Mud Quotes

Beneath the light, the river and hills are beautiful, The spring breeze bears the fragrance of flowers and grass. The mud has thawed, and swallows fly around. On the warm sand, mandarin ducks are sleeping. ~ Du Fu

Mud and rain and wretchedness and blood. Why should jolly soldier-boys complain? God made these before the roofless Flood - Mud and rain. ~ Siegfried Sassoon

The man looked up and Tanya was staring at him through watery eyes.
"Now you know. I don't see how it changes anything."
"It doesn't. You're still a diamond in a field of mud."
Tanya smirked.
"And what about you?"
"I don't know what I am."
"What do you want to be?"
"It's not that easy. ~ Luke Taylor

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall. ~ Joseph Conrad

I was asked, "How can we change the world?" And I answered, "You will never be able to change the world by projecting ideal images to aspire for. The only way to change the world is to penetrate the grassroots, to penetrate at the groundbreaking level - to be a mason - to dig into the core where all the tar and lumpy mud is located and to work with that shit until you bring out something beautiful. We change the world by dressing wounds, by listening to forgotten voices of the lost, by getting our hands dirty. Nobody is going to be able to change the world by painting a lovely picture. You have to know how to make paint. Then teach the people how to use a paintbrush. Then teach the people how to make strokes, how to wash the paintbrush, and how to mount their own paintings onto the wall. Because the alchemy of the world, of humanity as a whole, is really just the collective alchemy of every individual. Take what is darkness and transmutate it into a shining thing. Changing the world is never about the changer; it is about the world. ~ C. JoyBell C.

When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote. ~ Tim O'Brien

Life is made up of marble and mud. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Without aspirations for a better existence, you're stuck in the mud and going nowhere. ~ Kimora Lee Simmons

from 'Incident Light Poem'

And all surprisingly without outrage
without gunshot
without a call of timber with/out bleak rows
to fall:
Light follows the path of least time

A law becomes gospel and sharp eye-water
is a diminished story
The thrill of being an airplane
Of being possibly broken
An amnesiac love between white mud
and the disintegration of shells
winnowed away ~ Andrea Strudensky

We may scale cliffs; but to tramp forever in the mud is another thing. ~ Honore De Balzac

After a time he found and opened a book he had been reading that he had expected to end well, a romance which he wanted to end well, with the hero and heroine finding love, with peace and joy and redemption and understanding.
Love is two bodies with one soul, he read, and turned the page.
But there was nothing - the final page had been ripped away and used as toilet paper or smoked, and there was no hope or joy or understanding. There was no last page. The book of his life just broke off. There was only the mud below him and the filthy sky above. There was to be no peace and no hope. And Dorrigo Evans understood that the love story would go on forever and ever, world without end. ~ Richard Flanagan

That's what it's like to be a prisoner of anything. You want your freedom until you get it,
then you feel bare without your chains. ~ Tarryn Fisher

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for? ~ Virginia Woolf

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil? ~ Marquis De Sade

We walk on the ground and give sparse recognition to the mud that will be the eternal homes for the bodies that we praise so much. Ground might not worth much but it holds billions of history and some of humanity's greatest treasures, One day it will become our permanent home. Maybe we should begin a mud religion and give reverence to the dirt, in the end, it is the dirt, ground and Mother Earth that wins and reigns supreme throughout the centuries. ~ Crystal Evans

It falls to the lot of even the most glorious flags to be thrown in the mud. Glory, what men call glory, is often thick with mud. ~ Curzio Malaparte

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed
thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes
because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself
and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud. ~ John Fowles

Through the Mud
(from the book Blue Bridge)

A line of robots,
We approach a wall of mud,
Some of us carrying flowers.
The others laugh
Bit when we enter that wall
It is the flowers
That will make us an ark
To carry us on through the darkness,
Sailing through
With our symbols the only light
Until we fly
Out over the fields
On the other side of midnight
And all our wires
And bits of metal fall off.-
And our souls are bright again,
So new and light
They shoot up –
Up to plant our brilliant flowers
Like stars
In the face of heaven. ~ Jay Woodman

A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world. Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment. A key buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for spiritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change. ~ Matt Haig

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and everything is grey around us, and we are grey; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce and we will have one enemy less. Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white, distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colourless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarmth through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun. ~ Primo Levi

I conquered a fear of heights and water by bungee jumping from a crane over a lake. And if thats not crazy enough, I also wrestled a greased pig in a mud pit. ~ Shandi Finnessey

Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo - or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role? ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw the stars. ~ Dale Carnegie

Above Ania, the moon is nearly full and the stars are as bright as always. Cassiopeia, Orion, Arachne...The names of the constellations return to her in her father's voice. They are all in their places, a buffer against the chaos and indifference of the universe.
It is what is down here below them in the mud that is all wrong. ~ Jessica Shattuck

Chad has oil wells, so there are a few grand hotels for rich, who come to quickly take the money away before it ruins the charm of our mud and straw cities. ~ Daoud Hari

back as a mud-smashing ~ Amy Tan

One day, the lotus spoke again. "You remember me? The flower that grows through the mud?" I did. I said as much. "Have you ever considered my significance? I'm everywhere - art, religion, nature.... Have you ever wondered why?"

... It spoke, "Nothing touches me. I radiate beauty. You can do the same."

"How?" I asked.

"Easy," it said. "I grow in a pond. I take the water and nutrients I need to grow, and let the rest sink to the bottom. What's in mud, anyway? Water, nutrients, life and a little bit of sludge. Let the sludge go like I do. Then stand tall above the leaves. ~ Dawn Casey-Rowe

He was generally aware that he had been blessed in her beauty; even in her usual homespun, knee-deep in mud from her garden, or stained and fierce with the blood of her calling, the curve of her bones spoke to his own marrow, and those whisky eyes could make him drunk with a glance. Besides, the mad collieshangie of her hair made him laugh. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes ... ~ Bill Mollison

The lake comes to the fringe while lights go up around the bay. Somewhere near, cow flesh is singed. Smoke floats above the walkway. I've eaten green that comes up black, risen cold from torrid mud. I've licked my paws and tasted blood. What is this world of busy lies? Some urban genie feeding food to flies! ~ Andre Alexis

In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour's sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-truck, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks. However wretched, accommodations were always better or no worse than those on the enemy side. ~ Michael Chabon

Some other brown stuff that might not be mud into her tangled hair. All around, villagers wandered with their baskets of brightly colored eggs, looking for the perfect hiding places. Ruth Zardo sat on the bench in the middle of the green tossing ~ Louise Penny

Sorrow, like rain makes roses and mud. ~ Austin O'Malley

I loved driving with Marlboro Man. I saw things I'd never seen before, things I'd never even considered in my two and a half decades of city life. For the first time ever, I began to grasp the concept of north, south, east, and west, though I imagine it would take another twenty-five years before I got them straight. I saw fence lines and gates made of welded iron pipe, and miles upon miles of barbed wire. I saw creeks--rocky, woodsy creeks that made the silly water hazard in my backyard seem like a little mud puddle. And I saw wide open land as far as the eye could see. I'd never known such beauty.
Marlboro Man loved showing me everything, pointing at pastures and signs and draws and lakes and giving me the story behind everything we saw. The land, both on his family's ranch and on the ranches surrounding it, made sense to him: he saw it not as one wide open, never-ending space, but as neatly organized parcels, each with its own purpose and history. "Betty Smith used to own this part of our ranch with her husband," he'd say. "They never had kids and were best friends with my grandparents." Then he'd tell some legend of Betty Smith's husband's grandfather, remembering such vivid details, you'd think he'd been there himself. I absorbed it all, every word of it. The land around him pulsated with the heartbeats of all who'd lived there before…and as if it were his duty to pay honor to each and every one of them, he told me their names, their stories, their relationship, the ~ Ree Drummond

Politics these days is a disgusting game of mud-slinging, filled with selfish people with selfish aims. I'm very glad I've retired away from the hustle and bustle of Whitehall. ~ Munir Butt

Flint


An emerald is as green as grass,
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brilliant stone,
To catch the world's desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
But a flint holds fire. ~ Christina Rossetti

That is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do in my life, running through the jungle in heels. Because also, mud was often times three feet deep, and that was full on for sure. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard

Perhaps, he thought, true pure love, like all flowers, flourished best with its roots in muck and mud. Perhaps that was a law of life that held everything together. ~ Harry Mulisch

As we drove back to Enugu, I laughed loudly,above Fela's stringent singing. I laughed because Nsukka's untarred roads coat cars with dust in the harmattan and with sticky mud in the rainy season. Because the tarred roads spring potholes like surprise presents and the air smells of hills and history and the sunlight scatters the sand and turns it into gold dust. Because Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as freedom song. As laughter.(299) ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I'd turned into someone who realized that when a loved one leaves, she'll take with her the tree inside of you that was now inhabiting every single inch of you. Your heart will be left in tatters and caked with mud, like a tree ripped from its place. And where the tree once was, there would only be a gaping hole. It was a painful and crushing thought. Only those who've had those trees inside of them have the right to discuss the astronomical losses and profits life throws at us. ~ Min-gyu Park

Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music ... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle - but that's exactly what art is for. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

The youth had resolved not to budge whatever should happen. Some arrows of scorn that had buried themselves in his heart had generated strange and unspeakable hatred. It was clear to him that his final and absolute revenge was to be achieved by his dead body lying, torn and gluttering, upon the field. This was to be a poignant retaliation upon the officer who had said "mule drivers," and later "mud diggers," for in all the wild graspings of his mind for a unit responsible for his sufferings and commotions he always seized upon the man who had dubbed him wrongly. And it was his idea, vaguely formulated, that his corpse would be for those eyes a great and salt reproach. ~ Stephen Crane

Then he kissed her, not just a brush of lips as she'd done, but a kiss a kiss that scalded her tongue. The tree burst into full blooms. The garden fluttered around her. A riot of flowers shot out of the earth. She was mud-covered as he pulled back. ~ Melissa Marr

She found half of a sea biscuit and offered it to Sus. The young girl held it between two fingers and licked a corner. "It tastes like dirt." "And how would you know?" Felissa said, putting her fists on her hips. "You eat dirt often, do you? Snacking on mud pies when our backs are turned?" "It tastes how dirt smells," Sus said. ~ Shannon Hale

Sweeping from butcher's stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood. ~ Jonathan Swift

My husband is such a healthy eater. Except when it comes to sweets. He never consumes anything except fruit until noon. And then from noon on he might have some brown rice and some tofu, and then, come eight or nine at night, he orders three mud-pie double-chocolate pieces of cake and eats all three of them. ~ Sara Blakely

God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" See all I've made, the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars. And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. "Nice going, God! ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Today was a rainy, dreary, wear-your-steel-toed-mud-shoes Wednesday. ~ Greg Pincus

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it ...
It wasn't only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns
just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself
and the Peugeot
out of the places I had talked us into.
Some of these palavers could take half a day ... ~ V.S. Naipaul

Everyone he loved was gone. Everything he knew was over. Where was he supposed to go now? What was he supposed to do? Just then, someone grabbed him from behind. Before he knew what was happening, a gloved hand was over his nose and mouth, and his legs were kicked out from under him. He hit the ground hard and found himself lying face-first in the mud. The gloved hand tightened its grip. He couldn't move, couldn't scream, couldn't even breathe. "Don't make a sound," someone whispered in his ear. "Just listen carefully, and do exactly what I say. ~ Joel C. Rosenberg

He didn't believe in magic and demons. He believed in day and night, endurance and fury, cold mud and loneliness and the speed with which blood leaves the body ~ Laini Taylor

…and available man candy. But at least there would be mud, and maybe cows." p12 ~ Claire Upton

Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every
person has a ring of stories around them, a halo almost.
People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl
squatting in the front dooryard, in mud-caked overalls,
digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and
talked to me. some I've forgotten, but most I remember.
And so my memory goes back before my birth ~ Shirley Ann Grau

I was at Woodstock. In the mud. ~ Louis Gossett Jr.

She had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud. ~ Michael Ondaatje

APPLES SCENT,
You arrive in the basement. Immediatly it catches you. Apples are here, lying on fruit trays, turned crates. You didn't think about it. You had no wish to be flooded by this melancholic wave. But you can't resist. Apple scent is a breaker. How could you manage without this childhood, bitter and sweet ?
Shrivelled fruits surely are delicious, from this feak dryness where candied taste seems to have wormed in each wrinkle. But you don't wish to eat them. Particularly don't turn into an identifiable taste this floating power of smell. Say that it smells good, strong? But not ..... It's beyond .... An inner scent, scent of a better oneself. Here is shut up school autumn, with purple ink we scratch paper with down strokes and thin strokes. Rain bangs against glasses, evening will be long ....
But apple perfume is more than past. You think about formerly because of fullness and intensity from a remembrance of salpetered cellar, dark attic. But it's to live here, stay here, stand up.
You have behind you high herbs and damp orchards. Ahead it's like a warm blow given in the shade. Scent got all browns, all reds with a bit of green acid. Scent distilled skin softness, its tiny roughness. Lips dried, we alreadyt know that this thirst is not to be slaked.
Nothing would happen if you bite the white flesh. You would need to become october, mud floor, moss of cellar, rain, expectation.
Apple scent is painful. It's from a stronger life, a slowness ~ Philippe Delerm

You are going through mud but your feet are still clean. ~ Gerda Weissmann Klein

She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the market-place to sell. Been set for still bait. When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mud-balls, Janie had tried to show her shine. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Live in the world like a waterfowl. The water clings to the bird, but the bird shakes it off. Live in the world like a mudfish. The fish lives in the mud, but its skin is always bright and shiny. ~ Ramakrishna

One camera recorded only the flattened grass through a cracked lens. The other, moving closer to the girl, showed her dupatta fly toward it, a close-up of the tiny embroidered flowers on the white cloth, and then a battering darkness.
For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging, and then a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl, a dust mask on her face, her dark hair a cascade of mud, her fingers interlaced over the face of her brother.
A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that came out of the earth and through her and into the office of the home secretary, who took a step back. As if that were the only thing the entire spectacle had been designed to achieve, the wind dropped as suddenly as buildings collapse in 3-D models, and the girl stopped her noise, unlaced her fingers. The cameras panned, then zoomed.
In the whole apocalyptic mess of the park the only thing that remained unburied was the face of the dead boy.
"Impressive," said the home secretary. ~ Kamila Shamsie

Maybe she's a mud puddle nymph," Carmen snickered. ~ Kristen Day

Setting aside the puppet shows, the only thing that matters is who will be ruling, who will have the keys to the cash register, and how they're going to split up other people's money among themselves. On their way to the booty they'll spruce everything up, which is badly needed. New Scoundrels will appear, new leaders, and a whole choir of jnnocents with no memory will come out into the streets, ready to believe whatever they want or need to believe. They'll follow whichever Pied Piper flatters them most and promises them some shotty paradise... This is what it is... with its highs and lows, and it's only as good as it gets, which is better than nothing. There are those who see it coming and go far away... And there are those of us who stay with our feet stuck in the mud, because anyhow we don't have anywhere better to go. But don't worry about the circus. We've now come to the clown acts, and the trapeze artists will take a while to arrive. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

His eyes are cold and restless
His wounds have almost healed
And she'd give half of Texas
Just to change the way he feels
She knows his love's in Tulsa
And she knows he's gonna go
Well it ain't no woman flesh and blood
It's that damned old rodeo


Well it's bulls and blood
It's dust and mud
It's the roar of a Sunday crowd
It's the white in his knuckles
The gold in the buckle
He'll win the next go 'round
It's boots and chaps
It's cowboy hats
It's spurs and latigo
It's the ropes and the reins
And the joy and the pain
And they call the thing rodeo


She does her best to hold him
When his love comes to call
But his need for it controls him
And her back's against the wall
And it's So long girl I'll see you
When it's time for him to go
You know the woman wants her cowboy
Like he wants his rodeo ~ Garth Brooks

England was in a funny state, a different state from what it had been. Or was it really always in the same state? Always underneath the smooth surface there was some black mud. There wasn't clear water down to the pebbles, down to the shells, lying on the bottom of the sea. There was something moving, something sluggish somewhere, something that had to be found, suppressed. ~ Agatha Christie

You came all this way for a whore?" Albert asked, and Royce shot him a harsh look.

"Don't call her that if you want to live a long and happy life," Hadrian said as they dismounted.

"But this is a whorehouse - a brothel, right? And you're here to see a woman, so - "

"So keep talking, Albert." Hadrian tied his horse to the post. "Just let me get farther away."

Gwen saved our lives," Royce said, looking up at the porch. "I beat on doors. I even yelled for help." He looked at Albert, letting that image sink in. Yes, I yelled for help. "No one cared." Royce gestured toward Hadrian. "He was dying in a pool of blood, and I was about to pass out. Broken leg, my side sliced open, the world spinning. Then she was there saying, 'I've got you. You'll be all right now.' We would have died in the mud and the rain, but she took us in, nursed us back to health. People were after us - lots of people … lots of powerful people - but she kept us hidden for weeks, and she never asked for payment or explanation. She never asked for anything." Royce turned back to Albert. "So if you call her a whore again, I'll cut your tongue out and nail it to your chest."

Albert nodded. "Point taken."

Royce climbed the steps to the House and rapped once.

Albert leaned over to Hadrian and whispered, "He knocks at a - "

"Royce can still hear you." Hadrian stopped him.

"Really?"

"Pretty sure. You have no id ~ Michael J. Sullivan

Environmental historians ... insist that we have got to go ... down to the earth itself as an agent and presence in history. Here we will discover even more fundamental forces at work over time. And to appreciate those forces we must now and then get out of parliamentary chambers, out of birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into fields, woods, and the open air. It is time we bought a good set of walking shoes, and we cannot avoid getting some mud on them. ~ Donald Worster

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find. ~ Jeanette Winterson

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel. ~ Hilary Mantel

Splatters of mud stained Rothbury's fine lawn shirt, which clung slickly to the broad expanse of his back like a second skin. Having rolled up his sleeves at the onset of his task, his muscled arms were now streaked with mud and rain as were the tall boots and tight black breeches that hugged the sinewy muscles of his long, undoubtedly strong legs.
Her admiring gaze alighted upon his golden-brown hair, which now looked more brown than golden as it was wet with perspiration and mist. A few locks lay plastered to his neck in wispy whorls.
Charlotte suddenly felt overly warm. Seeing him... wet... somehow embarrassed her. It felt dark, intimate. Truly, if it weren't for the mud- and clothes- she rather thought this would be what he looked like after a bath.
A shiver ran down her arms as her eyes drifted to the dewy trails of rain droplets that ran over his slightly bristled jaw and neck, disappearing in the nest of his loosely tied cravat.
And then her hungry gaze raised... and connected with Rothbury's. All thoughts flew straight out of her head.
Looking at her from over his shoulder, he straightened, his smile twisting with arrogance.
Despite the chill in the air, her cheeks felt as if they were on fire. How long had he been watching her in-depth perusal? Long enough, she supposed, if the heated gleam in his eyes was any indication at all.
She blinked, shaking her head hurriedly, hoping by that action she was silently telling him, "No, I defi ~ Olivia Parker

Nobody can be forced to commit an act of villainy. You can't push anybody into the mud; people always step into it themselves. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence. ~ Charles Dickens

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects.... ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Mud and water and the stumps of trees. In every direction that was all there was. Bodies fell, but the trees died standing up. ~ Josh Ritter

Cowgirl Interlude (Bonanza Jellybean)
She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet.
Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire int he woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. "Self-defense," she pleaded, when her parents complained. "It was a [sic] out-law tennis shoe.
Billy the Ked. ~ Tom Robbins

When sunlight, which contains red, yellow, green, and blue light, shines on a mud puddle with oil on it, the areas that strongly reflect each of those colors overlap and produce all kinds of combinations which our eyes see as different colors ... This phenomenon of colors produced by the partial reflection of white light by two surfaces is called iridescence, and can be found in many places ... the more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. ~ Richard Feynman

I don't have to go to the bottom of the creek to know that there is mud down there ~ DeBorrah K. Ogans

Alas, all too often, the dream turns into a mud puddle. I am left looking at a disaster. What to do! Keep working. I ask the Almighty for help. That frees me ... ~ Jules Olitski

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy. ~ James Russell Lowell

Generals were early to bed, early to rise, always brushing their teeth after every meal, never skipping a morning shave. All they had to do was sit back in Nagano drawing up their battle plans. One order from them and us mortals on the front lines would move like pawns across a chessboard to our grisly fates. I'd like to see just one of them here with us in the mud. We had our own rules down here. Which is probably why they stayed away. If one of them showed, I'd see to it a stray bullet put them on the Killed In Action list. ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Who can wait in stillness while the mud settles? ~ Laozi

For a time Dish lost all sense of what life was about. He even lost the sense that he was a cowboy, the strongest sense he had to work with. He was just a fellow with a glass in his hand, whose life had suddenly turned to mud. The day before he had been a top hand, but what did that mean anymore? ~ Larry McMurtry

He had studied philosophy as a young man, but clay really spoke to him. I like mud, he explained. And then he went on to explain the Earth's magnetism, and why clay does stick together and it's about ions and stuff. And there are specific muds, or clays. For instance, this: red. Deep deep beautiful red. Albany slip. I stand there in awe, slipping around in worlds of specialization. The endless details, but the Earth is a big wad of it, mud. And that would be a huge start, to know that you liked it. There it is. ~ Eileen Myles

Now I was shocked! The old shibboleth, intelligence! Had not our government been culpable enough in pampering the high-IQ draftees as though they were too intelligent to fight for their country? Could not Doctor Gentle see that I was proud to be a scout, and before that a machine gunner? Intelligence, intelligence, intelligence. Keep it up, America, keep telling your youth that mud and danger are fit only for intellectual pigs. Keep on saying that only the stupid are fit to sacrifice, that America must be defended by the low-brow and enjoyed by the high-brow. Keep vaunting head over heart, and soon the head will arrive at the complete folly of any kind of fight and meekly surrender the treasure to the first bandit with enough heart to demand it. ~ Robert Leckie

The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks. ~ Jim Crace

I sit cross-legged on the rock The valleys and streams are cold and damp Sitting quietly is beautiful The cliffs are lost in mist and fog I rest happily in this place At dusk the tree shadows are low I look into my mind A white lotus emerges from the dark mud ~ Hanshan

And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an hour and a half late for luncheon and covered with mud from head to foot, and made not the least apology, saying merely: I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I would willingly reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kriss, but I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more per-nicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) implements, the umbrella and the watch. ~ Marcel Proust