Fences Quotes

1. "Sickening, the way the youngest de Vibrey girl, to humour the whim of her kinky old father, is actually riding side-saddle today. Twisted round like a blooming corkscrew. Hymen be blowed, think of what it's doing to her innards, poor wretch, think of the strain on her spine when she goes over the fences."
Author: A.P.

2. "Why do you go cold?" He kept his voice gentle. "I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of ;possession; if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and-" "Beautiful." "Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening" "It needn't." "Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that now. I use it." "Yes. But you don't want - do you - to be alone always. Or do you?""I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on ;doing my work;. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand?"
Author: A.S. Byatt

3. "I've now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven't the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I've not found out."
Author: Alan Turing

4. "What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!"
Author: Alexander Herzen

5. "In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell."
Author: Anaïs Nin

6. "Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that."
Author: Annie Proulx

7. "We stepped a little quicker, laughed a little louder and chatted over the fences a little longer. We gathered bouquets of wildflowers, dined on fresh strawberries and began to ride our bikes up and down the Third Line again. We ran up grassy hills and rolled back down through the young clover, feeling light and giddy, free from our heavy boots and coats. There were trilliums to pick for Mother and tadpoles to catch and keep in a jar. Spring had come at last to Bathurst Township and was she ever worth the wait!"
Author: Arlene Stafford Wilson

8. "Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences." Sherlock Holmes, The Problem of Thor Bridge"
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

9. "Like you? I go out of here every morning… bust my butt…putting up with them crackers everyday…cause I like you? You about the biggest fool I ever saw. It's my JOB. It's my RESPONSIBILITY! You understand that? A man got to take care of his family. You live in my house… sleep on my bed clothes…fill you belly up with my food… cause you my son. You my flesh and blood. Not ‘cause I like you! Cause it's my duty to take care of you. I OWE a responsibility to you! Let's get this straight right here… before it go along any further… I ain't got to like you. Mr. Rand don't five me money come payday cause he likes me. He gives me cause he OWE me. I done give you everything I had to give you. I gave you your life! Me and your mama worked that out between us. And liking your black ass wasn't part of the bargain. Don't try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not. You best be making sure they doing right by you. You understand what I'm saying, boy?"- August Wilson, Fences, 1986."
Author: August Wilson

10. "At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature."
Author: Bill Bryson

11. "The rapacious white tribe who were arriving in increasing numbers, not only as convicts but also as settlers, wanted to own everything they touched. They slashed and burned the wilderness so that they might graze their sheep and grow their corn. They erected fences around the land they now called their own and which henceforth they were prepared to defend with muskets and sometimes even their lives. They built church steeples and prison walls and homes of granite hewn from the virgin rock and timber cut from the umbrageous mountain forests. They possessed everything upon the island, the wild beasts that grazed upon its surface, the birds that flew over it, the fish that swam in its rushing river torrents and the barking seals resting in the quiet bays and secluded inlets. Everything they thought worthwhile was attached to the notion of ownership."
Author: Bryce Courtenay

12. "We never know, do we, what our neighbors might be doing behind their fences, what love affairs and bloody rituals might be taking place right next door? The world is a more interesting place that we ever think."
Author: Carolyn Parkhurst

13. "It isn't the young men who call to her at night. It's the Forest. It's the whisper of the trees that there's somethine else, outside the fences. That there's still a world that's bigger than any she could ever comprehend and all she has to do is find the strength to go after it."
Author: Carrie Ryan

14. "Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct."
Author: Daniel Dennett

15. "Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences."
Author: Dennis Lehane

16. "And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention."
Author: Donald Miller

17. "A number of people who have supported me on the border fence in the U.S. have observed the fences in Israel and their effectiveness."
Author: Duncan Hunter

18. "Fences work and the walls work and separations work. They afford to any nation the delay of entry."
Author: Duncan Hunter

19. "Fences would be a hindrance to terrorists should they decide to come across a land border between the U.S. and Mexico and to California."
Author: Duncan Hunter

20. "Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is. In the north I have eaten my lunch in pastures rank with ferns and junipers, all under fair skies with a wind blowing."
Author: E.B. White

21. "I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people."
Author: George Takei

22. "Love is a condition. There are many circumstances in life that can affect this condition. So it falls on you and I to insulate love from the things that would cause it harm. We, the protectors of love, are responsible if the condition of our love becomes critical. Yes, broken fences can be mended, but love on life support should be left to die. So our earthly desire should be to strengthen the condition of love daily."
Author: Gregory C. Warner

23. "Guilt isn't in cat vocabulary. They never suffer remorse for eating too much, sleeping too long or hogging the warmest cushion in the house. They welcome every pleasurable moment as it unravels and savour it to the full until a butterfly or falling leaf diverts their attention. They don't waste energy counting the number of calories they've consumed or the hours they've frittered away sunbathing.Cats don't beat themselves up about not working hard enough. They don't get up and go, they sit down and stay. For them, lethargy is an art form. From their vantage points on top of fences and window ledges, they see the treadmills of human obligations for what they are - a meaningless waste of nap time."
Author: Helen Brown

24. "Laws must be efficaciously deterrent in nature, and in grave offences where offenders trespass the precincts of being a human, and commit crimes against even babies/infants/children; solely for beastly gratification, deserve no mercy."
Author: Henrietta Newton Martin Legal Consultant

25. "The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

26. "Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

27. "It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more."
Author: Hermann Hesse

28. "Nixon's offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving."
Author: Jacob M. Appel

29. "What have they done to the earth?What have they done to our fair sister?Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit herStuck her with knives in the side of the dawnAnd tied her with fences and dragged her down"
Author: Jim Morrison

30. "May be there are entire worlds where there are no fences, where feeling bears you like a tide."
Author: Jodi Picoult

31. "Bryan helped me up.  "How can you be so good one minute then clumsy the next?"I shrugged.  "I've never been very athletic.  Not unless you count fencing.""You made fences?"
Author: John Corwin

32. "They hacked down trees widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigeon fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange. they thinned out the game, killed birds for sport, set accidental fire that would burn for days. their sheep killed hedges, snipped valleys bare, and their pigs nosed up the very roots of what might have grown. hrothgar's tribe made boats to drive farther north and west. there was nothing to stop the advance of man. huge boars fled at the click of a harness. wolves would cower in the glens like foxes when they caught that deadly scent. i was filled with a wordless, obscurely murderous unrest."
Author: John Gardner

33. "He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow."
Author: John Steinbeck

34. "On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed."
Author: Kim Edwards

35. "Big lots,' I said, seeing the eighty-year-old oaks and shady lawns. The houses were set way back and had iron fences and stone drives. The harder to hear your neighbors scream, my dear,' was David's answer, and I sent my head up and down in agreement."
Author: Kim Harrison

36. "Mastema prefers absolutes. He wants fences on the world and everything in its place, neat and tidy as a churchyard garden. God is not like that. God is boundless. For all his wisdom, Mastema cannot comprehend Yahweh's need for surprises. An omniscient Being would naturally yearn for things beyond His control, futures He could not see, wills He could influence but not command. Strange, yes. It is odd when the puppeteer desires his wooden slaves to cut their strings, yet that is exactly what He did when he granted humans free will."
Author: Kirby Crow

37. "And I hate to see artists who are real safe. I love to see artists swing for the fences sometimes."
Author: Lee Ann Womack

38. "Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has to two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every single one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are all hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers a sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude, we all try to find out from a stranger whether or not we are related, we all use every long word we know as often as we possibly can, we all go out for a walk in the evening so that we can look over each others' fences, we all think that we are equal to the best. Do you understand?"The captain was perplexed, "You didn't tell me about the two Greeks inside every Greek.""I didn't? Well, I must have wandered off the point."
Author: Louis De Bernières

39. "You choolos have great storys about climing fences"
Author: Luis J. Rodríguez

40. "We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are."
Author: Mahmoud Darwish

41. "Batley insisted that no cult existed but the jury found him guilty of 35 offences including 11 rapes. three indecent assaults, causing prostitution for personal gain, causing a child to have sex and inciting a child to have sex. The three women, who got Egyptian Eye of Horus tattoos apparently to show their allegiance to their organisation, were found guilty of sex-related charges. Young boys and girls were procured by cult members to take part in sex sessions, the trial heard. The group preyed on vulnerable youngsters, impelling them to join with veiled death threats. Batley was accused of forcing a number of his victims into prostitution. (Morris 2011) There are, after all, no paedophile rings; there is no ritual abuse; recovered memories cannot he trusted; not all victimization claims are legitimate. (Pratt 2009: 70)"
Author: Michael Salter

42. "Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin."
Author: P.D. James

43. "His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand."
Author: Peter Carey

44. "If he was a member of the human race at all, Neumann was its least attractive specimen. His eyebrows, twitching and curling like two poisoned caterpillars, were joined together by an irregular scribble of poorly matched hair. Behind thick glasses that were almost opaque with greasy thumbprints, his grey eyes were shifty and nervous, searching the floor as if he expected that at any moment he would be lying flat on it. Cigarette smoke poured out from between teeth that were so badly stained with tobacco they looked like two wooden fences."
Author: Philip Kerr

45. "We spend our life building higher fences and stronger locks, when the gravest dangers are already inside"
Author: Richard Paul Evans

46. "Aren't you a Republican? Just about everyone is in the whole town of Learning.""No, I'm not a Republican. And I'm not no Democrat. I'm not nothing.""Why not?""Because I'm not allowed to vote.""Me either. You have to be twenty-one to vote. I'm only twelve.""Reckon I'm soon looking at sixty.""Then why can't you vote? Is it because you're a Shaker?""No, it's account of I can't read or write. When a man cannot do these things, people think his head is weak. Even when he's proved his back is strong."Who decides?""Men who look at me and take me not for what I be. Men who only see my mark, my X, when I can't sign my name. They can't see how I true a beam to build our barn, or see that the rows of corn in my field are straight as fences. They just seem me walk the street in Learning in clothes made me by my own woman. They do not care that my coat is strudy and keeps me warm. They'll not care that I owe no debt and I am beholding to no man."
Author: Robert Newton Peck

47. "I can't help but be amazed at the power such small, unassuming animals wield over us; they so easily break down our defences."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

48. "Could he have been the fork in the road American never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back--maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared..."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

49. "All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken."
Author: Thomas Wolfe

50. "Gripped with bitter cold, ice-locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shuffling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog - to the left, to the right, above, below - a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog - heard in the misty world as words, but here becoming nothing - round white puffs of smoke. The dragon men dived up and disappeared again into the fog. And trolleys rushed screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown. ("The Dragon")"
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Fences Quotes Pictures