Roadside Quotes

I've given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho. ~ Douglas Coupland

If your name is Alex Andrew Aaron, and you are a straight-A student, is it because your initials are AAA, because your first middle, and last names are all first names, or because a business named after your initials offers 24-hour roadside assistance? Most likely the answer is none of the above, and in all likelihood you are a cheat and a fraud. Your last name couldn't possibly be Aaron, because I don't believe you have a last name. And not only do you not have a last name, but I seriously doubt whether you even exist. ~ Jarod Kintz

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. ~ Walt Whitman

Life must be poetry, a song, a dance, like a flower on the roadside, blossoming for no one in particular, but spreading its fragrance in the wind, and sending it anywhere. ~ Lao-Tzu

Blast him," Ronan hissed as they surveyed the empty space behind the roadside shop. "He may tell us not to treat him as a prince, but he cannot stop acting like one. He does as he pleases."
"Only when it's in my best interests," Tyrus said as he rounded the shop.
Ronan glowered. "Which is anytime you don't like what you're told to do."
Tyrus grinned. "True. ~ Kelley Armstrong

We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos. ~ Bob Barker

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:
we hug our little destiny again.
-Whatever You Say Say Nothing ~ Seamus Heaney

I remember every player - every single one - who wore the Tennessee orange, a shade that our rivals hate, a bold, aggravating color that you can usually find on a roadside crew, "or in a correctional institution," as my friend Wendy Larry jokes. But to us the color is a flag of pride, because it identifies us as Lady Vols and therefore as women of an unmistakable type. Fighters. I remember how many of them fought for a better life for themselves. I just met them halfway. ~ Pat Summitt

At the very time that Congress is considering a Bush administration request to equip our troops in Iraq with vehicles that are more resistant to roadside bombs, its leadership is fighting for a proposal that would have the opposite effect on roads here at home: a measure sought by environmentalists that would force automakers to make vehicles sold domestically much lighter and, thus, more vulnerable in collisions. ~ Deneen Borelli

I'm convinced that her obsession with Jesus was far more romantic than spiritual. I think she was actually attracted to him. I sincerely thought that one day while out on a grocery run, she would find some skinny, bearded, out-of-work Foote guy on the side of the road and, convinced that he was our anorexic Son of God, rescue him and head for some unincorporated Christian town in the middle of Illinois with a bingo hall and lots of roadside crucifixes, never to return. ~ Adam Rapp

Getting up quite late in the morning, going and trying to clean my bikes - I have quite a few of them in Ranchi - spending some time with my family, my parents and friends. Going out for rides with my friends and having lunch or dinner at a roadside hotel - that's my favourite time-pass. These are the sort of things that really excite me. ~ Mahendra Singh Dhoni

On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
"A Time to Break Silence," at Riverside Church ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner - financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy - so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared.When he retired, he reached new levels of preparedness, so his car contained bottled water, hand wipes, a roadside emergency kit with flares, books on tape, a coin dispenser, and two hand towels to use as makeshift bibs so he and my mother could drive and eat without making a mess. ~ Jancee Dunn

I had joked about my bones being found by the roadside. Notify the four winds. Up here i might never be found. Keen-eyed vultures would pick the bones clean. Wind and rain would bleach them and in time they'd dissolve into the earth.
I looked up, and a gust of wind swirled the mist, and i saw that glint of gold, so close now, just up ahead. one last effort, to haul and drag myself up over ragged rocks, and at last I stood, breath rasping, limbs shaking, my body one long ache, covered in grime and thick greasy sweat, in front of Hakuyu's cave. The patch of colour I'd seen was a simple bamboo blind, yellowed with age, and painted on it was the outline of a dragon, and the dragon's eye was a dot of gold. That was what had led me all this way. ~ Alan Spence

As far as my part in it is concerned, it began one night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, murky coal-hole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (IF YOU DUCK THE DRAKE YOUR A GOOSE!! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, sure enough, declare the presence inside of one 'Little Enis,' and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar, flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed! ~ Ed McClanahan

Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled. ~ Tom Robbins

Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside. ~ O. Henry

And I thought kitty liter was the unlawful practice of discarding small felines along the roadside. ~ Robert J. Morrissette

On our way home we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside. It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair ~ Agota Kristf

Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station. ~ Mira Jacob

I liked taking the elements of roadside advertising out of context because it removes the imperative and just goes to the essence of it - the pure heart of advertising. ~ Stanley Donwood

It was a Different Time. People were Friendly. We trusted each other. Hell, you could afford to get mixed up with wild strangers in those days
without fearing for your life, or your eyes, or your organs, or all of your money, or even getting locked up in prison forever. There was a sense of possibility. People were not so afraid, as they are now. You could run around naked without getting shot. You could check into a roadside motel on the outskirts of Ely or Winnemucca or Elko where you were lost in a midnight rainstorm
and nobody called the police on you, just to check out your credit and your employment history and your medical records and how many parking tickets you owed in California. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

A high-speed collision gave a new sense of sight
To me
And now my vision can render the scene
A blurry image of wreckage and roadside debris
Happiness returned to me
Through a grave emergency ~ Owl City

A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder. ~ Dylan Thomas

Pure truth," I said. "You are my bright penny by the roadside. You are worth more than salt or the moon on a long night of walking. You are sweet wine in my mouth, a song in my throat, and laughter in my heart. [ ... ] "You are too good for me," I said, "You are a luxury I cannot afford. Despite this, I insist you come with me today. I will buy you dinner and spend hours waxing rhapsodic
over the vast landscape of wonder that is you." [ ... ] "I will play you music. I will sing you songs. For the rest of the afternoon, the rest of the world cannot touch us. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Don't step off the road --- There might be another one! ~ James McGarrity

You should indeed have longer tarried By the roadside before you married. ~ Walter Savage Landor

She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear. ~ Tom Robbins

What's really important is the essence of the life lived. A college degree isn't going to tell me how well somebody lived, now is it? Does having a boat mean you lived a good life? Or a summerhouse? What about saving each valentine your son made or even working a roadside jam stand? A million, what do they call it? - selfies - on some silly website. What does it all mean, in the end? ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Happiness is a roadside flower growing on the highways of usefulness; plucked, it shall wither in thy hand; passed by, it is fragrance to thy spirit. Trample the thyme beneath thy feet; be useful, be happy. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real. ~ George MacDonald

Las Vegas is Everymans cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperors orgy is now a democratic institution. Topless Pizza Lunch. ~ Alistair Cooke

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting.
Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too ~ Fernando Pessoa

Through the Malala Fund, I decided to advocate for the education of Syrian refugees in Jordan. I went to the Syrian border and witnessed scores of refugees fleeing into Jordan. They had walked through the desert to get there with just the clothes on their backs. Many children had no shoes. I broke down and cried as I witnessed their suffering. In the refugee settlements most of the children were not going to school. Sometimes there was no school. Sometimes it was unsafe to walk to school. And sometimes children were working instead of being educated because their father had been killed. I saw many children on the roadside in this hot, hot weather, asking for work, such as carrying heavy stones, in order to feed their families. I just felt such pain in my heart. What is their sin, what have they done that they've had to migrate? Why are these innocent children suffering such hardship? Why are they deprived of school and a peaceful environment? ~ Malala Yousafzai

I love to close my eyes a moment and think of the land outside, white under the mingled snow and moonlight--the heaps of stones by the roadside white--snow in the furrows. Mon Dieu! How quiet and how patient! ~ Katherine Mansfield

I don't know of any wrestler who hasn't, at one time or another, been with a fan. One time I met a woman at a match in Tennessee, and afterward we went to a little roadside motel. We checked in, went to the room, and enjoyed each other for an hour or so. ~ Jerry Lawler

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus - the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant - and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. ~ David Foster Wallace

I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father's ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph. ~ Gloria Steinem

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. ~ Jeffrey K. Smith

The ocean to my right was maroon, the sky above it silver. There were sand trails through the thick purple ice plant that grew along the roadside ... but now the sky is the color of peaches ...
It was a ball of bright saffron sinking into the sea, turning the water purple, the sky orange and green. ~ Andre Dubus III

And in the evening, everywhere
Along the roadside, up and down,
I see the golden torches flare
Like lighted street-lamps in the town. ~ Frank Dempster Sherman

A man who had fallen among thieves lay by the roadside on his back dressed in fifteenthrate ideas wearing a round jeer for a hat ~ E. E. Cummings

Ella isn't like other little girls. She's inquisitive and curious, with a heart that senses others' emotions with the precision of Doppler radar. She drops coins from her piggy bank into the outstretched hands of the homeless in Times Square, frets over the plight of hurt animals on the roadside, and two Christmases ago, organized a coat drive at her school when she saw a little boy shivering on the playground. ~ Sarah Jio

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.

We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.

The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.

My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation---in the shadow of a dim delight.

The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.

At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Grief is a funny thing because you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life. After a bit you set it down by the roadside and walk on and leave it. ~ Rosamunde Pilcher

Cattle liked to stand on the roadside at night and would suddenly step out into the paths of oncoming cars, almost as if they were curious to find out what lay behind the headlights. Perhaps they thought that the headlights were torches, held by their owners, and came out to see if they brought food; perhaps they were looking for warmth and thought the lights were the sun. Perhaps they thought nothing in particular, which was always possible with cattle, and with some people too, for that matter. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

And he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day. M ~ Neil Gaiman

During the season, they saw each other and played together almost every day. At the aunt's request, seconded by Professor Valérius, Daaé consented to give the young viscount some violin lessons. In this way, Raoul learned to love the same airs that had charmed Christine's childhood. They also both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends; and their favorite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:
"Ma'am..." or, "Kind gentleman... have you a little story to tell us, please?"
And it seldom happened that they did not have one "given" them; for nearly every old Breton grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the "korrigans" dance by moonlight on the heather.
But their great treat was, in the twilight, in the great silence of the evening, after the sun had set in the sea, when Daaé came and sat down by them on the roadside and in a low voice, as though fearing lest he should frighten the ghosts whom he loved, told them the legends of the land of the North. And, the moment he stopped, the children would ask for more.
There was one story that began:
"A king sat in a little boat on one of those deep still lakes that open like a bright eye in the midst of the Norwegian mountains..."
And another:
"Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun's rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes. She wheedled her mother, was kind to ~ Gaston Leroux

Then we are nothing to him,' said the merchant, sorrow brimming in his eyes. 'I surrendered everything, all my wealth, for yet another indifferent god. If he cannot protect us, what is the point?'

She wished that she had an answer to such questions. Were these not the very grist of priestly endeavours? To grind out palatable answers, to hint of promising paths to true salvation? To show a benign countenance gifted by god-given wisdom, glowing as if fanned by sacred breath? 'It is my feeling,' she said, haltingly, 'that a faith that delivers perfect answers to every question is not a true faith, for its only purpose is to satisfy, to ease the mind and so end its questing.' She held up a hand to still the objections she saw awakened among these six honest, serious believers. 'Is it for faith to deliver peace, when on all sides inequity thrives? For it shall indeed thrive, when the blessed walk past blissfully blind, content in their own moral purity, in the peace filling their souls. Oh, you might then reach out a hand to the wretched by the roadside, offering them your own footprints, and you may see the blessed burgeon in number, grow into a multitude, until you are as an army. But there will be, will ever be, those who turn away from your hand. The ones who quest because it is in their nature to quest, who fear the seduction of self-satisfaction, who mistrust easy answers. Are these ones then to be your enemy? Does the army grow angered now? Does it strike out at ~ Steven Erikson

Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside ~ Anne Sexton

There were no fences at all by the roadside now, and the land was rough and untilled. Toward evening they came to a great forest, where the trees grew so big and close together that their branches met over the road of yellow brick. It was almost dark under the trees, for the branches shut out the daylight; but the travelers did not stop, and went on into the forest. ~ L. Frank Baum

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

We saw rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at intervals, and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which obtained in Jacob's time. There were no walls, no fences, no hedges - nothing to secure a man's possessions but these random heaps of stones. The Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal times, and these other Arabs, their lineal descendants, do so likewise. An American, of ordinary intelligence, would soon widely extend his property, at an outlay of mere manual labor, performed at night, under so loose a system of fencing as this. ~ Mark Twain

For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed. ~ Lorrie Moore

I would need ... daisy love, you know, pretty love, sweet love that nonetheless was ubiquitous in roadside ditches in the summertime, and instead I would get orchid love. Love that needed misting and replanting and pruning and fertilizing and died anyway. ~ Mary Ann Rivers

Some of you may feel that if you don't do something soon to change your life, you will be left by the roadside, alone, homeless and in despair. But is the despair not there as you reach and grapple to create or manifest your desires through your own effort and will? What happens if or when those things appear in your life? Joy? Peace? Or a temporary sense of relief?

What if it is relief from the wanting you have been craving for so long, not the outcome, but the relief from the constant wanting. ~ Kelly Martin

On Translating Eugene Onegin


1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.


2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Buried how long?"
The answer was always the same: "Almost eighteen years."
You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
Long ago."
You know that you are recalled to life?"
They tell me so."
I hope that you care to live?"
I can't say."
Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?"
The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken reply was, "Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon." Sometimes it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, "Take me to her." Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, "I don't know her. I don't understand."
After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig, and dig, dig – to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fall away to dust. The passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the reality of mist and rain on his cheek.
Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge of the roadside retreating by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train of night shadows within. Out of the midst in them, a ghostly face would rise, and he would accost it again.
Buried how long?"
Almost eighteen years."
I hope you care to live?"
I can't say."
Dig – dig – dig – until an impatient movement from one of the two pas ~ Charles Dickens

The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy's central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash. ~ Nancy Isenberg

Wherever there is a large motorway enabling the transport of ton after ton of German goods, you will inevitably find a sweet little rabbit trembling by the roadside. ~ Timur Vermes

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt. ~ Joy Kogawa

O Canada I have not forgotten you,
as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead on
the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that,
you are the two boys with pails walking along that road. ~ Billy Collins

I like to move forward and notice things along the roadside that indicate where I should go. ~ Josh Homme

There are a lot of car bombs and roadside bombs, house bombs, even, in this city planted by ISIS. So - but it's going to be a tough fight ahead, and the Iraqi generals expect to take the city back, the city of Ramadi, by mid-January. ~ Tom Bowman

As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think. ~ Wendell Berry

You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it. ~ Robert Plant

Dear God, she was getting turned on in the middle of a roadside emergency. This had to stop. ~ Miranda Liasson

A legal noose still encircled their necks and they couldn't seem to shake it off. Lacey assured the couple he would treat them kindly while they served out the final years of their contract. However, on the trip to St. Louis, they quickly saw that they had, once again, stumbled into a trap. Lacey treated them so badly that the couple decided they had only one move left - they would run. In 1804, they fled into Kentucky, Antoine taking the name Ben. No doubt they hoped to reach Ohio or some other free territory. However, Antoine's wife, drained and exhausted, collapsed by the roadside. While cradled in the arms of the man she loved, she died. ~ Betty DeRamus

We're nothing but meat, and if circumstances allow, we'll end up no different than a possum lying on the roadside. ~ Kevin Hazzard

The Song of the Defeated
My master has bid me while I stand at the roadside,
to sing the song of Defeat,
for that is the bride whom He woos in secret.
She has put on the dark veil,
hiding her face from the crowd,
but the jewel glows on her breast in the dark.
She is forsaken of the day,
and God's night is waiting for her with its lamps lighted and flowers wet with dew.
She is silent with her eyes downcast;
she has left her home behind her,
from her home has come that wailing in the wind.
But the stars are singing the love-song of the eternal to a face sweet with shame and suffering.
The door has been opened in the lonely chamber,
the call has sounded,
and the heart of the darkness throbs with awe
because of the coming tryst. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Nietzsche said 'What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger,'" Jim said to me as we slogged along another trash-strewn roadside." "Yeah, right," I said. "How about radiation? ~ Will McIntosh

The rain had ripened all the country around and the roadside grass was luminous and green from the run-off and flowers were in bloom across the open country. He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies ... and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia. ~ William James

The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts. ~ Rudy Rucker

Sometimes we cannot see and don't want to see because we are blinded. We need eye salve to put on our eyes. We cry out for revival, and yet God says, "I want to open your eyes so you can see what is before you. Revival has a face and a name. It lies bleeding on the roadside." If we want to see revival, we need to begin with the one in front of us. ~ Heidi Baker

In the case of a single nineteen year old infantry soldier mangled in the devastating blast of a carefully laid roadside bomb, some fifty or even sixty years of exigent torment - some 500,000 hours of constant, inescapable misery - has been created out of virtually nothing, far exceeding the total output of brutal (albeit dazzling) terror felt by another less fortunate soldier in the seconds before his body is irreparably torn apart by shrapnel and his life is extinguished on a poorly defined battlefield, his account closed forever. ~ John Zande

Everything was pleasant and friendly on this journey; conversations were warm and cordial, everything, a little old church where at one time the faithful had prayed, a ruin of a wall on a mountain where at one time powerful ruling families had held sway, a tree standing alone on a hill, a cottage by the roadside with the sun shining on it, all these acquired a distinctively gentle charm and significance. ~ Adalbert Stifter

And there, far ahead of me, running by the side of the road, a human. The low sun stretched his shadow out one hundred times taller than him. Cole St. Clair, running alongside the wolves, side-stepping debris on the roadside every so often and sometimes jumping the ditch for a few strides and then back again. He held his arms out for balance as he leaped, unself-conscious, like a boy. There was something so fiercely big about the gesture of Cole running with the wolves that it made the last thing I said to him ring in my ears. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I learned that my new lover was hard, but always good. She did not tease. If you pursued her, she would reveal her sweetest secrets and uncover her hidden places. Yes, she would grant those who came to her by car a measured beauty. There were wonderful things to be seen from the road. Her lesser suitors would jump out of their autos, snapping pictures, trying to save memories before having them, and hurry on. But what can be seen from a road is more enticing than revealing – like a shapely woman whose fleshly mystery cannot be hidden by modest garments but is made more alluring. From the roadside her eyes would invite and challenge: "Will you pursue me?" I did. And though my pursuit cost me a lot – pain, humiliation, hunger and sleepless nights – she was good. ~ Martin McCorkle

In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest
usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation
and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside. ~ John Millington Synge

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings. ~ Martin Filler

I know. If I want to make you happy, it won't be through gifts like these. Rather than the rose raised in the greenhouse, you prefer the primrose found by the roadside. For Christmas, a heartfelt card. But I can't help wanting to give you all sorts of things. Because I want to see you looking happy every day. ~ Mizue Tani

It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn't speak in clichés. And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall any day. ~ Neil Gaiman

Why uproot
a perfectly healthy
white blazing star
from the soil
to allow room
for a roadside weed? ~ Stephanie Hemphill

Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness. ~ Zadie Smith

Then she rooted around until she found the bathroom medicine cabinet. It used to contain a bottle of aspirin. Now it contained her scream from the time she was bitten by a llama at a roadside petting zoo in Manitoba. ~ Ian Tregillis

Time has a way of evening things out, the simple ways endure, and the fancy pants with his smart new way falls by the roadside. The best way to tell how long a thing will last is ask how long it's been around for. The newest things end soonest. And things that have been around for a good long while will last awhile to come. ~ Marcel Theroux

Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: 'CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What could it all be about? 'As one victim to another,' his body language seems to marvel, 'What's a mushroom done to deserve that kind of abuse?' Not even in the worst days of street-fighting did he ever experience ill-treatment on this scale. ~ Alexander Masters

If it is not my portion to meet thee in this life then let me ever feel that I have missed thy sight
let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.
As my days pass in the crowded market of this world and my hands grow full with the daily profits, let me ever feel that I have gained nothing
let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.
When I sit by the roadside, tired and panting, when I spread my bed low in the dust, let me ever feel that the long journey is still before me
let me not forget a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours.
When my rooms have been decked out and the flutes sound and the laughter there is loud, let me ever feel that I have not invited thee to my house
let me not forget for a moment, let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams and in my wakeful hours. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

I'll lay a bet," said Sancho, "that before long there won't be a tavern, roadside inn, hostelry, or barber's shop where the story of our doings won't be painted up; but I'd like it painted by the hand of a better painter than painted these." "Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him what he was painting, used to say, 'Whatever it may turn out'; and if he chanced to paint a cock he would write under it, 'This is a cock,' for fear they might think it was a fox." - Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote ~ Michael Gruber

Brave young women complete heroic acts everyday, with no one bearing witness. This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story the made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet feats of courage. And to introduce them to the young women like Kamila Sidiqi who will go on. No matter what. ~ Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Under Stars

The sleep of this night deepens

because I have walked coatless from the house

carrying the white envelope.

All night it will say one name

in its little tin house by the roadside.


I have raised the metal flag

so its shadow under the roadlamp

leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes.

Now I will walk back

thinking of the few lights still on

in the town a mile away.


In the yellowed light of a kitchen

the millworker has finished his coffee,

his wife has laid out the white slices of bread

on the counter. Now while the bed they have left

is still warm, I will think of you, you

who are so far away

you have caused me to look up at the stars.


Tonight they have not moved

from childhood, those games played after dark.

Again I walk into the wet grass

toward the starry voices. Again, I

am the found one, intimate, returned

by all I touch on the way. ~ Tess Gallagher

Dr. Martin Luther King put it like this: "We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside . . . but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved."23 ~ Shane Claiborne

Well I walk right on up to your rebel roadside
The one that rambles on for a million miles
Yes I walk down this road searchin' for your love
And my soul too
When I find ya I ain't gonna let go. ~ Jimi Hendrix

one kept me informed on Dad's progress. Or lack of progress. Or how serious it all was - is. You certainly didn't, darling." Yet, was this true? Vaguely I seemed to know that my father was not doing well for some time. Driving on our country roads you see the carcasses of animals - raccoons, deer - lying at the roadside, killed ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Because life should be as simple as a bucket of fish caught a few miles offshore and a van full of produce bought at a roadside stand. It should be as sweet as a cube of melon the color of your heart. ~ Natalie Baszile

Do you think Radiohead is my whole goddamn life? I also have a roadside cart where I sell apples and mincemeat pies. ~ Thom Yorke

For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower ~ Gregory Maguire