Muellner Asphalt Quotes

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Two more and I've won. I hear the same girl - she must be standing close by - whisper, "Come on."
On the ninety-ninth push-up, Reznik shoves me down with his heel. I fall hard on my chest, roll my cheek against the asphalt, and there's his puffy face and tiny pale eyes an inch from mine.
Ninety-nine; one short. The bastard. ~ Rick Yancey

Pilgrims from all over the world were making their way to the place deemed the pearl of the Middle East. The city was reminiscent of a modern-day Persepolis. Its buildings, like towering pillars, tested the sky's limit. The evenly paved roads belched with the smell of new tarmac, as if a million masons woke up every morning and by hand lay asphalt one grain at a time. People of all colors, ethnicities, creed and social statuses came bearing money, knowledge or experience in order to build their legacies in the new kingdom, sprouting out of the desert.
Dubai had arrived. ~ Soroosh Shahrivar

From the street below, the SYLK Institute building resembled a perfectly faceted aquamarine obelisk, rising from the cracked concrete and asphalt of the nation's capital city. ~ Jonathan Marker

The front edge of the shockwave impacts the earth and you're both shoved to your backs against the crumbling asphalt of the parking lot, and then crushed into oblivion as the Earth, along with every celestial body of your solar system, is disintegrated into tiny shards and then sucked unceremoniously into the resulting black hole. ~ Daniel Keidl

The dog writhing in the gutter, its back broken by a passing car, knows what it is to be alive. So too with the aged elk of the far north woods, slowly dying in the bitter cold of winter. The asphalt upon which the dog lies knows no pain. The snow upon which the elk has collapsed knows not the cold. But living beings do. ~ George Greenstein

You don't have to go to church and sit in a pew to find faith. Look into the eyes of a newborn baby or watch a sunset. Listen to children laughing. Like when a dog licks your palm or when you can smell the rain steaming the asphalt on a hot summer day. There is God ... there is love, and there is evidence of your faith. Live, breathe, love ... the rest will come easily. ~ Greever Williams

He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fumble and always inciting cheers from onlookers up and down the street––especially when he punctuated the hit with the words "Patent that!"...This permissible violence was unique in that it elicited respect from the victim rather than calls for retribution. ~ Jeff Hobbs

You had to wonder who all these people in their cars were leaving behind and who they were driving toward, and if they knew that in the distance, the echo of their tires on the asphalt sounded like a river, and that to someone like me, it could seem like the miracle I'd been looking for. ~ Alice Hoffman

The only person he told about his hunch was Monroe. He and Monroe had grown up together in Dorchester, playing in the streets when the summer made the asphalt breathe and their laughter bounced ~ Jodi Picoult

At Jaffa in Syria and among the Nomads in Arabia , are lakes of enormous size that yield very large masses of asphalt, which are carried off by the inhabitants thereabouts. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Body parts really don't like to be cut, stabbed or hacked into sections, and they express their anger by leaking all over the fuck. Jesus, we're, like, seventy percent water or something? And you learn that's so fucking true when you go to a fresh scene. Pools of it. Drips of it. Speckles of it. Then you got the stained clothes, rugs, bedsheets, walls, flooring - or if it's outside, the ground cover, the concrete, the asphalt. And then there's the smell. Blood, sweat, urine, other shit. That juicy bouquet will get in your sinuses and stay there for hours afterward." He shook his head again. "The older cases . . . the smell is worse than the mess. Water deaths, with the bloating, are just ugly - and if that gas that's built up gets out? The stench will knock you on your ass. And I don't know, I wasn't too crazy for the burn deaths either. I mean, you'd think we'd realize we're not different than any other mammal - cooked meat is cooked meat, period. But I've never seen a grown man puke up his coffee and donuts over a medium rare T-bone. ~ J.R. Ward

Martin got up and brushed off the seat of his pants with his hat. He put his hat on his head and started back toward the path. For when you woke from a long dream, into the new morning, then try as you might you couldn't not hear, beyond your door, the sounds of the new day, the drawer opening in your father's bureau, the bang of a pot, you couldn't not see, through your trembling lashes, the stripe of light on the bedroom wall. Boys shouted in the park, on a sunny tree-root he saw a cigar band, red and gold. One of these days he might find something to do in a cigar store, after all he still knew his tobacco, you never forgot a thing like that. But not just yet. Boats moved on the river, somewhere a car horn sounded, on the path a piece of broken glass glowed in a patch of sun as if at any second it would burst into flame. Everything stood out sharply: the red stem of a green leaf, horse clops and the distant clatter of a pneumatic drill, a smell of riverwater and asphalt. Martin felt hungry: chops and beer in a little he remembered on Columbus Avenue. But not yet. For the time being he would just walk along, keeping a little out of the way of things, admiring the view. It was a warm day. He was in no hurry. ~ Steven Millhauser

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. ~ Andre Aciman

They have good streets here, but everything's so spread out. I am not used to asphalt, it makes my feet hurt, and my brain. I get as tired here in a day as I do back home in a year.
That's not home, other people live there now, I wrote to Mother. Home is where you are now ...
And Mother wrote back to me: How would you know where home is? The place where Toni the clockmaker tends the graves, that's home. ~ Herta Muller

Beneath the wishbone of her legs, the fox shudders. The moon falls right out of the
sky. Fur springs up to cover wounds, its tail traces an "S" on the asphalt. ~ Tina May Hall

In a future that portends stronger and more-frequent hurricanes striking North America's Atlantic coast, ferocious winds will pummel tall, unsteady structures. Some will topple, knocking down others. Like a gap in the forest when a giant tree falls, new growth will rush in. Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one. ~ Alan Weisman

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends. ~ Shel Silverstein

Mount Fuji was mostly invisible n the summer, but on clear days she could see its grand and graceful silhouette dominating the northern sky. White herons gathered in the river upstream from laundry suds pouring out of a city grate, and hydrangeas bloomed on the banks, dropping blue and lavender petals over soda cans and bento cartons littered beside the asphalt. ~ Sara Backer

I want you to stop taking cracker dust." "And he says it isn't a righteous streak," Andrew mused, more to himself than to Neil. "If it was righteousness I'd ask you to give up drinking and smoking, too," Neil said. "I'm only asking for this one thing. It doesn't have any effect on you anyway and it's an unnecessary risk. You don't need a third addiction." "I don't need anything," Andrew reminded him, right on cue. "If you don't need it, it'll be easy to give it up," Neil said. "Right?" Andrew thought it over a minute, then flicked his cigarette at Neil. It singed the material where it bounced off his shirt. Neil ground it out under his shoe when it hit the asphalt. The cool look he flicked Andrew was wasted; Andrew's gaze had already drifted past him in search of something more interesting. "I'm going to take your temper tantrum as a yes," Neil said. "I'll bring the money by your room tonight. ~ Nora Sakavic

As I walked down the sidewalk, it felt like everything around me was listening. The asphalt heard my thoughts, and the building around me all had ears. The sun revealed our secret and nothing remained undiscovered in this world. ~ Burbuqe Raufi

All I know is that the fear I have been battling all night is breaking down the door of my ignorance. As my feet slam down I feel not the hard, wet asphalt but the soft Persian rug that led to the staircase in my father's home. In the glow of lightning the dancing trees are illuminated but I see my mother in the glow of candlelight, spinning, twirling, her hair fanned out
behind her. It is falling over me, saturating my thoughts, and I cannot. I cannot let it in. ~ Gwenn Wright

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

For some of us, the soul is resident in the sole, and yearns ceaselessly for light and air and self-expression. Our feet are our very selves. The touch of floor or carpet, grass or mud or asphalt, speaks to us loud and clear from the foot, that scorned and lowly organ as dear to us as our eyes and ears. ~ Barbara Holland

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom - goddammit! - herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon! - by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers ~ Edward Abbey

Old foot trails may be neglected, back-country ranger stations left unmanned, and interpretive and protective services inadequately staffed, but the administrators know from long experience that millions for asphalt can always be found; Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere - particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are extremely popular with the petroleum industry - they bring the motorist right back to the same gas station from which he started. ~ Edward Abbey

She waved, laughing, waiting for him to go zooming past her. Instead he slowed, then came to a stop right in front of her.
"What are you doing?" she demanded, as he put his foot on the asphalt. She pointed to the finish line, a scant hundred yards away. "Go."
People around them started screaming. Josh ignored them all.
He pulled off his glasses. "How you doing?"
"Josh! This isn't funny. Move." She glanced over his shoulder, knowing the other racers would appear at any second. "Just finish. You can win. Then we'll talk."
"We can talk now."
She shrieked. "No! I said I was wrong. I said I loved you. What more do you want?"
"You," he said. "For always."
"Yes, yes. You can have that. Now go. Cross the finish line. It's right there. Can't see it? Hurry."
"You'll marry me?"
The man next to her turned. "For God's sake, lady. Marry him already. ~ Susan Mallery

The day was turning into one of complicated feathered wings held together with string and wax, but in this case - in Lang´s case- he knew he had to get closer to the sun, closer to the clouds, or he´d die on the ground, never having flown but for a moment on a stretch of black asphalt, tasting the wind in his lungs. ~ Rhys Ford

The firelight burned at Jason's back and made his shadow stretch out across the asphalt before him like a dying man. "Hurry, ~ Clint Stoker

If the devil was going to come, I expected to see the myth of him. A demon with an asphalt shine. He'd be fury. A chill. A bad cough. Cujo at the car window, a ticket at the Creepshow booth, a leap into the depth of night. ~ Tiffany McDaniel

It's happening everywhere; commercial and housing development, along with the road network needed to support it, is the single greatest pressure on natural landscapes in the United States, and by its very pervasiveness the hardest to control. Between 1982 and 1997, developed land in the forty-eight contiguous states increased by 25 million acres - meaning a quarter of all the open land lost since European settlement disappeared in just those fifteen years. This isn't a trend, it's a juggernaut, and the worst may be yet to come. At this pace, by 2025 there will be 68 million more rural acres in development, an area about the size of Wyoming, and the total developed land in the United States will stand at a Texas-sized 174 million acres. Already, just the impervious covering we put on the land, the things like roads, sidewalks, and buildings we pave with asphalt or concrete, adds up to an area the size of Ohio.3 ~ Scott Weidensaul

Broken glass showered from the windows. Chunks of the walls bounced off the pavement and the cars parked along the curb, crushing into smaller pieces. The asphalt on the street split in places into long ribbon-like slashes. The ground continued rolling like the deck of a ship. The noise of the destruction, screams of terrified people, and the car alarms mixed into a concerto of horror. ~ A.O. Peart

The afternoon sunk into the tall grass growing on the roadside. The distant dome turned from coral to burnt umber, a final flash of amber as the stars unveiled themselves above. In the last light of dusk, we facemmo la scarpetta every last dish – leaving behind olive pits, an oily carcass, several rings of spilled red sulfates – and stretched our arms across the table to hold hands. As darkness fell over the valley, we walked hand in hand down that hill, our shoes rubbing the soft asphalt of what could only be the silvery full moon reflected, and watched as the dome, lit up now in its tawny wonder, lowered down behind the horizon. ~ Megan Rich

Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people's homes.
But among the artifacts that will never be found - among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives - is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew - our names, the date, and these words: We were here. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard- instead of numbers, we add up bodies. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Asphalt hurts. But not as much as abandoning your dignity. ~ Abby McDonald

It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You ever notice how sometimes, in the middle of July, right downtown, you'll see a flower poking up through a crack in the asphalt. And you think, What a stupid place to set down roots. It'll get run over, or it'll dry up and blow away. But it hangs on, and it grows, and it blooms. Somehow, against the odds, it finds what it needs and it makes that place better for being there. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

For half a century, the Sunset Strip was the asphalt timeline of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I'll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive, where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun. ~ Steve Erickson

My best girl wore diesel. Steamy asphalt ribbons poured over her gravel shoulders. Curves that took me to Zanzibar.... ~ Michael Walsh

Pieces of my father's brain are on the asphalt. ~ Gayle Forman

In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burning into baking asphalt. ~ Alyson Richman

A guy walks into a pub with a lump of asphalt on His shoulder, He says to the bar man give us a pint and one for the road. ~ Tommy Cooper

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds
nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. ~ Dorianne Laux