Roost Quotes

I don't know if this is a true statistic, but I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That's what we got from the women's movement. The chickens have come home to roost. ~ Jack Nicholson

Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad. ~ Malcolm X

It is a wise provision that youth cannot see what it owes the previous generation. This is a chicken that comes back to roost in heavier years. ~ Miles Franklin

Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep. Gentlemen ~ Charles Dickens

The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there's a clatter of wings. We both look up. There's a pigeon, a woodpigeon, sailing down to roost in a lime tree above us. Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It's as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes her neck. This. This flightpath. This thing, she thinks. This is fascinating. Some part of the hawk's young brain has just worked something out, and it has everything to do with death. ~ Helen Macdonald

. . . the only legitimate reason that kingship is not attractive to us is because in this age and this world the only kings available are finite and sinful. Listen to C. S. Lewis describe why he believes in democracy:

A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true. . . I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. . . . The real reason for democracy is . . . Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.1

If there could be a king who is not limited in his wisdom and power and goodness and love for his subjects, then monarchy would be the best of all governments. If such a ruler could ever rise in the world - with no weakness, no folly, no sin - then no wise and humble person would ever want democracy again.

The question is not whether God broke into the universe as a king. He did. The question is: What kind of king is he? What difference would his kingship make for you? ~ John Piper

Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In the oven made by the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked himself dryer than usual; and he has in his thirsty mind his mellowed port-wine half a century old. ~ Charles Dickens

In Bonoboville, the females gently but firmly rule the roost, keeping the males gentle and firm ~ Susan Block

Plan harm for another and harm yourself most, The evil we hatch always comes home to roost. ~ Hesiod

Indeed, this was the problem with lying to intimates, he thought. The untruths always came home to roost and never in a way that justified the falsity, however small or large it had been. Because, in fact, there was never a justification to lie to someone who loved you. ~ J.R. Ward

Dad was a very gentle, sweet man. Mum was the matriarch and the patriarch of the family. She ran the roost with a steel fist, but at the same time there was respect and love for her. ~ Tony Scott

The only things that moved in the neighbourhood were bits and bobs of bafflingly pointless machinery, whittling the hours busily doing nothing. Waiting to be freed from flesh. It was an oppressive reality come home to roost. This house here contained dead people. And that one, and that one there. The same all the way down the block, horrible, inexplicable, and so quiet. ~ B.P. Gregory

There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage. ~ Barbara Lazear Ascher

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, "There is always a day of reckoning." The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits - ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human's life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting. ~ Donald Van De Mark

O thou who art the sparrow's friend," he said, "have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen ~ Frederick Buechner

I have to think that I think it's always been a horse race between this administration's temporary political acumen and their completely, utterly, totally bankrupt policies. And they're coming home to roost. It was always a question of time. These guys aren't conservative. These guys are radicals. ~ Bradley Whitford

London is a roost for every bird. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.
I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.
The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true ... I find that they're not true without looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation ...
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters. ~ C.S. Lewis

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. ~ Christopher Hitchens

My big goal in life was always to figure out how I can make a lot of money so I can go off and make films irrespective of the opinion of the three or four critics who seem to rule the roost. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

According to Melissa Mailey, we now live in a world where kings and noblemen rule the roost. And they've turned all of central Europe - our home, now, ours and our children's to come - into a raging inferno. We are surrounded by a Ring of Fire. Well, I've fought forest fires before. So have lots of other men in this room. The best way to fight [such] a fire is to start a counterfire. So my position is simple. I say we start the American Revolution - a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule! ~ Michael Stearns

I looked up then, out the far window, and there, just within sight, the sun was going down across the river. It was dull red, no longer shining over the land, its ray brought home to roost, contained within its sphere. The sky was streaked with lavendar, a pulsing pale blue, purple and smudged pink and orange melding into one another all the way to the horizon. ~ Jane Hamilton

the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face. . . . What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson. ~ Christopher Hitchens

But I am thinking now of your favorite of whom you have talked to me sometimes, and read me, too, some of his letters, of Mozart. How was it with him in his day? Who controlled things in his times and ruled the roost and gave the tone and counted for something? Was it Mozart or the business people, Mozart or the average man? And in what fashion did he come to die and be buried? And perhaps, I mean, it has always been the same and always will be ... Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. ~ Hermann Hesse

Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost. ~ David Cronenberg

Mother of heaven…" Rachel breathed as she crouched next to Notak in the darkness of their roost across the street. "You said this place was guarded, not that it was entrenched. Faul, that's not a warehouse, that's a garrison that likes to hold crates in its spare time! ~ S.G. Night

When I started to my roost, Jake grabbed my arm, pulling me against him. "Sleep with me," he whispered in my ear.
I jerked away, ready to launch into a tirade for him playing on my emotions to put the moves on me when the tormented expression on his face stopped me cold.
He stared pleadingly into my eyes. "I'm still so fucking scared, Angel. I need someone just to hold tonight so I won't be alone. ~ Katie Ashley

It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough ... As Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledging grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. ~ Seamus Heaney

Curses are like chickens, they always come home to roost. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I've gone from being a brilliant captain of a TV soccer team to an average rugby player on a real team. I've gotten so used to ruling the roost and just saying whatever the hell I wanted, and I had to get back to reality. ~ Tanc Sade

Our avian brothers are back to roost on the first leg of their annual sojourn south. Why them and not us? Maybe it's because we humans are meant to be rooted in one spot. ~ Mitchell Burgess

The first to wave the white flag was America when they elected a new president.
The second was the American people for forgetting where their ancestors came from.
The third was congress for letting racism rule the roost. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

If you want to have more options as an actor, you just need to watch your weight, and I've ignored that fact for several years quite happily. Now the chicks have come home to roost. ~ Cherry Jones

When you get back, I finally wrote, let's lay ourselves down in the fields outside, and sleep there for the night, whatever the weather. We'll let the crows roost on our shoulders and skulls, let them nudge our necks with their wings, and pick at our earlobes, nibbling all the rotten bits out of us until we're nothing more than sinew, bone, and teeth. Until we're so pure, you can see right through us down to the roots and dirt. Until even our memories are eaten alive. ~ Tiffany Baker

You have failed,' they said.
'No, no, I am not yet finished.'
So they waited while I continued,
persistent, knowing life was ongoing.
Failure cannot roost in a soul that refuses to remain at rest. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The country was passing through turbulent times. British Raj was on its last legs. The World War had sucked the juice out of the British economy. Britain neither had the resources nor the will to hold on to a country the size of India. Sensing the British weakness and lack of resources to rule, different leagues of Indians sniffed different destinies in the air following the imminent exit of the British: a long stretch of Nehru Raj, Hindu Raj extending from Kashmir to Kerala not seen since Emperor Ashoka in third-century BCE before the emperor himself renounced Hinduism and turned a non-violent Buddhist, a Muslim-majority state carved out of two shoulders of India with a necklace-like corridor running through her bosom along Grand Trunk Road, balkanisation of the country with princes ruling the roost, and total chaos.
From August 1946 onwards, chaos appeared to be the most likely destiny as it spurted in Bengal, Bihar, and United Provinces, ending in the carnage of minority communities at every place.
The predicament of British government was how to cut their losses and run without many British casualties before the inevitable chaos spread to the whole country.
The predicament of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, was how to achieve his dream of Muslim-majority Pakistan carved out of India before his imminent demise from tuberculosis he suffered from, about which - apart from his doctor - only a handful of his closest relations and friends ~ Manjit Sachdeva

A gourmet can tell from the flavor whether a woodcock's leg is the one on which the bird is accustomed to roost. ~ Lucius Beebe

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Gipsies, who every ill can cure,
Except the ill of being poor
Who charms 'gainst love and agues sell,
Who can in hen-roost set a spell,
Prepar'd by arts, to them best known
To catch all feet except their own,
Who, as to fortune, can unlock it,
As easily as pick a pocket. ~ Charles Churchill

What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience. ~ Henry Rollins

For now," Amelie said. "Take her home. And
"
"Say nothing
yes, yes, I heard you the first seven hundred times," Myrnin said, much too sharply. "I'm ancient. I'm not deaf. "
Amelie's cold expression deepened, and her gray eyes took on an unpleasant reddish glitter. "Do you think I find this a joking matter?"
"Maybe you should," he said. "And maybe you should have cut off the old man's head when you had the chance. Absolutely no one would have argued with that choice. Merely walling him up, to increase his suffering and create an example
that was unmerciful, and, worse, it was sloppy. I believe that flapping sound you hear is pigeons, coming home to roost. ~ Rachel Caine

No wonder Philippe always looked so exhausted," he said ruefully when he was through. "It's very fatiguing pretending you're in charge when your wife actually rules the roost. ~ Deborah Harkness

I've been so mistreated by male authority in my life that I had a terrible time in my marriage trying to be a submissive wife. I wanted to rule the roost in everything. And it wasn't even really that I was rebellious; I was afraid of being hurt. And I think that a lot of people that choose these alternative lifestyles, I think it's because they've been hurt somewhere along the line very badly. ~ Joyce Meyer

My traveller friends and I came home to roost about midnight and before turning into sleep had coffee in the lounge ... There was a group of Iranian refugees squatting on the floor not far from us, and I could see that one of them was eavesdropping on our conversation. Presently he came over.

'You talk ghosts,' he said, 'Please may we come and listen to your talk? ~ J. Aelwyn Roberts

Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon's ark was James Andrew Manallace - a darkish, slow northerner of a type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. ("Dayspring Mishandled") ~ Rudyard Kipling

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. ~ Annie Dillard

Curses, like chickens, come home to roost. ~ Susanna Moodie

Every threat to an endogroup results in increased violence towards its own weakest members, the negative image. All externally directed atrocities eventually come home to roost, including genocide. ~ Heather Marsh

Today, the growers are like a punch-drunk old boxer who doesn't know he's past his prime. The times are changing. The political and social environment has changed. The chickens are coming home to roost - and the time to account for past sins is approaching. ~ Cesar Chavez

An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other - when language is not the basis of the communication that shapes our being - the only outcome can be fragmentation. In that sense, postmodernism is modernity come home to roost. ~ Colin E. Gunton

Tis a fact I've learned all too well that words cast out in the light of day, like doves, oft come home to roost in the darkest hours.
-Christopher ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

There's prejudice everywhere. I don't think the music industry is as bad as the movie industry. But I have taken a few hits over the years for my sexuality, and for being honest about my life. In the end, it's the music that rules the roost. ~ Rufus Wainwright

In the annals of science fiction, where dystopias rule the imaginative roost, Star Trek stood nearly alone in telling us that our future would be better than our past, that our common problems would be solved, that we, as a species, were fundamentally good, and that the universe would reward us for our goodness. ~ Charles Shaar Murray

Were floods of tears to be unloosed In tribute to my grief, The doves of Noah ne'er had roost Nor found an olive-leaf. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost. ~ Jeremiah Wright

Here, what do you know of madness and despair?'

'There are no such things. All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. ~ Joseph Conrad

The Bank [of Scotland] had tried to sell itself to a company run by TV evangelist Pat Robertson. That deal fell through, perhaps because it transpired that Mr Robertson believed that Scotland was 'a dark land' where 'homosexuals ruled the roost'. ~ Alistair Darling

I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Who better to raise Prince Rhaegar's infant son than Prince Rhaegar's dear friend Jon Connington, once Lord of Griffin's Roost and Hand of the King? ~ George R R Martin

Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' gold
And like the sky my soul is also turnin'
Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind ~ Ray Lamontagne

Is that a fact, Miss Georgia Cracker? Maybe a gentleman does, but not a cowboy. The only time a real cowboy removes his hat is for a funeral, a wedding, or church. A cowboy likes to keep his hat close by in case he needs to get out in a real hurry. That thing you call a hat on your head is big enough for two barnyard owls to roost in. ~ Maggie Brendan

Curse away! And let me tell thee, Beausant, a wise proverb The Arabs have,-"Curses are like young chickens, And still come home to roost." ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I used to be a gibber-poet. . . . assemblages of appropriated text from cereal box side panels. I'd spell every third word backwards to foreground the slipping signification of say, riboflavin, dextrose, whatever - the arbitrariness of the act is what charges the work with politically subversive anti-hegemonic gender inspecificity. Once you implode the ingredients hierarchy you've eradicated the implicit privileging of the phallocentric socio-economic taxonomy. The whole banana to slip . . . into pro-metaphoric usage is so de-centered you can bet your boots they won't be recon-deconstructing Sugar-Frosted Flakes again till the cows some home to roost. ~ James W. Blinn

It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now. ~ David Attenborough

We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing, the fences of our own backyards, and have stood amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, every limb of the dead oak feathered black; and I cut the engine let the river grab the jon boat and pull it toward the tree ... Then as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time its soft countenance the raw fleshy jowls, wrinkled and generous like the faces of the very old who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, reluctant, looking back at their roost, calling them what they are- transfiguring angels who pray over the leaf graves of the anonymous lost with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings. ~ David Bottoms

Evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost. ~ Aesop

The grass is always greener on the other side. We are busy applying fairness creams while people in the West go bare-bodied on the beach to get a tan. Indian girls have ruled the roost when it comes to beauty pageants. I flaunt my complexion, and I am proud to be noticed as an Indian wherever I go. ~ Shilpa Shetty

What is a potto?"
"It is a little furry creature that sleeps all day with its head between its legs and then walks about very, very slowly all night, high in the trees, slowly eating leaves and creeping up on birds as they roost and eating them too. ~ Patrick O'Brian