Yellow Brick Road Quotes

If you want to chase a runaway ambulance toward what's left of the American Dream, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao show you that, still, somehow, boxing remains the yellow brick road in our country. ~ Brin-Jonathan Butler

How lonely it is going to be now on the Yellow Brick Road. ~ Ray Bolger

Stairway to Hell or Yellow Brick Road? Why don't you give your Magic 8 Ball a shake and see if it's ready to play again. ~ Kami Garcia

He held up his hand, and in it was ...
Oh, God.
The neon-pink vibrator, glowing in the dark now. It was following her, stalking her, all the way down the yellow brick road to hell. ~ Jill Shalvis

Kanan is a big road through the Santa Monica Mountains. Between mid-March and mid-April, when you get over to the western side of the mountains, it's populated by Spanish broom - this beautiful, yellow, flowering weed that smells the way I imagine it smells along the Yellow Brick Road. ~ John C. McGinley

you are sad now.
you are not sad forever.
there are no paved roads
to healing.
you must build one
brick by brick.
there will be backtracks before breakthroughs but-
you must collapse
into yourself
before rebuilding.
you must unearth
every wound
before learning the power of salt.
you will build that yellow brick road-
in your own time and
on your own terms.
- the grit of healing. ~ Amanda Lovelace

I know we're all following the same yellow brick road, looking for that ultimate band, that ultimate night to be remember. ~ Rachel Cohn

It's time to stop following the yellow brick road, use your God given brain, and quit chasing rainbows, because the truth is life's hard, but can be oh so sweet when you choose to own it. ~ L.M. Fields

Your dreams are ballbusters; they're not the yellow brick road. ~ Kelly Cutrone

Follow the yellow brick road. ~ E.Y. Harburg

Therefore, since I could count on no continuity of sapient will to carry me through, indeed since all that was certain was that I must suffer repeated loss of same in order to maintain my body's vitality, my only course was to accomplish with what I hoped was the greater puissance of conscious craft what I had already once barely managed to achieve by accident of fate.

Which was to use these periods of conscious lucidity to engrave a mantric tropism upon the presentient levels of my mind with perpetual chanting repetition and diligent meditation, so that even when reason and conscious will had once more fled, my Bloomenkind self would, during periods of enforced floral nirvana, be programmed to follow the yellow, to follow the sun that sooner or later must rise during a cycle of such meditations into its percept sphere.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ... ~ Norman Spinrad

I thought about the cast of The Wizard of Oz on the yellow brick road and wondered which character I was. Perhaps the Tin Man, in search of a red, pulsating heart. Or at least someone to give it to. ~ Kate Rockland

I'd rather drive the yellow brick road, you wouldn't happen to know of a rental car place around. ~ Ryan Stiles

You may lose a partner, a friend,
But you must never lose yourself.
You may miss the next train, or trend,
And yet it won't put you on the shelf.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Without carrying a heavy load.
You may not find a wizard at last,
Stilll you may learn from the past. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Walk on your own yellow brick road. If you can't find one, spray paint your way into happiness. If that doesn't work, buy yellow shoes. ~ Sadiqua Hamdan

The Monk in the Kitchen



I

ORDER is a lovely thing;
On disarray it lays its wing,
Teaching simplicity to sing.
It has a meek and lowly grace,
Quiet as a nun's face.
Lo - I will have thee in this place!
Tranquil well of deep delight,
All things that shine through thee appear
As stones through water, sweetly clear.
Thou clarity,
That with angelic charity
Revealest beauty where thou art,
Spread thyself like a clean pool.
Then all the things that in thee are,
Shall seem more spiritual and fair,

Reflection from serener air -
Sunken shapes of many a star
In the high heavens set afar.


II

Ye stolid, homely, visible things,
Above you all brood glorious wings
Of your deep entities, set high,
Like slow moons in a hidden sky.
But you, their likenesses, are spent
Upon another element.
Truly ye are but seemings -
The shadowy cast-oft gleamings
Of bright solidities. Ye seem
Soft as water, vague as dream;
Image, cast in a shifting stream.


III

What are ye?
I know not.
Brazen pan and iron pot,
Yellow brick and gray flag-stone
That my feet have trod upon -
Ye seem to me
Vessels of bright mystery.
For ye do bear a shape, and so
Though ye were made by man, I know
An inner Spirit al ~ Anna Hempstead Branch

Slim spent a total of 36 years in Boggo Road.). ..He knows what a well-written letter means to a man inside. It means connection, humanity. It means waking up. He's been writing letters to Boggo Road inmates for years using false names on the envelopes because the screws would never pass a letter on from Arthur "Slim" Halliday, the man who knows how to escape their red brick wall fortress, better than anyone. … ~ Trent Dalton

If one kept the great yellow mounds of smashed brick in the corner of one's eye, then the mind understood them as the contours of nature and forgot its trick of making one unhappy. ~ Chris Cleave

Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire. ~ Cathleen Schine

Purpose draws potential, potential brings to life Destiny. Understanding you have a purpose is the first brick on the road to Destiny! ~ Otis Teague

St Mary Magdalene church was on the left-hand side of the road, set back behind a low brick wall, well-trimmed topiary and a narrow fringe of grass studded with lichen-covered gravestones from a hundred years ago. A sign had been tied to the railings: two capital As set inside a blue triangle that was itself set within a blue circle. An arrow pointed towards the church. Milton felt a disconcerting moment of doubt and paused by the gate to adjust the lace of his shoe. He looked up and down the street, satisfying himself that he was not observed. He knew the consequences for being seen in a place like this would be draconian and swift; suspension would be immediate, the termination of his employment would follow soon after, and there was the likelihood of prosecution. He was ready to leave the service, but on his own terms and not like that. ~ Mark Dawson

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries.

It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind. ~ Neil Gaiman

A brick could be used like yellow sneezes hello every time love walks like a slinky down the stairs. Who used my shoe as a soup bowl? ~ Jarod Kintz

I stumble across the sea of tarmac, finding pavement, concealment and a brick wall. Palms brace against the scrubby surface. My stomach churns and then bubbles over, burning my throat as acrid yellow acid spills from my lips in frothy discomposure. It splatters the pavement like a spray of blood. ~ Rebecca Clare Smith

Then I used to lock myself in my room, or go to the end of the garden, climb on to the ruin of a high stone greenhouse and, dangling my legs from the wall which looked out on the road, would sit for hours, staring and staring, seeing nothing. Near me, over the dusty nettles, white butterflies fluttered lazily. A pert little sparrow would fly down on to a half-broken red brick nearby, and would irritate me with its chirping, ceaselessly turning its whole body with its outspread tail; the crows, still wary, occasionally cawed, sitting high, high on the bare top of a birch -- while the sun and wind played gently in its spreading branches; the bells of the Donskoy monastery would sometimes float across -- tranquil and sad -- and I would sit and gaze and listen, and would be filled with a nameless sensation which had everything in it; sorrow and joy, a premonition of the future, and desire, and fear of life. At the time, I understood none of this, and could not have given a name to any of the feelings which seethed within me; or else I would have called it all by one name – the name of Zinaida. ~ Ivan Turgenev

33/ Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick. ~ Kim Addonizio

Not long after he and Margaret were married, he'd complimented her on a pot of yellow blossoms near the front door. She'd laughed, and blushed, and then confessed that weeks earlier, watching him walk around the vegetable garden, she'd slipped out, dug up a brick-sized clump of earth which held the clear impression of his right foot, and tucked it into the flower pot. In that earth she'd planted a chrysanthemum, hoping that as it bloomed year after year so would his love for her. How should he marry again, after that? ~ Andrea Barrett

It is Never Too Late to Mend."

Since it can never be too late
To change your life, or else renew it,
Let the unpleasant process wait
Until you are compelled to do it.
The State provides (and gratis too)
Establishments for such as you.

Remember this, and pluck up heart,
That, be you publican or parson,
Your ev'ry art must have a start,
From petty larceny to arson;
And even in the burglar's trade,
The cracksman is not born, but made.

So, if in your career of crime,
You fail to carry out some "coup",
Then try again a second time,
And yet again, until you do;
And don't despair, or fear the worst,
Because you get found out at first.

Perhaps the battle will not go,
On all occasions, to the strongest;
You may be fairly certain tho'
That He Laughs Last who laughs the Longest.
So keep a good reserve of laughter,
Which may be found of use hereafter.

Believe me that, howe'er well meant,
A Good Resolve is always brief;
Don't let your precious hours be spent
In turning over a new leaf.
Such leaves, like Nature's, soon decay,
And then are only in the way.

The Road to - -well, a certain spot,
(A Road of very fair dimensions),
Has, so the proverb tells us, got
A parquet-floor of Good Intentions.
Take care, in your desire to please,
You do not add a brick to these.

Harry Graham

I expected Candy to pick a different rental house. The little yellow one always gets positive comments from broads. Instead, she chose the blocky, brick house. It's the kind of house I'd have picked. Like the fuckwit I've become, I take her choice as a sign that she and I are made for each other. "Why ~ Bijou Hunter

Useless, it was useless to get in since I don't want to go anywhere.

Bluish objects pass the windows. In jerks all stiff, and brittle; people, walls; a house offers me its black heart through open windows; and the windows pale, all that is black becomes blue, blue this great yellow brick house advancing uncertainly, trembling, suddenly stopping and taking a nose dive. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

As we've said, it's not a coincidence that Fear Itself, Schism, and other big stories end at the same time. This is the first brick in the next road. ~ Tom Brevoort

Half a mile from Haverstraw there lived a halfwit fellow,
Half his house was brick and red, and half was wood and yellow;
Half the town knew half his name but only half could spell it.
If you will sit for half an hour, I've half a mind to tell it. ~ James Thurber

I told them a thousand times if I told them once:
Stop fooling around, I said, with straw and sticks;
They won't hold up; you're taking an awful chance.
Brick is the stuff to build with, solid bricks.
You want to be impractical, go ahead.
But just remember, I told them; wait and see.
You're making a big mistake. Awright, I said,
But when the wolf comes, don't come running to me.
The funny thing is, they didn't. There they sat,
One in his crummy yellow shack, and one
Under his roof of twigs, and the wolf ate
Them, hair and hide. Well, what is done is done.
But I'd been willing to help them, all along,
If only they'd once admitted they were wrong. ~ Sarah Henderson Hay

The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague. ~ Joseph O'Neill

Belbroughton Road, Linton Road, Bardwell Road. The houses there are quite normal. They are ordinary sizes and have ordinary chimneys and roofs and gardens with laburnum and flowering cherry. Park Town. As you go south they are growing. Getting higher and odder. By the time you get to Norham Gardens they have tottered over the edge into madness: these are not houses but flights of fancy. They are three storeys high and disguise themselves as churches. They have ecclesiastical porches instead of front doors and round norman windows or pointed gothic ones, neatly grouped in threes with flaring brick to set them off. They reek of hymns and the Empire, Mafeking and the Khyber Pass, Mr Gladstone and Our Dear Queen. They have nineteen rooms and half a dozen chimneys and iron fire-escapes. A bomb couldn't blow them up and the privet in their gardens has survived two World Wars. ~ Penelope Lively

If you wanted to kill a city, that is the recipe. And yet Flint was very much alive. In 2014, the year of switch to a new source of drinking water, it was the seventh-largest city in the state. On weekdays, its population swelled as people commuted into town for work in teh county government, the region's major medical centers, four college campuses, and other economic anchors. For all the empty space, teens in shining dresses still posed for prom photos in the middle of Saginaw Street, the bumpy brick road that is Flint's main thoroughfare. Parents still led their children by the hand into the public library for Saturday story time. Older gentlemen lingered at the counter of one of Flint's ubiquitous Coney Island diners, and the waitresses at Grandma's Kitchen on Richfield Road kept the coffee flowing. For about ninety-nine thousand people, Flint was home. ~ Anna Clark

As the train rolled through the countryside, so lush and green, and into the sprawling suburbs of south London, I stared around at all the strangeness: the narrow little "terraced" houses all in rows of brick and chimneypots, the tiny back gardens with clotheslines and garden sheds, the little cars all on the wrong side of the road - it was all so delightfully foreign, and exotic. My first lesson that the rest of the world really was more different than I knew or imagined. ~ Neil Peart

The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence. ~ William Gibson

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children. ~ Brian Doyle

Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there's always hope of escape down the road. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

There was a typewriter buried alive in that horse, the one I road to get out of the flood. ~ Buddy Wakefield

Your suit looks just like mine." Kenji frowns. "I'm supposed to be the one with the black suit. Why can't you have a pink suit? Or a yellow suit - "
"Because we're not the freaking Power Rangers," Winston says, rolling his eyes.
"What the hell is a Power Ranger?" Kenji shoots back. ~ Tahereh Mafi

It is a cherished dream of most Bullet owners to do the classic Manali to Leh ride. A sort of pilgrimage or initiation into the cult that is 'Bulleting'. So there are plenty of Bullets in Manali during these months, some with number plates from as far away as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Goa and Kerala. The local mechanics are experts in servicing Bullets and preparing them for the arduous road ahead, and I got my bike serviced here. The rear brakes had taken a fair share of wear and tear, and the setting of the clutch had to be readjusted. ~ Rishad Saam Mehta

Five hours after presenting a ... lecture on cancer before an audience of about 400 in L.A., the windshield was shot out of my car on the road back to San Francisco. The next night the glass window in the tailgate (the back window) was shot out (300 miles removed from the first shooting) ... The late Arthur T. Harris, MD, was threatened by two men with assassination if he continued to use Laetrile. ~ Ernst T. Krebs

Arrayed in a new body another mother may someday give birth so that with stronger limbs and brighter mind the old soul shall take the road to earth again. ~ P.C. Cast

I wasn't born with enough middle fingers. ~ Marilyn Manson

The truth is, that MOST of the time MOST of us take the road MOST traveled, the path of least resistance and MOST comfortable. ~ Jayce O'Neal

It was very quiet here on the mountainside,
but, quiet in the of hills and forests. A quiet that wasn't silent at all, but composed of constant tiny sounds. It was small buzzing in the gorse bush nearby, of bees working the yellow flowers -dusty with pollen, far below was the rushing of the burn, a low note echoing the wind above stirring leaves and rattling twigs sighing past the jutting boulders. ~ Diana Gabaldon

There was a transparency to comedy that I wasn't finding in poetry. Comedians can't pretend they don't have identities. They're up there, onstage, with their bodies against a brick wall like they're facing a firing squad. There's nowhere to hide, so they have no choice but to acknowledge their identities ("So you might have noticed I'm black") before they move on or drill down. It's also harder to bullshit one's way through comedy, because the audience cannot be convinced into laughter. Real laughter is an involuntary contraction that bursts out of you like an orgasm. You laugh from surprise but you're only surprised once, which is why comedy ruthlessly lives in the present. Nothing gets dated faster than a joke. ~ Cathy Park Hong

On a motorcycle, I learned to let go of the vast uncertainty and focus instead on what is in front of me: the surface of the road and the curve of it, the vehicles in front and behind, the wind and the rain and the wildlife peeking out of the grass. There are times when I struggle to manage every last detail as it whips pat me, to hold on to past and present and future simultaneously, but they're not mine to understand, or control. I have to remind myself, again and again, that only this is mine: this moment, this heartbeat, this decision. ~ Lily Brooks-Dalton

[London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic ... One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings. ~ V.S. Pritchett

We hopped back into the Jeep, and he drove us along a back road, which changed to a dirt road, which changed to gravel, which changed to two lines in the dirt, and then disappeared altogether. ~ Colleen Houck

I know some writers can write on the road, but I'm not one of them. ~ George R R Martin

I tok the road less traveled. Now I'm lost. ~ Neil Leckman

You miss the idea of him. There you go. Was that so hard? "That goes away, too," says your friend. Through the magic of the biological imperative, his brain has been reprogrammed. He has been forced to gloss over his own romantic carnage so that he might once again start down that road of procreation. He has nineteen layers of skin; you have three-fourths of a layer. They're all like this, the recovered. Sometimes you want to hop across the table, curl up in their laps, and beg to be made one of them. How does it work? Hypnosis? A chip in the neck? A radioactive spider with Xanax venom? ~ Sloane Crosley

Youth is rather to be pitied than envied by people in years since it is doomed to toil through the rugged road of life which the others have passed through, in search of happiness that is not to be met with in it and that, at the highest, can be compounded for only by the blessing of a contented mind. ~ Samuel Richardson

It is a hard thing, to reach this point on this long road, and know that I am not the hero. I am the villain. I have killed a thousand men, taken a thousand women, enslaved ten thousand.' He raised his hands. 'What does that make me? ~ Christian Cameron

From the '70s and '80s, the following songs immediately spring to my mind as candidates: "The Battle of Evermore," "Spirit of Eden," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Close to the Edge," "In Your Eyes," "Thick as a Brick," "Cinema Show," "Echoes," and "The Killing Moon. ~ Bradley J. Birzer

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip -- and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great tanscendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the sahpe of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that save us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in th ~ David Foster Wallace