Tawakkal Lawn Quotes

Waiting for God"


This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air's memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.

This deliberate day eased
past the calendar and waited. Patiently
the sun instructed the shadows how to move;
it held them, guided their gradual defining.
In the great quiet I carried my life on,
in again, out again. ~ William Stafford

One legged veterans will greet the dawn, and they're whistling marches as they mow the lawn, and the gargoyles on sit and grieve. ~ Phil Ochs

Meridian


First daylight on the bittersweet-hung
sleeping porch at high summer; dew
all over the lawn, sowing diamond-
point-highlighted shadows;
the hired man's shadow revolving
along the walk, a flash of milkpails
passing; no threat in sight, no hint
anywhere in the universe, of that

apathy at the meridian, the noon
of absolute boredom; flies
crooning black lullabies in the kitchen,
milk-soured crocks, cream separator
still unwashed; what is there to life
but chores and more chores, dishwater,
fatigue, unwanted children; nothing
to stir the longueur of afternoon

except possibly thunderheads;
climbing, livid, turreted alabaster
lit up from within by splendor and terror
-- forded lightening's
split-second disaster. ~ Amy Clampitt

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimings, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit's going. Because she'd meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won't there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused, and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon? ~ Truman Capote

I don't force it. If you don't have an idea and you don't hear anything going over and over in your head, don't sit down and try to write a song. You know, go mow the lawn ... My songs speak for themselves. ~ Neil Young

You probably love to tell kids to get off your lawn, too. ~ Jeaniene Frost

In the suburbs lust thrives and flourishes like an epidemic of lawn grubs during a heat wave. ~ Helen Argiro

Upright, she's slapped with the aroma of musk and sweat. It's the good hunky, 'shirtless man building a dollhouse for his daughter' kind of perspiration, not the 'he just mowed the lawn' kind of stench. ~ Sandy Ward Bell

I was later to realize that a neatly trimmed lawn was a powerful signifier and should have commanded in me a slight sense of fear and respect, especially in conjunction ~ Matt Haig

Throughout the open space, and a two-story fireplace. The bedrooms all have mountain vistas, and the patio has a multimillion-dollar view of a great, green, tree-studded lawn. Edmund Washburn, a big teddy bear of a man, had fired up the ~ James Patterson

Your first leader is your dad. 'course he controls your food and shelter, so, he's not really a leader, he's more of a fascist dictator. But dictators have dreams too. Your dad doesn't. He gave them up when he had you. So remember that next time you say, I don't want to cut the lawn. Just shut up and mow the grass and save the lip for your teachers. ~ Christopher Titus

In that house I built
a bonfire that illuminated
the fecund earth around it.
And in that split-level
my friend Tommy, only eight
teeth left in his whole head,
dug a huge illegal grave
to bury his father's packhorse.
He marched that sumpter
into the dark study
and shot its head on the left
so it would fall right.
That night, as if to argue
with the day,
Karen and I made love
on the front lawn of the mansion
one cul-de-sac down,
four feet away
from what would be
a window cracked
open to allow the outside
in. ~ B.J. Ward

Blast," Daisy complained. "Blast, blast ... Lillian, I had just gotten to the best part!"
"As we speak there are at least a half-dozen eligible men who are lawn-bowling outside," her sister said crisply. "And playing games with them is far more productive than reading by yourself."
"I don't know anything about bowls."
"Good. Ask them to teach you. If there's one thing every man loves to do, it's telling a woman how to do something. ~ Lisa Kleypas

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to great old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do let me find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole. ~ Virginia Woolf

Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and jud ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity
it is, in a word, bourgeois
and so it attracts all of the same gripes. ~ Neal Stephenson

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. 'They're a rotten crowd,' I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.' I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

He growled, moaned, winced, and cursed. Yet despite all these sounds of seeming displeasure, he made no effort to discourage her. He made his body hers to explore, just as she'd been longing to do ever since he'd come upon her that first night, draped in a towel and dripping wet.
With one finger, she drew a teasing line down the center of his chest, all the way down to his navel.
He bucked his hips. His erection grazed her sex, and she gasped at the sudden contact. Their bodies were separated by the fine lawn of his shirt and the wool of his trousers, but she could feel him- his length, his heat, his hardness.
His desire.
She'd felt triumphant in tackling him to the bed, but that was nothing compared to the surge of power rushing through her now. The thick, hot column of arousal wedged between her thighs- it was for her. All for her. Excitement rocketed through her body and came to settle in her sex, melting onto a soft, throbbing ache.
Desperate to soothe that ache, she rocked against him. The friction sent a pulse of bliss through her body. Judging by his tortured groan, he felt it, too.
His head fell back against the mattress. "God. Yes. Again. ~ Tessa Dare

It's pretty cool to be able to hang out with the President and have the race-winning car on the South Lawn. ~ Buddy Rice

And we were taught to play golf. Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble, nettle and thistle, an Eezy-wipe lawn where nothing of life, dirty and glorious, remains. Golf turns outdoors into indoors, a prefab mat of stultified grass, processed, pesticided, herbicided, the pseudo-green of formica sterility. Here, the grass is not singing. The wind cannot blow through it. Dumb expression, greenery made stupid, it hums a bland monotone in the key of the mono-minded. No word is emptier than a golf tee. No roots, it has no known etymology, it is verbal nail polish. Worldwide, golf is an arch act of enclosure, a commons fenced and subdued for the wealthy, trampling serf and seedling. The enemy of wildness, it is a demonstration of the absolute dominion of man over wild nature. ~ Jay Griffiths

-Hey, neighbor, is your wife free for a date today?

-No, I'm taking her out this afternoon?

-Great! Then you won't mind if I come over and mow your lawn. Sucker! ~ Jarod Kintz

You still carrying an arsenal in the trunk of your car?"

"Why, you need something?"

"No, but if your car is hit by lightning I'll know where my lawn went. ~ John Connolly

Do heroes know when they are heroic? Rarely. Are historic moments acknowledged when they happen? You know the answer to that one. (If not, a visit to the manger will remind you.) We seldom see history in the making, and we seldom recognize heroes. Which is just as well, for if we knew either, we might mess up both. But we'd do well to keep our eyes open. Tomorrow's Spurgeon might be mowing your lawn. And the hero who inspires him might be nearer than you think. He might be in your mirror. ~ Max Lucado

If there was a God he reasoned it would have the same relation to us as we have to blades of grass. Do we make them grow? Yes in the sense that we water the lawn. Do we care for them and worry over them? Again as a lawn but not as individual blades. We don't give them names. We just want them to look nice and green. A God who created the earth would want it to look nice an blue from space. He would sit back after a long day of creating things and think to himself now that's what a planet should look like. ~ Tom Lichtenberg

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Okay, calm down, we'll pay,"said Vee, reaching into her back pocket. She stuffed a wad of cash into the bowl, but it was dark and I couldn´t tell how much. "You owe me big-time," she told me.

"You're supposed to let me count the money first," Marcie said, digging through the bowl, trying to recapture Vee´s donation.

"I just assumed twenty was too high for you to count," Vee said. "My apologies." Marcie's eyes went slitty again, then she turned on her heel and carted the bowl back into the house.

"How much did you give her?" I asked Vee.

"I didn't. I tossed in a condom."

I lifted my eyebrows."Since when do you carry condoms?"

"I picked one up off the lawn on our way up the walk. Who knows, maybe Marcie'll use it. Then I'll have done my part to keep her genetic material out of the gene pool. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer. ~ Virginia Woolf

The lightning bugs are back. They fly low to the ground as the lawn dissolves from green to black in the dusk. Seeing them, I can reconstruct a childhood: a hot night under tall trees; the Good Humor man, in his square white truck, the freezer smoky when he reaches inside for an ice cream.
The lightning bugs trapped in empty jars with holes on top. "Let them out," our mother said, "or they will die in there." We were careless. We always
forgot to open the jars. The bugs would be there in the morning, their yellow tails dim in the white light of the summer sun, pathetic as they lay on
their backs. We were always horrified by what we had done. As night fell we shook them out and caught more.
I relive the magic of the yellow light without the bright white of hindsight. The little flares in the darkness, a distillation of the kind of life we think we had, we wish we had, we want again. ~ Anna Quindlen

There isn't a single plant on earth that doesn't carry within it the ability to heal something. For example, the bark from the cinchona tree heals malaria, turkey tail mushrooms (Coriolus versicolor) can shrink tumors, and even those little yellow dandelions that shoot up in every nook and cranny of your lawn can cool down a fever and help detoxify the blood. ~ Mindi K. Counts

Any girl faced with daily attention from a gorgeous boy with a cute accent and perfect hair would be hard-pressed not to develop a big,stinking, painful,all-the-time,all consuming crush.
Not that that's what's happening to me.
Like I said.It's a relief to know it won't happen. It makes things easier. Most girls laugh too hard at his jokes and find excuses to gently press his arm. To touch him.Instead,I argue and roll my eyes and act indifferent. And when I touch his arm,I shove it.Because that's what friends do.
Besides,I have more important things on my mind: movies.
I've been in France for a month, and though I have ridden the elevators to the top of La Tour Eiffel (Mer took me while St. Clair and Rashmi waited below on the lawn-St. Clair because he's afraid of falling and Rashmi because she refuses to do anything touristy), and though I have walked the viewing platform of L'Arc de Triomphe (Mer took me again,of course, while St. Clair stayed below and threatened to push Josh and Rashmi into the insane traffic circle),I still haven't been to the movies.
Actually,I have yet to leave campus alone. Kind of embarrassing.
But I have a plan.First,I'll convince someone to go to a theater with me. Shouldn't be too difficult; everyone likes the movies.And then I'll take notes on everything they say and do, and then I'll be comfortable going back to that theater alone.A ~ Stephanie Perkins

WITHIN A FEW HOURS of the noon announcement, people all around North Korea began converging on statues of Kim Il-sung to pay their respects. By one frequently cited figure there are 34,000 statues of the Great Leader in the country and at each of them loyal subjects prostrated themselves with grief. People didn't want to be alone with their grief. They burst out of their homes and ran toward the statues, which were in fact the spiritual centers of each city.

Chongjin is home to some 500,000 people, but has only one twenty-five-foot bronze statue, at Pohang Square. People filled the vast square, and spilled over into the front lawn of the Revolutionary History Museum directly to the east. The crowds extended down the wide Road No. 1 all the way to the Provincial Theater and radiated out into the surrounding streets like spokes from a wheel. From above, the people looked like a line of ants streaming toward a common goal.

Hysteria and crowds make for a lethal combination. People started to surge forward, knocking down those in line, trampling people already prostrate on the ground, flattening the carefully trimmed hedges. From blocks away, the noise from the square carried through the humid air and sounded like the roar of a riot. The weather alternated between violent downpours and searing heat. No one was allowed to wear a hat or carry a parasol. The sun beat down on the bare heads and the wet sidewalks turned the streets into a roiling steambath. Peop ~ Barbara Demick

There were, however, a few exceptions.
One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out before any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain. ~ Jack Kerouac

In the courtyard, jasmine sugared the air, great white sprays tumbling from the top of a wooden arbor at the side of the lawn. Huge goldfish swam slowly near the surface of the pool, listing their plump bodies backwards and forwards to court the afternoon sun. It was heavenly, but I didn't stick around; a distant band of trees was calling to me and I wove my way towards it, through the meadow dusted with buttercups, self-sown amid the long grass. Although it wasn't quite summer, the day was warm, the air dry, and by the time I reached the trees my hairline was laced with perspiration.
I spread the rug in a patch of dappled light and kicked off my shoes. Somewhere nearby a shallow brook chattered over stones and butterflies sailed the breeze. The blanket smelled reassuringly of laundry flakes and squashed leaves, and when I sat down the tall meadow grasses enclosed me so I felt utterly alone. ~ Kate Morton

I'll save the sacking for later," he continues. "We can mimic the plays of our conjugal union in the privacy of my backyard. We can roll around on the lawn like animals and invent our own naughty games-Naked Leap Frog-Marshal May I-Hide the Peak-Red Light, Green Light District-Obstacle Intercourse-Hot Lava-Capture the Sector-Skyla Says-the possibilities are endless. Our throbbing loins will rep the victory. The entire scenario is, as you would say-made of win."~ Marshall ~ Addison Moore

Mandy loved the smell of a sunny day after a night of rain. The sun hit the orange puddles, the overgrown, soft, green grass on her lawn, and it beamed down through the orange steel mill smog, sending otherworldly, bizarre shadows across the concrete sidewalk. ~ Rebecca McNutt

At first it seemed to be no more than a chance ray of light beamed into the vestibule by the shifting of a tree-bough between house and street lamp, but as we kept our eyes glued to it we saw that it was a form - a tall, attenuated, skeletally-thin form moving stealthily in the shadow.

Slowly the thing emerged from the gloom of the doorway, and despite the warning I had had, I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck just above my collar, and a feeling as of sudden chill ran through my forearms. It was tall, as we had been told, fully six feet from its bare-boned feet to hairless, parchment-covered skull; and the articulation of its skeleton could be seen plainly through the leathery skin that clung to the gaunt, staring bones. The nose was large, high-bridged and haughty, like the beak of a falcon or eagle, and the chin was prominent beneath the brownish sheath of skin that stretched drum-tight across it. The eyes were closed and showed only as twin depressions in the skull-like countenance, but the mummified lips had retracted to show a double line of teeth in a mirthless grin. Its movements were irregular and stiff, like the movements of some monstrous mechanical doll or, as Edina Laurace had expressed it, like a marionette worked by unseen wires. But once it had emerged from the doorway it moved with shocking quickness. Jerkily, and with exaggeratedly high knee-action, it crossed the lawn, came to the sidewalk, turned on its parchment-soled feet as if ~ Seabury Quinn

I must admit that outside the university, it is difficult to be a pure mathematician. No one in my family understands what I do. My neighbors wonder why I spend all my time in my study scribbling with pencil on a yellow pad of paper instead of going outside to mow the lawn. ~ Isadore Singer

In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States. ~ Joan Didion

If I were just your average 23-year-old girl, and I called the police to say that there were strange men sleeping on my lawn and following me to Starbucks, they would leap into action. But because I am a famous person, well, sorry, ma'am, there's nothing we can do. It makes no sense. ~ Jennifer Lawrence

The word "marriage" lingered in Guy's ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam's round terra cotta-coloured mouth saying, "Why should I put myself out for you?" and it was Anne's eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve's long dark head, insolently smiling. ~ Patricia Highsmith

Hurry up, he'll be coming back pretty soon!"

Lynda spelled with a "y" Corgill, who was two years behind Dara, Mackenzie, and Jennifer, and had just completed her sophomore year, squeezed the hot glue gun into the door lock of the headmaster's office. Shelby Andrews, her accomplice and the newest resident to be accepted at Wood Rose, stood watch.

"I see the lights of the truck. Hurry! He's coming back! Are you finished?"

Lynda gave the metal apparatus one last squeeze, filling the lock with the quick-drying cement glue guaranteed to harden on contact. "Finished."

In the soft illumination of the crescent moon high overhead, the two girls, barefooted and wearing dark blue pajamas, ran across the lawn crisscrossed by dark, elongated shadows and dampened by night-cooled air to the maintenance shed where they placed the glue gun on the top shelf where it was normally kept. With their task completed, they quickly returned to the dormitory, to the far end from where Ms. Larkins slept, and crawled through the open window. Within minutes they were back in their rooms, in their individual beds, and sound asleep. The sleep of innocent angels.

It would soon be light; and Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women would start another day. ~ Barbara Casey

You mean nonhuman. Inhuman is an adjective, I said, as I rose from the lawn and padded softly around the left side of the house to the backyard. ~ Kevin Hearne

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.' ~ Mohsin Hamid

She could see Sylvie and her friends on the lawn below, their dresses fluttering like moths in the encroaching dusk. ~ Kate Atkinson

Lawn roller? ... What is it for?"
Why it is for rolling lawns."
I shook my head and laughed back at him. "Do I look like I have hay in my ears fellow? Just why, madman, would anyone want to roll a lawn? There would be nothing left but mud, and the grass would die from lack of sun."
No, Korvas. Rolling means to flatten."
No, it doesn't. A roller rollsa a flattener flattens."
Obushawn sighed and nodded. "Very well, it is a lawn flattener. It's for flattening lawns."
I see no purpose in it. If I wanted a flat lawn, that's what I would have planted in the first place. I think you are a failure at business, you obviously drink to excess, and beat your wife, dog, and children, you steal from the temple and blind beggars, and are most likely well on your way to being put away in a home. I do not want to talk to you anymore. Go away. ~ Barry B. Longyear

Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave.
She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave.
"Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian. ~ Armistead Maupin