Marching Quotes

He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

and he became a communist. He was court-martialed but allowed to resign from the army. In the revolutions of 1848 he fought to overthrow his king and, failing, fled to America. There he became first a carpenter and then the editor of a German-language newspaper in Cincinnati with a slant so leftist he earned the nickname "Reddest of the Red." When the Civil War came, Willich recruited fifteen hundred Cincinnati Germans within a matter of hours and helped organize the Ninth Ohio-now marching with the XIV Corps. ~ Steven E. Woodworth

Every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. ~ John Steinbeck

That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopeon city, and the endless column of the marching dead. ~ Stephen King

The regular rhythm and upbeat tunes of military music or marching bands positively affect your mood even if you don't actually 'enjoy' listening to it. ~ Liz Miller

I think in some way it's like that for all of us, living with the ghosts of things that used to be, or never were. We're all of us haunted by yesterday, and we got no choice but to keep marching into our tomorrows. ~ Rodman Philbrick

I shined off high school band, marching, jazz studies. At the time I was too cool for school, I had this professional gig and I was going home taking a shower and heading to downtown Hawaii, Waikiki. ~ Eric Hernandez

The difference was principally in the invisible places toward which their respective hearts were turned. They dreamed of Cairo with its autonomous government, its army, its newspapers and its cinema, while he, facing in the same direction, dreamed just a little beyond Cairo, across the Bhar El Hamar to Mecca. They thought in terms of grievances, censorship, petitions and reforms; he, like any good Moslem who knows only the tenets of his religion, in terms of destiny and divine justice. If the word 'independence' was uttered, they saw platoons of Moslem soldiers marching through streets were all the signs were written in Arabic script, they saw factories and power plants rising from the fields; he saw skies of flame, the wings of avenging angels, and total destruction. ~ Paul Bowles

Just like the good old days: marching together into the unknown, searching for missing magical weapons and risking painful death. I'd missed my buddies! ~ Rick Riordan

In reference to the search for Lincoln's killers as it took to the Maryland swamps:
The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous. First, the troops assemble on the edge of bogs with names like Allen's Creek, Scrub Swamp, and Atchall's Swamp, standing at loose attention in the shade of a thick forest of beech, dogwood, and gum trees. Then they form two lines and march straight forward, from one side to the other. As absurd as it seems to the soldiers, marching headlong into cold mucky water, there is no other way of locating Booth and Herold. Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in their painstaking weeklong search for the killers. ~ Bill O'Reilly

We blacks had problems in the '60s and we solved them by marching. We've still got problems - let's march. ~ Al Sharpton

Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves the black letters marching across the white pages ... ~ Rebecca Wells

They play strange games, games I don't recognize. They pull buttons off their clothes and exchange them back and forth, palming and concealing them and guessing which hands they're held in. Or they arrange themselves in a strange spiral pattern, marching in a loop that folds back on itself, while someone standing outside it taps people out, seemingly at random. ~ Michael Montoure

A battle is like a deadly sort of dance, Lyss thought. We learn the steps by sparring in the practice yards, by marching up and down the field in the hope that we'll remember the moves when we're distracted by the smell of blood and the shrieks of the wounded anddeath howling toward us from all sides. We go into battle to the cadence of drums and guns, but our dance cards are blank. We have no idea who we'll dance with that day, when death might cut in, and who'll leave the floor alive. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

Dom stood dumbfounded as Jane disappeared into the street. Then he hurried to catch up to her, to get some answers.
She knew. How the blazes did she know?
The answer to that was obvious. "So, Nancy told you the truth, did she?" he snapped as he fell into step beside her.
Jane didn't reply, just kept marching toward the inn like a Hussar bent on battle.
"When?" he demanded. "How long have you known?"
"For nine years, you…you conniving…lying--"
"Nine years? You knew all this time, and you didn't say anything?"
"Say anything!" She halted just short of the innyard entrance to glare at him. "How the devil was I to do that? You disappeared into the streets of London as surely as if you were a footpad or a pickpocket."
She planted her hands on her hips. "Oh, I read about your heroic exploits from time to time, but other than that, I neither heard nor saw anything of you until last year, when you showed up at George's town house. It was only pure chance that I happened to be at dinner with Nancy that day. As you'll recall, you didn't stay long. Nor did you behave as if you would welcome any confidences."
Remembering the cool reception he'd given her, he glanced away, unable to bear the accusation in her eyes. "No, I suppose I didn't."
"Besides," she said, "it hardly mattered that I knew the truth. I assumed that if you ever changed your mind about making a life with me, you would seek me out. Since you never did, you were clearly dete ~ Sabrina Jeffries

A man lives his life only when he is marching, i thought, when he keeps marching onwards at any price. When he stops marching onwards, he decays. The joy of life is the joy of the experience that comes from feeling one's own strength. ~ Jan Valtin

Faith requires at times marching into the waters before they part. ~ Walter Wink

I was a broken half afloat in a great nowhere, and the trains were determined to keep me this way. Let me say this about those days, when the war was still a war, but one soon to end, when refugees were roaming and tanks lay overturned on their backs like great tortoises and one was wise to avoid the marching streams of any soldiers, be they Soviet or German: These trains we never should have trusted again, they appeared to be our only way home. And so people packed themselves into the cars quite willingly and looked the other way when they failed to arrive at their stated destinations. I marveled at our collective belief in an eventual safety. ~ Affinity Konar

Everything was going my way. I was happily marching into the history books. Then it all just fell apart. ~ George Michael

The power of protest depends not only on how many turn out, but also on what legislative, judicial, and civil society institutions exist to enact the will of those marching in the streets. ~ Cynthia P. Schneider

I like watching
from inside, as if locked away
and stealing the distinct pleasure
of a high school marching band drum section's
pure perfection. How stoically they play
in the exhaust of a fire engine's wake. ~ Kristen Henderson

I prayed for twenty years. Nothing happened until I got off my knees and started marching with my feet. ~ Jay Coles

We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders. ~ Noam Chomsky

Whether things turn out for the better depends on what we do. We ought not spend our time masterminding the future, but recognize our marching orders: to do the best we can for history and the planet. ~ Huston Smith

Within white Australia, there was a growing movement for what was known as reconciliation - a movement that peaked with millions marching in 2000 to demand the government say sorry for past injustices. ~ Richard Flanagan

There are two kinds of music. One comes from the strings of a guitar, the other from the strings of the heart. One sound comes from a chamber orchestra, the other from the beating of the heart's chamber. One comes from an instrument of graphite and wood, the other from an organ of flesh and blood. This loftier music I speak of tonight is more pleasing than the notes of the most gifted composers, more moving than a marching band, more harmonious than a thousand voices joined in hymn and more powerful than all the world's percussion instruments combined. That sweet sound of love. ~ Michael Jackson

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students - and who advocated general education - Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. ~ Michael Crichton

Nasty little dragon. It wouldn't happen again. He was St George and he would slay the dragon. That was how it worked, wasn't it? He knew the story. He was a hero, a patron saint. He was England. This country was his. His people were marching towards him from all corners. He would take his throne. But first he had to destroy the dragon. He would butcher him like a piece of meat; a long pig, that's all he was: cutlets, chops, ribs and chitterlings. He would make sausages out of him, ha, because in the end he was nothing more than a side of pork ... No, smaller than that. He was just a lamb. A leg of lamb. Yes. He would slaughter the lamb. ~ Charlie Higson

I've thrilled and shouted with patriotic pride, like everyone. Music and flags and men marching in step have bewitched me, as they do all of us. And then I've gone home and sworn to root this evil instinct out of my soul. God help us - let's love the world, love humanity - not just our own country! That's why I'm so keen about the part we're going to play at the Peace Conference. Our motto over there will be America Last! Hurrah for us, I say, for we shall be the only nation over there with absolutely no axe to grind. Nothing but a pax to grind! ~ Christopher Morley

Time is relentless, marching forever onward, stripping away everything in its path, with
one exception: me. The people I care for die. The places I call home crumble. The passage of time demonstrates in horrifying detail the follies of immortality…it's a personal hell from which there is no escape, and while Mir doesn't have a key, he'll make a good cellmate. ~ Ken Lange

Katrina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever.

Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflecting on others the very same carnage once inflicted on them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again - she knew them only as Widow This or Widow That - but she'd never met a Widower Anything. ~ Omar El Akkad

Being a writer is great, and being a parent is great, and I hate Marching Band. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

The true Christian was intended by Christ to prove all things by the Word of God: all churches, all ministers, all teaching, all preaching, all doctrines, all sermons, all writings, all opinions, all practices. These are his marching orders. Prove all by the Word of God; measure all by the measure of the Bible; compare all with the standard of the Bible; weigh all in the balances of the Bible; examine all by the light of the Bible; test all in the crucible of the Bible. That which cannot abide the fire of the Bible, reject, refuse, repudiate, and cast away. This is the flag which he nailed to the mast. May it never be lowered! ~ John Wycliffe

Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out. ~ Sufjan Stevens

The Saints come,
as human as a mouth,
with a bag of God in their backs,
like a hunchback,
they come,
they come marching in. ~ Anne Sexton

Out of the city and over the hill,
Into the spaces where Time stands still,
Under the tall trees, touching old wood,
Taking the way where warriors once stood;
Crossing the little bridge, losing my way,
But finding a friendly place where I can stay.
Those were the days, friend, when we were strong
And strode down the road to an old marching song
When the dew on the grass was fresh every morn,
And we woke to the call of the ring-dove at dawn.
The years have gone by, and sometimes I falter,
But still I set out for a stroll or a saunter,
For the wind is as fresh as it was in my youth,
And the peach and the pear, still the sweetest of fruit,
So cast away care and come roaming with me,
Where the grass is still green and the air is still free. ~ Ruskin Bond

The patter of their feet as they walk through Jim Crow barriers to attend school is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread. ~ Paul Robeson

I came to that wooden marching band. I stopped and looked. There was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and drum. Birds don't live alone, I told myself. They live in flocks. Like people. People are always in a group. Like that little wooden band. ~ Paul Fleischman

The best way we can honor the pioneers - the best way for us to repay our debt of gratitude to them - goes beyond making and hearing speeches, marching in parades, or attending fireworks celebrations.
The best way we can show our gratitude is by incorporating into our own lives the faithfulness to God's commandments, the compassion and love for our fellowmen, the industry, optimism, and joy the pioneers demonstrated so well in their own lives. ~ President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

In brief, it is now clear that Europe's religious dedication to rules is nothing but a veil under which the strong make up the rules as they go along to suit their own political agenda. Perhaps that would be fine if the said agenda was not quick-marching Europe and the global economy into an economic, political and moral morass. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

No, he would never know his father, who would continue to sleep over there, his face for ever lost in the ashes. There was a mystery about that man, a mystery he had wanted to penetrate. But after all there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed for ever. For it was just that that his father had in common with the men of the Labrador. The Mahon people of the Sahel, the Alsatians on the high plateaus, with this immense island between sand and sea, which the enormous silence was now beginning to envelop: the silence of anonymity; it enveloped blood and courage and work and instinct, it was at once cruel and compassionate. And he who had wanted to escape from the country without name, from the crowd and from a family without a name, but in whom something had gone on craving darkness and anonymity - he too was a member of the tribe, marching blindly into the night near the old doctor who was panting at his right, listening to the gusts of music coming from the square, seeing once more the hard inscrutable faces of the Arabs around the bandstands, Veillard's laughter and his stubborn face - also seeing with a sweetness and a sorrow that wrung his heart the deathly look on his mother's face at the time of the bombing - wandering though the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he ~ Albert Camus

Marching and quick-marching are much easier to God's warriors than standing still. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

He would not beg Zoya to stay. It was not in his nature to plead with anyone, and that was not the pact they shared. They did not look to each other for comfort. They kept each other marching. They kept each other strong. So he would not find another excuse to get her talking again. He would not tell her he was afraid to be left alone with the thing he might become, and he would not ask her to leave the lamp burning, a child's bit of magic to ward off the dark.
But he was relieved when she did it anyway. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Fuck You Poem #45

Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced.
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.
Fuck you humidly and icily.
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.

Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.

Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.
Fuck you at low and high tide.
And fuck you astride
anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,
bathrooms, or kitchens.
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.

And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you. ~ Amy Gerstler

And I'll keep marching because the firebird is all I can give you. No money. No army. No mountaintop stronghold." He shouldered his pack. "This is all I have to offer. The same old trick." He stepped out into the rain. I didn't know if I wanted to run after him to apologize or knock him into the mud. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Age 10. I joined the school marching band as a drummer. ~ Adrian Belew

Modern man has the possibility of understanding the mechanism of consciousness, and marching directly towards his objective, with the will flexed to its maximum efficiency. ~ Colin Wilson

Night of the Broken Glass
dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust
Dark is the night
I hear your heartbeat
In the room there is no light
Fire in the night
I hear them marching
Your boots are brown
Glass in my thoughts
Hear the fear in this night
Shrill screams shattered
I do not hear your heartbeat
Why is the light so bright in the room ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

This man of his, yes, this man. Now Sam accepts his own desire. "I'm a gayrod," he shouts marching through crowded plazas. "I'm in love with a man, and I want men. That's what I want. I want man, man, man! ~ Barry Webster

But common sense comes too late, because Logan is now moving away from the counter and marching in my direction.

"Hey, gorgeous." He slides in the seat across from me and places a chocolate-chip muffin on the table. "I got you a muffin."

Damn it, I guess he'd noticed me right when he'd walked in.

"Why?" I ask in suspicion, and without saying hi.

"'Cause I wanted to get you something, and you already have coffee. Ergo, muffin."

I raise one eyebrow. "Are you trying to buy your way into my good graces?"

"Yup. And excellent pun, by the way."

"I wasn't punning. My name just happens to be a homonym."

His blue eyes gleam as he downright smolders at me. "I love it when you talk homonyms to me."

"Uh-huh. ~ Elle Kennedy

He spends the night in prayer. God's voice, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, tells him what the politician in him already knows: that whatever he might stand to gain from playing one against the other, the prospect of a foreign army marching through Italy can bring only instability and devastation in its wake for all. He is, it seems, the Church's shepherd after all. ~ Sarah Dunant

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. ~ Lorrie Moore

War for most men is not fighting or marching in parades. It is sitting around somewhere wondering what the hell you are supposed to be doing. ~ Art Buchwald

I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you're saying, someone who understands exactly what you're getting at. "Hmm," the typewriter says. And "Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see." And sometimes it chuckles ... ~ Helen Oyeyemi

It seemed that there was no time to catch up with all the things that were happening. I would be at the construction workers' demonstration one day and then marching with the welfare mothers the next. We got down with everything - the rent strikes, the sit-ins, the takeover of the Harlem state office building, whatever it was. If we agreed with it, we would try to give active support in some way. The more active i became, the more i liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole ...
My energy just couldn't stop dancing. I was caught up in the music of the struggle and i wanted to dance. I was never bored and never lonely, and the brothers and sisters who became my friends were so beautiful to me. ~ Assata Shakur

You will be raising these kids in your mind your whole life. And they will change you. Your little contribution to it - twenty years from now, they'll be marching off into other things and that's still the legacy you leave. ~ Bill Ayers

We, the people, gave the marching orders to our democratically-elected officials and instructed them. We wanted out of Vietnam and we got out of Vietnam. We wanted women's right to choose and we got women's right to choose. We got the EPA, we got the Clean Air Act, Water Act, we got rights for workers in the workplace to be protected from dangers. We accomplished pretty much all of what we wanted when we had the courage of our convictions. That is the missing ingredient. ~ Jill Stein

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we us ~ Robert Macfarlane

But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around
they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late. ~ Ransom Riggs

So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Big squidhead lies a-sleeping at the bottom of the sea,
And one day, when the stars are right, he'll wake up presently,
And then may wipe us all out, which sounds worrying to me,
While the Tcho-Tcho sing this song…

Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Cthulhu!
Cosmic horror coming to you,
The Old Ones are back now with a view to
Sucking out your brains.

Big Squidhead lies a-sleeping, although, in a way, he's dead.
There are dreams that change reality a-running round his head.
He lies in dread R'lyeh, which is on the ocean bed.
But pops up and down for fun.

And the Tcho-Tcho sing
Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Yog-Sothoth!
The streets will be chockablock with shoggoth,
How sweetly their cries 'Tekeli-li!' doth
Improve the slimy hour.

Big Squidhead lies a-scheming at the bottom of the sea,
He is counting out the aeons that make up eternity,
And when he's done, it's curtains for the mast majority,
While the Tcho-Tcho get on down.

Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Shub-Niggurath!
We're on the winning side to see the aftermath,
Put on your marching boots because we're on the path,
To the end times, here we come!
To the end times, here we come!
To the end times! Here! We! Coooooooooome! ~ Jonathan L. Howard

If truth be told, I ofttimes wonder how Stannis ever got that ugly daughter of his. He goes to his marriage bed like a man marching to a battlefield, with a firm look in his eyes and a determination to do his duty. ~ George R R Martin

In the end, what your own troops do is more important than who they are marching against. ~ Don Meyer

He stared at her in insolent silence, unable to believe the alluring, impulsive girl he remembered had become this coolly aloof, self-possessed young woman. Even with her dusty clothes and the smear of dirt on her cheek, Elizabeth Cameron was strikingly beautiful, but she'd changed so much that-except for the eyes-he scarcely recognized her. One thing hadn't changed: She was still a schemer and a liar.
Straightening abruptly from his stance in the doorway, Ian walked forward. "I've had enough of this charade, Miss Cameron. No one invited you here, and you damn well know it."
Blinded with wrath and humiliation, Elizabeth groped in her reticule and snatched out the handwritten letter her uncle had received inviting Elizabeth to join Ian there. Marching up to him, she slapped the invitation against his chest. Instinctively he caught it but didn't open it.
"Explain that," she commanded, backing away and then waiting.
"Another note, I'll wager," he drawled sarcastically, thinking of the night he'd gone to the greenhouse to meet her and recalling what a fool he'd been about her.
Elizabeth stood beside the table, determined to have the satisfaction of hearing his explanation before she left-not that anything he said could make her stay. When he showed no sign of opening it, she turned furiously to Jake, who was sorely disappointed that Ian was deliberately chasing off two females who could surely be persuaded to do the cooking if they stayed. "Make him read ~ Judith McNaught

At last they settled down to their long watch - squatting round the fire, and laughing for sheer love of adventure as good campaigners should; for were there not marching towards them some eight dark hours equipped with who could say what curious weapons from the rich arsenal of night and day? ~ Hope Mirrlees

The end of the war was like the beginning, with the army marching down the open road under the spring sky, seeing a far light on the horizon. Many lights had died in the windy dark but far down the road there was always a gleam, and it was as if a legend had been created to express some obscure truth that could not otherwise be stated. Everything had changed, the war and the men and the land they fought for, but the road ahead had not changed. It went on through the trees and past the little towns and over the hills, and there was no getting to the end of it. The goal was a going-towards rather than an arriving, and from the top of the next rise there was always a new vista. The march toward it led through wonder and terror and deep shadows, and the sunlight touched the flags at the head of the column. ~ Bruce Catton

Good Mistake"

Blood on your hands
And your hands still roam
But your secret is safe with the garden gnome
Those marks on your neck never seem to fade
Bring a marching band
For the masquerade
Oh lonely man
You know you can
A pocket knife
Will serve you well
Remember what you're good for
There's much more to life

Under the sun
It's not what they can see
Until it's done
Your secret's safe with me

Blow out the candles on your cake
It's another year due with the same mistakes
Blind like a bat
When you hit that wall
Now who's gonna come
Who you gonna call
Oh lonely man
You know you can
A pocket knife
Will serve you well
Remember what you're good for
There's much more to life

Under the sun
It's not what they can see
Until it's done
Your secret's safe with me

I can see you run
I can see you're undone
Shadow to the sun
Shadow to the sun
See a rule to break
See another rule to make
It's a good mistake
Shadow next to none

Broken bones in a walking man
It's a trick to the eye
It's a rubber band
Don't let it go
Let it fall a part
It's a heavy load
For a tender heart ~ Mr. Little Jeans

Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ." ... and ... "The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication, distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories, however, make us all losers. ~ Thane Rosenbaum

For the past several years, I've been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life's exit ramp. ~ Joe Klein

The coke bugs were out in force, doing military manoeuvres, all jazzed up on their Bolivian marching powder. ~ Mark D. Diehl

I believe in fate, I believe in hard work, and I feel like if I just keep marching, the path will kind of appear before me. ~ Tatyana Ali

Behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil, and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting syllables in unison. p. 100 ~ Milan Kundera

The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things, - marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

But no one leaves. - Let us set out once more on our native roads, burdened with my vice, that vice that since the age of reason has driven roots of suffering into my side - that towers to heaven, beats me, hurls me down, drags me on.

Ultimate innocence, final timidity. All's said. Carry no more my loathing and treacheries before the world.

Come on! Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger.

Hire myself to whom? What beasts adore? What sacred images destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lie maintain? - Through what blood wade?

Better to keep away from justice. - A hard life, outright stupor, - with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and suffocate. No old age this way, no danger: terror is very un-French.

- Ah! I am so forsaken I will offer at any shrine impulses toward perfection.

Oh my self-denial, my marvelous Charity! my Selfless love! And still here below!

De Profundis Domine, what an ass I am! ~ Arthur Rimbaud

This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward. ~ Henry Ford

We need to send our words out in the direction we want them to go. In other words, we need to start talking victory when we're staring at defeat. We need to start talking healing when we're feeling sick. We need to start blessing and prosperity when we don't have anything. We need to speak about marching when we feel like quitting. ~ Jentezen Franklin

Please give reason. Raised taxes; marching us off to war again; approved more NSA snooping. WHO ARE THEY?! ~ Matt Drudge

I thought I would inaugurate a Bipolar Pride Day. You know, with floats and parades and stuff! On the floats we would get the depressives, and they wouldn't even have to leave their beds - we'd just roll their beds out of their houses, and they could continue staring off miserably into space. And then for the manics, we'd have the manic marching band, with manics laughing and talking and shopping and fucking and making bad judgment calls. ~ Carrie Fisher

These walks in the country forced us to establish a good marching rhythm that was specific to our family. Each year we walked a little faster until as adolescents the children came to outpace us. Every family has its own pace and way of doing things that can be discovered only by walking together without being in much of a hurry. ~ Scott Haas

Have the Minister's soldiers been on the march?" "Probably. Given that they're soldiers, and marching is what soldiers do, if only to impress their captains. ~ Edward W. Robertson

A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in 1948, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades. Warning him that these could not be held against the troops, that he had better keep way, he received this reply, " I must follow them. I am their leader." ~ Abbott Lawrence Lowell

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

In high school, I stole a six-foot submarine sandwich from a banquet room in front of several hundred people. I did it because I was in marching band, and we were promised food if we played, and they broke their promise. It was my first and only heist, motivated by justice and hunger. ~ Greg Van Eekhout

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws.
That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don't know how. Or we believe that bad things won't happen to us.
And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler's murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia's icy wasteland - into the Soviet Army's machine guns and cannon - to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor.
Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons' lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush's shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers' coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers' sacrifice. And so she invited the press to ~ David Zindell

Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact - sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly different to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe if concerned, unnecessary. ~ Aldous Huxley

Coldness went marching up his arms like the feet of evil fairies. ~ Stephen King

Well, anyhow, the practical outcome of all these damn democratic ideas, is that men of our quality -- yes, damn it! we have a quality -- excuse themselves from the hard and thankless service they owe -- not to the crowd, Dick, but to the race. (Much good it will do is to shirk like that in the long run.) We will not presume, we say, no. We shrug our shoulders and leave the geese, the hungry sheep, the born followers, call them what you will, to the leaders who haven't our scruples. The poor muts swallow those dead old religions no longer fit for human consumption, and we say 'let 'em.' They devour their silly newspapers. They let themselves be distracted from public affairs by games, by gambling, by shows and coronations and every soft of mass stupidity, while the stars in their courses plot against them. We say nothing. Nothing audible. We mustn't destroy the simple faith that is marching them to disaster. We mustn't question their decisions. That wouldn't be democratic. And then we sit here and say privately that the poor riff-raff are failing to adapt themselves to those terrible new conditions -- as if they had had half a chance of knowing how things stand with them. They are shoved about by patriotisms, by obsolete religious prejudices, by racial delusions, by incomprehensible economic forces. Amid a growth of frightful machinery... ~ H.G. Wells

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on. ~ Julia Ward Howe

They ignored her because of their headphones, a thousand people marching to fifteen hundred different drummers, effectively secluded but for a very basic instinct not to bump into one another. Those that were unplugged rushed from place to place and were never actually anywhere other than somewhere else. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

They did not look to each other for comfort. They kept each other marching. ~ Leigh Bardugo

I am interested in you, Gretchen." When I still won't look at him, he presses his fingers against my jaw and gently turns my face. He is looking straight in my eyes when he says, "I'm interested in you."
His midnight blues burn with an intensity that almost makes me believe him. Makes me want to believe him. He knows just the right thing to say to mess with my mind. He always has. He leans closer, watching me. His lips are a breath away from mine.
This time I'm not buying it.
My knee connects with his soft spot and he doubles over, gasping for air.
"Find your own way home," I snap before turning and marching back to my car. ~ Tera Lynn Childs

Therefore a wise prince, marching the whole day, does not go far from his baggage waggons. ~ Lao-Tzu

Basilard, can you cover our trail?
Basilard rubbed his head dubiously. Maldynado, Books, and Akstyr leave trail like marching army. ~ Lindsay Buroker

In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving in a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn't going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel.

Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest.

JACKSONVILLE
FLA OR BUST

I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn't bust.

The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn't believe that the bottom ones weren't crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature's tricks with curved surfaces. Topology! I had never made it that far in mathematics and engineering studies, and I knew no ~ Charles Portis

When I think of the farm, I think of mud. Limning my husband's fingernails and encrusting the children's knees and hair. Sucking at my feet like a greedy newborn on the breast. Marching in boot-shaped patched across the plank floors of the house. There was no defeating it. The mud coated everything. I dreamed in brown. When it rained, as it often did, the yard turned into a thick gumbo, with the house floating in it like a soggy cracker. ~ Hillary Jordan

I take my marching orders from the Constitution. ~ Ron Paul

Climate change will impact most heavily on the disadvantaged. If we don't address these impacts, as well as growing income inequalities, we are marching blindly toward major breakdowns in security, governance, and public welfare. ~ Wesley K. Wark

REGARDING THE MARCHING BAND: How much more interesting it would be to see a creeping band. ~ Demetri Martin

He set off right away, glad of his boots, an old army pair. The leather had outlasted three complete sets of stitching. They were the most comfortable footwear he had ever known. There's no happiness like a good pair of boots, he thought as he walked. Boots, if they were just exactly right for you, changed the way you felt. In fact, there was no happiness like marching alone up a track towards evening in the desert. His limbs tingled. For a while he didn't care if he ever found what he was looking for, if he had to give it all up tomorrow. Nothing mattered but this march through the wide open air of the desert hillside. ~ Henry Shukman