Nettie Sparrow Quotes

Nettie set out a loaf of sourdough bread from Baker's Way Bakers, a wodge of runny Camembert, and a container of leftover lamb, rich with garlic and rosemary, nestled on a bed of spicy arugula from the home garden. She'd plucked two sharp green apples from one of the trees in their tiny orchard, and she placed a waxed bag of caramel shortbread beside them. ~ Ellen Herrick

The girls seemed unconcerned and went about their days, each as lovely in their own way as the flowers they tended. Sorrel's black hair became streaked with premature white, which gave her an exotic air, although the elegance was somewhat ruined by the muddy jeans and shorts she practically lived in. Nettie, on the other hand, had a head of baby-fine blonde hair that she wore short, thinking, wrongly, that it would look less childlike. Nettie wouldn't dream of being caught in dirty jeans and was always crisply turned out in khaki capris or a skirt and a white shirt. She considered her legs to be her finest feature. She was not wrong.
Patience was the sole Sparrow redhead, although her hair had deepened from its childhood ginger and was now closer to the color of a chestnut. It was heavy and glossy as a horse's mane, and she paid absolutely no attention to it or to much else about her appearance, nor did she have to. In the summer her wide-legged linen trousers and cut-off shorts were speckled with dirt and greenery, her camisoles tatty and damp. The broad-brimmed hat she wore to pick was most often dangling from a cord down her back. As a result, the freckles that feathered across her shoulders and chest were the color of caramel and resistant to her own buttermilk lotion (Nettie smoothed it on Patience whenever she could make her stand still). When it was terribly hot, Patience wore the sundresses she'd found packed away in the attic. She knew they were her mother's, an ~ Ellen Herrick

So, O king, does the present life of man on earth seem to me, in comparison with the time which is unknown to us, as though a sparrow flew swiftly through the hall, coming in by one door and going out by the other, and you, the while, sat at meat with your captains and liegemen, in wintry weather, with a fire burning in your midst and heating the room, the storm raging out of doors and driving snow and rain before it. For the time for which he is within, the bird is sheltered from the storm, but after this short while of calm he flies out again into the cold and is seen no more. Thus the life of man is visible for a moment, but we know not what comes before it or follows after it. ~ Bede

While it is certainly true that God's love for us does not protect us from pain and sorrow, it is also true that all occasions of pain and sorrow are under the absolute control of God. If God controls the circumstances of the sparrow, how much more does He control the circumstances that affect us? God does not walk away and leave us to the mercy of uncontrolled random or chance events. ~ Jerry Bridges

To become a sparrow you don't have to be a crow. ~ Munia Khan

When I stopped viewing girls as potential girlfriends and started treating them as sisters in Christ, I discovered the richness of true friendship. When I stopped worrying about who I was going to marry and began to trust God's timing, I uncovered the incredible potential of serving God as a single. . . .

I believe the time has come for Christians, male and female, to own up to the mess we've left behind in our selfish pursuit of short-term romance. Dating may seem an innocent game, but as I see it, we are sinning against each other. What excuse will we have when God asks us to account for our actions and attitudes in relationships? If God sees a sparrow fall (Matthew 10:29), do you think He could possibly overlook the broken hearts and scarred emotions we cause in relationships based on selfishness?

Everyone around us may be playing the dating game. But at the end of our lives, we won't answer to everyone. We'll answer to God. . . .

Long before Seventeen magazine ever gave teenagers tips on dating, people did things very differently.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a guy and girl became romantically involved only if they planned to marry. If a young man spent time at a girl's home, family and friends assumed that he intended to propose to her. But shifting attitudes in culture and the arrival of the automobile brought radical changes. The new "rules" allowed people to indulge in all the thrills of romantic love without having ~ Joshua Harris

We should have another code for when you're about to hit someone."
"Very well. How about 'the sparrow flies south for winter'?"
"Seriously?"
"What's wrong with it? It's a classic. ~ Derek Landy

The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows. ~ Donald G. Mitchell

Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people. ~ Steven Moffat

Insane asylum' - among the great narrative options, that'd be one step short of 'and then she woke up', right? Or is that what you're planning next episode as we push the tandem-story envelope?

Cool nude-hairbrushing scene, by the way. I assume it's her butt that the pillow's caressing? She's a thoughtful one, isn't she? Shame about the hair knot. That could wreck a person's whole day.

- Joel ~ Rebecca Sparrow

There 's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 't is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes? Hamlet. V.2 ~ William Shakespeare

I want to live and die and reside forever in heartbeats wrapped in the most intimate song I've ever heard. ~ Sparrow AuSoleil

See? If you would have gotten a dog like I told you to, you'd be one of the cool kids around here."

"And I told I work too much to have a dog. If you want a dog, you get a dog."

"I did suggest that at one point, but you said no."

"As I recall, your plan was to get a dog and keep it at my house. That would still be me getting a dog except in that scenario you would get to pick the dog. For some strange reason, that seems lose/lose to me."

"Well, obviously I'd come over whenever it needed to go out."

"How is that going to work? The club is almost an hour's drive from my house even at the best of times."

He sighed, leading the way into the great room. "You'd need to let me live in your pool house, of course."

"I don't have a pool house, or even a pool, dipshit."

He followed her inside, enjoying this conversation far too much to leave now.

"Obviously, the first part of the plan would be for you to get a pool installed, and then build a pool house for me to live in."

She frowned at him and punched him in the chest. "Your imaginary dog is already costing me an imaginary fortune."

"The upside is that imaginary dogs aren't big eaters. You're already saving a fortune on dog food. ~ Sparrow Beckett

(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country's philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance between earth and air and water; which is to say that things with legs or wings were out of balance with their earth element by walking around on feet or, worse, flying above the earth in the thin substance of air, obviously entirely unsuitable for the support of solid flesh. The momentum all this inappropriate motion set up in their liquid element unbalanced them further. Spirit, in this system, was equated with the fourth element, fire. All this was generally felt to be a load of rubbish among the people who had to work in the ordinary world for a living, unlike philosophers living in academies. But it was true that a favourite magical trick at fetes was for theatrically-minded fairies to throw bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers in the air and turn them into things before they struck the ground, and that the trick worked better if the bits of chaff or seed-pods or conkers were wet.)

Slower creatures were less susceptible to the whims of wild magic than faster creatures, and creatures that flew were the most susceptible of all. Every sparrow had a delicious memory of having once been a hawk, and while magic didn't take much interest in caterpillars, butterflies spent so much time being magicked that it was a rare event to see ordinary butterflies without at least an extra set of wings or a few extra frills and iridescences, or bodie ~ Robin McKinley

Where he saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words. Where his friend saw dappled light, the felicity of flight, the sadness of gravity, he saw the solid form of a common sparrow. ~ Nicole Krauss

Among the early commercial adopters of wild beer were the Cottonwood Brewery of Boone, North Carolina, and Joe's Brewery of Champaign, Illinois. Brewer John Isenhour gained a "cult status" for his production of beers with a lambic profile in the mid-1990s using wild yeast and bacteria that he kept active at various stages of the lambic fermentation cycle. John quite successfully marketed the "Lambic" to his rather conservative clientele in this central Illinois college town as "Belgian lemonade. ~ Jeff Sparrow

The fire roared down upon us. It curled through our hair, then wrapped around our wrists and faces, trying to drag us apart. It seared across my skin, hotter than the Heart of Fire, and yet more painful was how it seared through my mind. The fire burned away my memories, taking back his name and mine, both of my pasts and all of my hopes, the sky and the sparrow and the world itself. I clung to somebody I did not know, could not imagine knowing, but I still knew beyond all doubt that he was mine.
We fell until we had been falling forever and always, and always would continue falling, because nothing existed outside this chaos of fire and shadow.
But I held on to him.
And he held on to me. ~ Rosamund Hodge

Mr. Sparrow, you will accompany these fine men to the helm and provide us with the bearing to Isla de Muerta. You will then spend the remainder of the voyage contemplating all possible meanings of the phrase 'silent as the grave'. Do I make myself clear? ~ Rob Kidd

He looked at her in surprise as she pushed him back, her hand on his chest. Prurient and tender and shy and slutty, she tasted him, and savored the mouthfeel of him, and it was as if they had been lovers since forever. There was never a thought of Sparrow School, or numbered techniques. Dominika simply wanted him. ~ Jason Matthews

Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescrib'd, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer Being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n,
That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n;
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall. ~ Alexander Pope

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events. ~ Barry Lopez

God notices every one of us; there is not a sparrow or a worm that continues to live apart from His decrees. ~ Charles Spurgeon

I don't like the idea that I am going to come back as an ant or a sparrow if I don't get along in the great karma of life. ~ Stephen King

The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. She was seen one dag sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who were just out of her reach. She was telling them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw; but the sparrows kept their distance. ~ George Orwell

A life passed amid gangsters, thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow's skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the must decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy - in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow's better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster. ~ Tiffany Baker

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.

Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you'd kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling. ~ Ocean Vuong

There was a strong but not unpleasant smell- moist earth, decomposing leaf matter, new flowers beginning to catch the day's sun- and great fat bumblebees were busy already collecting pollen from a profusion of small pink and white blooms. Blackberries: Sadie surprised herself by dredging up the knowledge. They were blackberry flowers, and in a few months' time the bushes would be heavy with fruit. ~ Kate Morton

A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light. Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Take all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on you cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again. ~ Kenneth Rexroth

The sparrow flies south for the winter. ~ Derek Landy

I saw a robin redbreast in Central Park today, but it turned out to be a sparrow with an exit wound. ~ David Letterman

My pilot pointed to his left front and above, and looking in the direction he pointed, I saw a long dark brown form fairly streaking across the sky. We could see that it was a German machine, and when it got above and behind our middle machine, it dived on it for all the world like a huge hawk on a hapless sparrow. ~ James McCudden

I don't hate you, you're just the most annoying person in my life. ~ Rebecca Sparrow

Be like a sparrow aspiring to be an ostrich, and I'll be like a cowboy with no horse looking for a speedy land runner to ride. ~ Jarod Kintz

I don't have the answers. I don't know how this story will end. All I know is that there is a very real God whom my mother adores, and if she, in all her pain and suffering, can still radiate worship, how much more should I? He sees the little sparrow fall. He sees my mum dancing to the rhythms of his grace, and he sees me in all my anger trying to love him in spite of it all. So I will continue to trust, even if it means letting her go. ~ Emily T. Wierenga

I feel a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt. ~ Alice Walker

Be a sparrow, I told myself. Be silent and fly away. No one will bother you if you disappear. ~ Laura Whitcomb

Divination is a mirror, reflecting what is here and here," Kezia would tell her, pointing to Nettie's heart and head. Nettie nodded like a solemn student.

"Whatever the cards show you, always trust the words that well inside you. The truth is waiting to be heard. Never doubt it. ~ Gwendolyn Womack

I feel like saying something back to her. Something like, 'Eat hanger, bitch.' Except that Skeletor here doesn't look like she's eaten anything at all since last October. But I don't say anything, of course. Instead I stand there and take shit from someone who looks like a praying mantis in drag.
- Cat ~ Rebecca Sparrow

Are not two sparrows sold for only a penny? But not one of them falls to the ground without your Father knowing it. ~ Holy Bible Matthew 10 29

And in thy own sermon, thou
That the sparrow falls dost allow,
It shall not cause me any alarm;
For neither so comes the bird to harm,
Seeing our Father, thou hast said,
Is by the sparrow's dying bed;
Therefore it is a blessed place,
And the sparrow in high grace. ~ George MacDonald

The Fool in the Tarot deck frequently depicted a boy with a dog at his heels, staring at the sky while he walked blithely off a cliff, burdened only by a bundle on a stick. The diabolist had admitted a relationship to the card.

No single detail was quite right, but much as something might appear similar if one were to unfocus their vision…

The young diabolist walked with the sparrow at his shoulder, eyes on the windows without looking through the windows, walking forward as if he were afraid to stop. His burden here was the gas containers.

No, he was burdened not just by the gas containers, but by some notion of responsibility.

A man, when facing death, aspires to finish what he started.

What had the custodian of the Thorburn estate started? What drove him?

She knew he sought to do good and to vanquish evil, and she could surmise that both good acts and the existence of evil had touched him deeply.

The Fool card was akin to the ace. Depending on the game being played, it was often the lowest card or the highest. Valueless or highly valued. Powerless or powerful.

It all depended on context. He sought to kill the demon, and he would either catastrophically fail or succeed.

This Fool sought to slay the metaphorical dragon. He felt his own mortality, which was quite possibly her fault, in part, and now he rushed to finish the task he'd set for himself. To better the world.

Wildbow

When you marooned me on that God forsaken spit of land, you forgot one very important thing mate. I'm Captain Jack Sparrow. ~ Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio

As I watched the men throw more earth into the grave, I dug into the cold soil of my own mind, and it became suddenly clear - the way things always become clearer only after they have happened - that Ikenna was a fragile delicate bird; he was a sparrow. Little things could unbridle his soul. Wistful thoughts often combed his melancholic spirit in search of craters to be filled with sorrow. As a younger boy, he often sat in the backyard, brooding and contemplative, his arms clasped over his knees. He was highly critical of things, a part of him that greatly resembled Father. He nailed small things to big crosses and would ponder for long on a wrong word he said to someone; he greatly dreaded the reprove of others. He had no place for ironies or satires; they troubled him. ~ Chigozie Obioma

Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn't Susan's fault that she was only a corncob.

Sometimes Mary let Laura hold Nettie, but she only did it when Susan couldn't see. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

Complications arose, ensued, were overcome ~ Jack Sparrow

A sparrow's heart beats four hundred and sixty times a minute. A man's, just seventy-eight. But sometimes, at night, my heart approached sparrow speed. This happened when the darkness crept into my bed and wrapped itself around my feet. ~ Jenny Offill

I have always known
that you will visit my grave.
I see myself as a small brown bird,
perhaps a sparrow, watching you
from a low branch as you pray
in front of my name.
I will hear you
sound out my epitaph: Aqui descansa
una mujer que quiso volar.
You will recall telling me
that you once dreamed in Spanish,
and felt the words
lift you into flight.
The sound of wings
will startle you when you say "volar,"
and you will understand. ~ Judith Ortiz Cofer

Who would attempt to fly with the tiny wings of a sparrow when the mighty power of an eagle has been given him ~ Kenneth Wapnick

Hardy's poetry is pre-eminently about ways of seeing. This is evident in the numerous angles of vision he employs in so many poems. Sometimes it involves creating a picture, as in 'Snow in the Suburbs', which allows the eye to follow the cascading snow set off by a sparrow alighting on a tree; or it employs the camera effect, as in 'On the Departure Platform', which tracks the gradually diminishing form and disappearance of a muslin-gowned girl among those boarding the train. However, Hardy is also a poet of social observation. His humanistic sympathies emerge in a variety of poems drawing upon his experience of both Dorset and London. ~ Geoffrey Harvey

Quickly, I slid into the rifts between stars. I imagined the space as a sphere bedizened with little astral ornaments, and soon those heavy celestial bodies became small as candies held in one's palms. The thread easily looped them together.
I grinned, turning to Amar. Between us was a sphere thick with stars and around us twined soft shadows like cats weaving between ankles.
"Magnificent," he said.
His gaze was full of awe, but I saw something else in his eyes. Longing. Then, he reached into the sphere, drawing out the string with the three stars. He twisted them between his hands, fashioning a constellation no larger than a sparrow. Amar stepped forward, sliding the stars above my ear. It cast a glow that turned his face silvery and beautiful.
"There, my queen," he said. "A constellation to wear in your hair. ~ Roshani Chokshi

I just asked the Psychic Lettuce what my future holds, and it said, 'You will live alone with sixty guinea pigs. And they will all be called Peter'. ~ Rebecca Sparrow