbling flocks do stray, Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest; Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks, and rivers wide. ~ John Milton

There were neighbors that I played with and did all the things that children do. I did mow the lawn. I did help with various things that needed to be done to occupy my time. ~ Paul Smith

You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines,
all this leprous day and then more vodka,
more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies,
the pond sucking out the throb. ~ Anne Sexton

We don't have a lot of churches in America; we have a lot of really nice brick buildings on finely manicured lawns! Just because someone says they are of the Church or they are Christian, doesn't make it so. ~ Paul David Washer

I don't remember my parents together, ever: my father was much older, and really only interested in collecting magazines and bathroom suites; we were the only family in the area to have a bathroom suite on the lawn. ~ Paula Yates

Create a Chocolate Factory There may be as many different types of playrooms as there are families, but every one of them should have the following design element: lots of choices. A place for drawing. A place for painting. Musical instruments. A wardrobe hanging with costumes. Blocks. Picture books. Tubes and gears. Anything where a child can be safely let loose, joyously free to explore whatever catches her fancy. Did you see the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? If so, you may have been filled with wonder at the chocolate plant, complete with trees, lawns, and waterfalls - a totally explorable, nonlinear ecology. That's what I mean. I am focusing on artistic pursuits because kids who are trained in the arts ~ John Medina

The grass is always greener once you don't have to mow a lawn anymore. ~ R. K. Milholland

They basked in the righteousness of the poor and the exclusiveness of the downtrodden. Let the whitefolks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly
mostly
let them have their whiteness. It was better to be meek and lowly, spat upon and abused for this little time than to spend eternity frying in the fires of hell. No one would have admitted that the Christian and charitable people were happy to think of their oppressors' turning forever on the Devil's spit over the flames of fire and brimstone. ~ Maya Angelou

The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture. ~ Bill Mollison

The bozo who's going to go early John Woo all over the manicured lawns and flower beds just to show he doesn't give a fuck about convention. ~ Don Winslow

It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right now, it will probably be a long, long time before the yard gets overrun by lions and snakes. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Mowing your lawn is against nature. ~ Rufus Wainwright

My treasure chest is filled with gold.
Gold ... gold ... gold ...
Vagabond's gold and drifter's gold ...
Worthless, priceless, dreamer's gold ...
Gold of the sunset ... gold of the dawn ... Gold of the showertrees on my lawn ...
Poet's gold and artist's gold ...
Gold that can not be bought or sold -
Gold. ~ Don Blanding

My parents were kind of over protective people. Me and my sister had to play in the backyard all the time. They bought us bikes for Christmas but wouldn't let us ride in the street, we had to ride in the backyard. Another Christmas, my dad got me a basketball hoop and put it in the middle of the lawn! You can't dribble on grass. ~ Jimmy Fallon

I have four sons whom I love dearly. Suppose our lawn needed to be cut. I could say, "Boys, can you see the need? The grass is high. It's above my knees. Soon I will not be able to get to the garage. Don't you see the desperate need?" But in the final analysis, they get out the mower because their father says, "Mow the grass!" World evangelization is an imperative because Jesus said so. ~ George Sweeting

Summer is full of smoke, and endless lawns. Quietly, whether across moss or on algae, knee over the railing of the little porch, fate comes. ~ Andre Alexis

I have vowed that rather than let Alzheimer's take me, I would take it, i would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with death. ~ Terry Pratchett

You don't mow another man's lawn! ~ Billie Joe Armstrong

This was an away-day for the deputy prime minister's staff, who've had a change of responsibilities [on John Prescott's scandalous playing habits ... on the croquet lawn] ~ Paul Clark

Yet he could not enjoy the walk. In the morning especially a bougainvillaea looks handmade, lawns are always lawns, and it is true indeed that dogs smell fear. Cats don't say. ~ Douglas Woolf

Kandinski looked up. 'Do you read science fiction?' he asked matter-of-factly.
'Not as a rule,' Ward admitted. When Kandinski said nothing he went on: 'Perhaps I'm too skeptical, but I can't take it too seriously.'
Kandinski pulled at a blister on his palm. 'No one suggests you should. What you mean is that you take it too seriously.'
Accepting the rebuke with a smile at himself, Ward pulled out one of the magazines and sat down at a table next to Kandinski. On the cover was a placid suburban setting of snugly eaved houses, yew trees, and children's bicycles. Spreading slowly across the roof-tops was an enormous pulpy nightmare, blocking out the sun behind it and throwing a weird phosphorescent glow over the roofs and lawns. 'You're probably right,' Ward said, showing the cover to Kandinski. 'I'd hate to want to take that seriously.'
("The Venus Hunters") ~ J.G. Ballard

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work. ~ Carl Sandburg

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness ... it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
from her essay, On Being Ill ~ Virginia Woolf

She moved, so that they were now standing arm in arm: two ladies, she thought, a brown lady from Botswana and a white lady from somewhere far away, America perhaps, somewhere like that, some place of neatly cut lawns and air conditioning and shining buildings, some place where people wanted to love others if only given the chance. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

My mother was a very elegant woman. When a flying saucer landed on the lawn, she turned it over to see if it was Wedgwood. ~ Joan Rivers

But the positive thoughts would give way to negative thoughts, and the negative thoughts seemed to swoop into her mind the way a big flock of black crows takes over the landscape, sitting thick in the trees and on the fence rails and lawns, staring at you in ominous silence. ~ Jeannette Walls

We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbors. ~ Miranda July

If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn. ~ Andrew Mason

. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.

Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home. ~ Bill Mollison

The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I was a city girl, and the few trees and lawns of Green Park were as much country as I could deal with at any given time. ~ Robert Thier

To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this. ~ Yukio Mishima

Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf. ~ Sylvia Earle

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We must plant trees, grow gardens instead of lawns, ride bicycles when we can and support responsible local businesses over big brands. ~ Bryant McGill

Right after we invaded Iraq, I put a sign on my lawn that said "War is not the answer." That sign was either defaced, ripped up, or stolen every week. I had to replace that sign twelve times. ~ Paul Haggis

Crabgrass is aptly descriptive of this hated weed, for it does scuttle quickly through a lawn. ~ Allen Lacy

The Midwest breeds funny, eccentric people, to varying degrees. You play shows not because you're expecting to get a record deal, but to do something fun outside of mowing lawns. Everything else is just gravy ... Or mustard. ~ Patrick Carney

Atrazine - a herbicide often used on corn fields, golf courses and even lawns - has become one of the most common contaminants in American drinking water. ~ Charles Duhigg

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn't be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn't require a suit
of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers
to watch their backs

as they eat at McDonalds.
They shouldn't have to stop

to consider the speed
of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But
one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student
who opened a door and died.

It was the front
door to his house, but

it could have been any door,
and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old

and was aiming
at someone else. But

a bullet doesn't care
about "aim," it doesn't

distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet
supposed to know this

child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment

because his friend
was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say
I had "one" student who

opened a door and died?
That's wrong.

There were many.
The classroom of grief

had far more seats
than the classroom for math

though every student
in the classroom for math

could count the names
of the ~ Matthew Olzmann

Before I left the 'Star' last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about. ~ Linwood Barclay

No duties. I don't have to be profound.
I don't have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: 'You were running,
That's fine. It was the thing to do.'
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs,
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That's better than examining one's private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It's here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Lawn roller? ... What is it for?"
Why it is for rolling lawns."
I shook my head and laughed back at him. "Do I look like I have hay in my ears fellow? Just why, madman, would anyone want to roll a lawn? There would be nothing left but mud, and the grass would die from lack of sun."
No, Korvas. Rolling means to flatten."
No, it doesn't. A roller rollsa a flattener flattens."
Obushawn sighed and nodded. "Very well, it is a lawn flattener. It's for flattening lawns."
I see no purpose in it. If I wanted a flat lawn, that's what I would have planted in the first place. I think you are a failure at business, you obviously drink to excess, and beat your wife, dog, and children, you steal from the temple and blind beggars, and are most likely well on your way to being put away in a home. I do not want to talk to you anymore. Go away. ~ Barry B. Longyear

Alexia, did you know there is an entire regiment decamping on your front lawn?
Laddy Maccon sighed. Really, Ivy, I would never have noticed. ~ Gail Carriger

Why did God create men? Because vibrators can't mow the lawn. ~ Madonna Ciccone

Was it a camp?" Daniel asked.
Sean nodded. "A naturist camp."
"Maya will feel right at home", Corey said from his spot on a wooden lawn chair.
Daniel sputtered a laugh and Sean tried to hide his.
"Naturist, not naturalist," I said. "It means nudist."
Corey leaped up and spun. "You mean old, naked butts sat on those chairs? ~ Kelley Armstrong

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their backyards at 3 A.M. ~ George Will

Anonymity is a wonderful thing if you can hang on to it. I live in Pasadena where we try to keep the movie people out. We discourage them from moving in our neighborhood and if they do we burn effigies on their lawns. ~ Joe Johnston

On its rocky tip, dominating the scenery for miles around, stood he Villa dell'Ossevatore. Breathtakingly beautiful, it comprised three individual buildings and a single watchtower, roofed in terracotta tile and connected by stone bridges and loggias. Its lush gardens and lawns encircled the peninsula in steadily descending terraces, and a wide stone-built staircase hugged the rock all the way down to the waterline, terminating at a landing stage edged with balustrades. Higher up the hillside she saw the pergolas straining under the branches of ancient wisteria, and huge displays of azaleas and camellias. Ivy clung to the west-facing sides of the buildings and curled among its statues. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

Another part of Bit's unifying urban theory is sprinklers, that you can gauge a neighborhood's wealth by the way people water. If every house has an automatic system, you're looking at a six-figure mean. If the majority lug hoses around, it's more lower-middle class. And if they don't bother with the lawns ... well, that's the sort of shitburg where Bit and Julie always lived, except for that little place they rented in Wenatchee the summer Bit worked at the orchard. ~ Jess Walter

Your neighbors will make judgments about you based on how your lawn and house look, and people who see you passing will judge you based on how clean you keep your car. It's not always fair, but it has always been true. Appearances matter, so make yours a good one. ~ Lou Holtz

In December the first frosts came with the full moon, and then my nights of vigil held a quality harder to bear. There was a sort of beauty to them, cold and clear, that caught at the heart and made me stare in wonder. From my windows the long lawns dipped to the meadows, and the meadows to the sea, and all of them were white with frost, and white too under the moon. The trees that fringed the lawns were black and still. Rabbits came out and pricked about the grass, then scattered to their burrows; and suddenly, from the hush and stillness, I heard that high sharp bark of a vixen, with the little sob that follows it, eerie, unmistakable, unlike any other call that comes by night, and out of the woods I saw the lean low body creep and run out upon the lawn, and hide again where the trees would cover it. Later I heard the call again, away in the distance, in the open park, and now the full moon topped the trees and held the sky, and nothing stirred on the lawns beneath my window. I wondered if Rachel slept, in the blue bedroom; or if, like me, she left her curtains wide. The clock that had driven me to bed at ten struck one, struck two, and I thought that here about me was a wealth of beauty that we might have shared. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean. ~ Winston Churchill

And that was as far as he got before i heard it. The thumping of footsteps, running up the lawn toward me: It seemed like I could hear it through the grass, like leaning your ear to a railroad track and feeling the train coming, miles away. As the noise got closer I could hear ragged breaths, and then a voice.
It was my mother. ~ Sarah Dessen

Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries. ~ Richard Brookhiser

How does a woman gain such wisdom in only twenty-nine years?" Gordon asked, escorting her across the lawns toward the mansion.
"The same way a man does."
"Which is?"
Lady Keely cast him an ambiguous smile. "Either you are born with wisdom, my lord, or you make do
without it ... ~ Patricia Grasso

Tis from high Life high Characters are drawn; A Saint in Crape is twice a Saint in Lawn: A Judge is just, a Chanc'llor juster still; A Gownman learn'd; a Bishop what you will; Wise if a minister; but if a King, More wise, more learn'd, more just, more ev'rything. ~ Alexander Pope

Someday we might look back with a curious nostalgia at the days when profligate homeowners wastefully sprayed their lawns with liquid gold to make the grass grow, just so they could then burn black gold to cut it down on the weekends. ~ Alok Jha

Jake ignored him and went on. "If I ever do hook up with anybody again - and I sincerely doubt that I will, so wipe that hopeful look off your face - it will be with someone who thinks that being with somebody who mows lawns is her idea of heaven on earth and who will do exactly what I tell her to do and love it."
"I think Donna Reed is dead," Will said. ~ Jennifer Crusie

I never wanna have a time where I'm on the big lawn just sitting back smoking cigars and drinking lemonade. I wanna work forever. Until I die. I wanna die on the way to a show. ~ Schoolboy Q

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Now," she said when all was ready and lit the silver sconces on either side of the mirror. What woman would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow
for all about the looking glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her head were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her; so dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to pt it in plain English, and say outright "Damn it Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth. ~ Virginia Woolf

In Austin, the eco-capital of Texas, residents tend to favor native plants and wildflowers to the sculpted lawns of the Palm Springs variety. ~ Douglas Brinkley

The Depression, by the time it came, ratified what'd been under way. Slothrop grew up in a hilltop desolation of businesses going under, hedges around the estates of the vastly rich, half-mythical cottagers from New York lapsing back now to green wilderness or straw death, all the crystal windows every single one smashed, Harrimans and Whitneys gone, lawns growing to hay, and the autumns no longer a time for foxtrots in the distances, limousines and lamps, but only the accustomed crickets again, apples again, early frosts to send the hummingbirds away, east wind, October rain: only winter certainties. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I looked at her. my lovely, tall mother with her pretty coil of hair and her hard, bitter mouth. Her veins were never open. Her heart never leapt out to flop helplessly on the lawn. She never melted into puddles. She was normal. Always. At any cost. ~ E. Lockhart

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time. ~ Wallace Stegner

When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol. ~ Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Not just the industrial farming but the sprawl, the sprawl, the sprawl. Low-density development is the worst. And SUVs everywhere, snowmobiles everywhere, Jet Skis everywhere, ATVs everywhere, two-acre lawns everywhere. The goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns. ~ Jonathan Franzen