The Yellow House Quotes

I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I was only then, when I knew I was alone, at least for the moment, that I reached under my gown into the pocket of my dress. As I pulled out my key from the yellow house, which I'd kept on my bureau since the day Nate left, I traced the shape one last time before folding my hand tightly around it.
Behind me, Cora was calling again. My family was waiting. Looking down at the pond, all I could think was that it is an incredible thing, how a whole world can rise from what seems like nothing at all. I stepped closer to the edge, keeping my eyes on my reflection as I dropped the key into the water, where it landed with a splash. At first, the fish darted away, but as it began to sink they circled back, gathering around. Together, they followed it down, down until it was gone.<3 ~ Sarah Dessen

But the original was there as well - more jaded and rudimentary, functional rather than romantic. It fit not just the yellow house but another door, deep within my own heart. One that had been locked so tight for so long that I was afraid to even try it for fear of what might be on the other side ~ Sarah Dessen

Dad?' All at once I remembered that long-gone afternoon from the Pause when Joe took me to the yellow house and we stood in our parents' old bedroom and waited for our father. I had never told anyone about that day, and I did not tell Caroline now. The memory felt like a small, terrible bomb I was holding in my hands. ~ Tara Conklin

Mr. Pink lives in the Pink House, Mr. Yellow lives in the Yellow House, and Mr. Blue lives in the Blue house. Then who is residing in the White House? ~ OyoKids Publications

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts. ~ Carl Sandburg

Song for the Last Act

Now that I have your face by heart, I look

Less at its features than its darkening frame

Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,

Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.

Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease

The lead and marble figures watch the show

Of yet another summer loath to go

Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.


Now that I have your face by heart, I look.


Now that I have your voice by heart, I read

In the black chords upon a dulling page

Music that is not meant for music's cage,

Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.

The staves are shuttled over with a stark

Unprinted silence. In a double dream

I must spell out the storm, the running stream.

The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.


Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.


Now that I have your heart by heart, I see

The wharves with their great ships and architraves;

The rigging and the cargo and the slaves

On a strange beach under a broken sky.

O not departure, but a voyage done!

The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps

Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps

Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening ~ Louise Bogan

His hair stuck up more than usual, but he was otherwise neat in his typical black. If they lived through the mission, she decided to buy him an obnoxiously cheerful shirt. Something in sunflower yellow, perhaps. ~ Lindsay Buroker

The nice thing about poetry is that you're always stretching the definitions of words. Lawyers and scientists and scholars of one sort or another try to restrict the definitions, hoping that they can prevent people from fooling each other. But that doesn't stop people from lying.

Cezanne painted a red barn by painting it ten shades of color: purple to yellow. And he got a red barn. Similarly, a poet will describe things many different ways, circling around it, to get to the truth.

My father also had a nice little simile. He said, "The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. And you can't lay your hand on it. All you do is circle around and point, and say, 'It's in there somewhere. ~ Pete Seeger

When an accident or a crime happens, there's a period of time before the yellow tape goes up, before the official response becomes formalized. That allows the nightcrawlers to get very close. ~ Dan Gilroy

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

woods. The road was still paved with yellow brick, but these were much covered by dried branches and dead leaves from the trees, and the walking was not at all good. There were few ~ L. Frank Baum

How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told. Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were those leaden-footed hours and years. ~ William James

I write on big yellow legal pads - ideas in outline form when I'm doing stand-up and stuff. It's vivid that way. I can't type it into an iPad - I think that would put a filter into the process. ~ Robin Williams

How could anything be the same? The red of blood lay over the market road in slick pools mingled with a yellow spread of dal someone must have brought in anticipation of a picnic after the parade, and there were flies on it, left behind odd slippers, and a sad pair of broken spectacles, even a tooth. It was rather like the government warning about safety that appeared in the cinema before the movie with the image of a man cycling to work, a poor man but with a wife who loved him, and she had sent his lunch with him in a tiffin container; then came a blowing of horns and small, desperate cycle tinkle, and a messy blur clearing into the silent still image of a spread of food mingled with blood. Those mismatched colors, domesticity shuffled with death, sureness running into the unexpected, kindness replaced by the image of violence, always made the cook feel like throwing up and weeping both together. ~ Kiran Desai

Tom felt that it was time to wake up; this sort of life might be romantic enough, in his blighted condition, but it was getting to have too little sentiment and too much distracting variety about it. So he thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit pon that of professing to be fond of Pain-killer. He asked for it so often that he became a nuisance, and his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and quit bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had no misgivings to alloy her delight; but since it was Tom, she watched the bottle clandestinely. She found that the medicine did really diminish, but it did not occur to her that the boy was mending the health of a crack in the sitting-room floor with it.

One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack when his aunt's yellow cat came along, purring, eying the teaspoon avariciously, and begging for a taste. Tom said:

"Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter."

But Peter signified that he did want it.

"You better make sure."

Peter was sure.

"Now you've asked for it, and I'll give it to you, because there ain't anything mean about me; but if you find you don't like it, you mustn't blame anybody but your own self."

Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down the Pain-killer. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging against furniture, upset ~ Mark Twain

It was a dead swan. Its body lay contorted on the beach like an abandoned lover. I looked at the bird for a long time. There was no blood on its feathers, no sight of gunshot. Most likely, a late migrant from the north slapped silly by a ravenous Great Salt Lake. The swan may have drowned. I knelt beside the bird, took off my deerskin gloves, and began smoothing feathers. Its body was still limp - the swan had not been dead long. I lifted both wings out from under its belly and spread them on the sand. Untangling the long neck which was wrapped around itself was more difficult, but finally I was able to straighten it, resting the swan's chin flat against the shore. The small dark eyes had sunk behind the yellow lores. It was a whistling swan. I looked for two black stones, found them, and placed them over the eyes like coins. They held. And, using my own saliva as my mother and grandmother had done to wash my face, I washed the swan's black bill and feet until they shone like patent leather. I have no idea of the amount of time that passed in the preparation of the swan. What I remember most is lying next to its body and imagining the great white bird in flight. I imagined the great heart that propelled the bird forward day after day, night after night. Imagined the deep breaths taken as it lifted from the arctic tundra, the camaraderie within the flock. I imagined the stars seen and recognized on clear autumn nights as they navigated south. Imagined their silhouettes passing ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors, who never speaks of sunsets, have made many sunsets intelligible to me, in all their colors. There is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish the values of beings, sounds and shapes, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green, and how much yellow is in the blue green of the sky. It comes down to the same thing - the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends of the grammarians. ~ Fernando Pessoa

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

Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things. ~ Charles De Lint

She resembles the Venus de Milo: she is very old, has no teeth, and has white spots on her yellow skin. ~ Heinrich Heine

The single yellow diamond stud he wore in his left ear twinkled like a giggle in the morning sunlight. ~ Malorie Blackman

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation. ~ James Joyce

But I will stretch my toes so that they touch the rail at the end of the bed; I will assure myself, touching the rail, of something hard. Now I cannot sink; cannot altogether fall through the thin sheet now. Now I spread my body on this frail mattress and hang suspended. I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. All is soft, and bending. Walls and cupboards whiten and bend their yellow squares on top of which a pale glass gleams. Out of me now my mind can pour. ~ Virginia Woolf

Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on. ~ Jerry Falwell

Sometimes English football takes pride in having the lowest yellow-card count in Europe, but of course it will have if you can take someone's leg off and still not be booked. ~ Luis Suarez

Sunny laughed. "It's okay. You're right, Emma. My name is unusual, but I like to think of it as ... special also."
Special?
Sam cocked his head as he studied Sunny. Almost all of her hair had escaped out of her ponytail now. She wore a baggy pink sweatshirt and had on the kind of drawstring plaid pants that would've set Bozo the Clown's heart pitter-pattering with envy. Her yellow tennis shoes were covered with dog hair.
Yeah, special was one word for her. ~ Jennifer Shirk

He turned all the lights off and held her in his arms. She was so cold. "Stay close to me," she said. She looked outside towards the flowing lights. Everything was so bright there and for once there was no fear. She imagined the yellow lights that touched her life. In this life she saw nothing but peace. Where else to go from here? She wondered. What is there to see within one's peace? ~ Vatsal Surti

For a fraction of a second he was a yellow blossom of flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it. All that remained of what he'd been was a wisp of steam coiling above the torrent of fire. ~ Neal Stephenson

You tried so hard to give your kid food that was healthy, she thought. The soy cheese pizza. The organic peas and broccoli and baby carrots. The smoothies. The hormone-free milk. The leafy greens. You kept processed food to a minimum, threw Halloween candy out after a week. Never let him eat the icies they sold in the park, because they had red and yellow dye in them. And then you gave him this? ~ Sharon Guskin

Tires roared. The car lurched forward ... crunching ... a bright light ... yellow eyes ... then blackness. ~ Jessica Sorensen

That night our new husbands took us quickly. They took us calmly. They took us gently, but firmly, and without saying a word. They assumed we were the virgins the matchmakers had promised them we were and they took us with exquisite care. Now let me know if it hurts.
They took us flat on our backs on the bare floor of the Minute Motel. They took us downtown, in second-rate rooms at the Kumamoto Inn. They took us in the best hotels in San Francisco that a yellow man could set foot in at the time. The Kinokuniya Hotel. The Mikado. The Hotel Ogawa. They took us for granted and assumed we would do for them whatever it was we were told. Please turn toward the wall and drop down on your hands and knees (...)
They took us violently, with their fists, whenever we tried to resist. They took us even though we bit them. They took us even though we hit them (...).
They took us cautiously, as though they were afraid we might break. You're so small. They took us coldly but knowledgeably - In 20 seconds you will lose all control -
and we knew there had been many others before us. They took us as we stared up blankly at the ceiling and waited for it to be over, not realizing that it would not be over for years. ~ Julie Otsuka

Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything - the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds - to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real. ~ Jon Krakauer

He wasn't surprised. After the thorny branches had shredded her dress, they had reached for her legs as night fell, and now he could see that she was terribly lacerated. The wounds were deep, and he could see exposed muscles and tendons glisten yellow and pink in a devastating kind of beauty where the ragged flesh gaped open. ~ Lois Lowry

They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose.
'That was called silphium.' His mother stood behind him. 'It grew in Saturnus's first garden.'
She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone.
Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Belicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds' eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries. ~ Lawrence Norfolk

It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

That girl has more cracks in her than the road of yellow brick ~ Danielle Paige

The world is exploding in emerald, sage, and lusty chartreuse - neon green with so much yellow in it. It is an explosive green that, if one could watch it moment by moment throughout the day, would grow in every dimension. ~ Amy Seidl

There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose
a gleaming, round saucer
over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul
or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon. ~ Haruki Murakami

Outside, the September air was enticingly fragrant, yellow with pollen and rich, lemony sunlight. ~ Alice Hoffman

In order to have a happy ending, in order to be triumphant, in order to be heroic, you have to tell your own story. The women's movement knows that; black people know that; brown people know that; yellow people know that. You have to be able to tell your own story in order to show that you are worthy--that you belong. ~ Nikki Giovanni