"Backyard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fried chicken to those who dwell in the country where chickens scratch in every backyard, but to those who dwell where they reckon time from the occasion when they last ate an egg, fried chicken bears the same relation to other food that nightingales' tongues bore to other dishes at epicurean Roman feasts. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... him. He had hardly set a paw in it when an infuriated ball of fur lit somewhere out of space on to his back, cursing and spitting and tearing the hair out in slathers. This new enemy was my wife's tortoise-shell kitten Emmeline, whose existence I had for the moment forgotten, but who owns that backyard and whose permission had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... basement or inner corridor of any large building; the basement of a private home; a subway or tunnel; or even a backyard trench with some kind of shielding material (heavy lumber, earth, bricks, etc.) ...
— In Time Of Emergency - A Citizen's Handbook On Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters (1968) • Department of Defense
... where the corral was, to get my horse, but found the gate fastened with chains and securely locked. The corral walls were built of adobe, and the two walls of it were a continuation of the side walls of the house, and its end wall formed an enclosure or backyard. My horse was there, and I found my saddle in one of the rooms of the building, hidden under a blanket. I entered the corral through the back door of the house, caught and saddled my horse, and then led ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... the improved growth of their vegetables. However, there are numerous simpler, less rigorous ways of composting that produce a product nearly as good with much less work. These more basic methods will appeal to the less-committed backyard gardener or the homeowner with lawn, shrubs, and perhaps a few flower beds. One unique method suited to handling kitchen garbage—vermicomposting (worms)—might appeal even to the ecologically concerned apartment dweller with ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... driven up to the high backyard fence and its sticks heaved into the yard and piled in perfect order—and it made a goodly and formidable showing when Old Pete, the wood-sawyer, finally arrived on the scene. The time of wood-buying ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... Pryors' and went straight ahead, only I kept out of line with our kitchen windows. I tramped through the slush, ice, and crossed fields where I was afraid of horses; but when I got to the top of the Pryor backyard fence, I stuck there, for the bulldogs were loose, and came raving at me. I was going to be eaten alive, for I didn't know the word Laddie did; and those dogs climbed a fence like a person; I saw them the time Leon brought back Even So. I was thinking what ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... needed permanently for two or three cycles belonging to the house, and occasionally for the machine of a visitor, and if room is obtainable in a backyard or garden in direct communication with the road, the question of constructing a really durable and practical cycle shed is well worth consideration. I say constructing, because, in the first place, a bought shed costing the same money would probably not be of such good ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... she lay listening to the strange low hub-hub from outside. And it made her think of what she had seen an hour before, when at the open window, resting her elbows on the sill, she had begun to make her acquaintance with her backyard—a yawning abyss of brick and cement which went down and down to cement below, and up and up to a strip of blue sky, and to right and to left went stretching away with rows and rows of windows. And now as the murmurs and quick low cries, piano music, a baritone voice and ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... 'e did. It seems scrounging for fuel 'ad reached such a pitch in the village that people took their backyard fences in at night, 'an they 'ad posted a policeman on the station to prevent 'em sawing away the waiting-room. But our washing 'ad to be done, 'an I thought if I got the whole of this football team scrounging they might find something as everyone else 'ad ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... In the backyard of the Bryant home, buried in debris, was a chicken coop, not a splinter awry. Within it was a goose sitting meekly upon a dozen eggs which she ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... he when he had read them. "More thieves than one, and the coal-cellar of all places as a way in! I certainly tried to give it that appearance. I left enough candle-grease there to make those coals burn bravely. But it looked up into a blind backyard, Bunny, and a boy of eight couldn't have squeezed through the trap. Long may that theory keep them ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... fingers, and I perceived that the grass blades were sharp as knives, and hurt my hands cruelly. I tried to get up cautiously, so as not to cut myself on the sharp grass. I put down a tentative foot, much as my kitten treads for the first time the primeval forest in the backyard. All at once I felt the stealthy patter of something creeping, creeping, creeping purposefully toward me. I do not know how at that time the idea was in my mind; I had no words for intention or purpose. Yet it was precisely the evil intent, and not the creeping animal that ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... burst in the back-yard and the landlady fainted. Another came crashing in through a first-floor window, and, bursting, knocked several bedrooms into one. Then we thought it time to get the women down into the cellar—rather a risky undertaking since the door of it was in the backyard. However, we got them all down in safety and came up into the second saal to watch the course of events. Hagen gave a fearful groan as a shell broke into the kitchen behind us, and, bursting in the centre of the stove, sent his ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... to answer, when there came a sharp knock at the door leading from the backyard, and Lambton's Indian lad entered. "The soldier—he come—many. I go over the ridge; I see. They come ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... open. People used the side door into the ell sitting room, and the brick walk leading in a curved sweep to this doorway was free from grass. A high wooden lattice separated the front lawn from the backyard and sheds and stables, and about this lattice sprawled in luxuriant freedom rose vines and honeysuckle, just now faintly ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... dragged so strongly that she almost lost her feet. She attempted to scream, but a hand was instantly placed over her mouth, and she found herself running helplessly, and against her will, down a narrow passage which flanked one side of the burning house; beyond this into a small backyard; then through another house into another yard; and so on until she entered a small, very dirty room. This room was full of unknown condiments in jars and pots, some queer stuffed figures in fancy-dresses, some wigs and curls of false hair, and several masks, false noses, etc., etc. Sue, entering ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... of a stream, with jewelled dragon-flies darting over, soft clouds above and the odour of wild grapes or swamp azalea wafting from the banks, are no more to them than half a dozen such lilies grown in a sunken tub or whitewashed basin in a backyard; rather are they less desirable because less easily controlled and encompassed. Such people, and they are not a few, belong to the tribe of Peter Bell, who saw nothing more in the primrose by the river's brim than that it was a primrose, and consequently ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Emancipation Day celebration. None of these was it that had aroused the denizens of "Little Africa," and kept them talking across the street from window to window, from door to door, through alley gates, over backyard fences, where they stood loud-mouthed and arms akimboed among laden clothes lines. No, the cause of it all was that Erastus Smith, Aunt Mandy Smith's boy, who had gone away from home several years before, and who, ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... impatiently. "There's no spring in sight. There's snow yet on the shed in Donovan's backyard. And yesterday they puts open cars on the Sixth Avenue lines, and the janitors have quit ordering coal. And that means six weeks more of winter, by all the signs ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... and attended her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... fiends of war are out and the city skies aflame, Will have something better to talk about than an absent woman's shame, Will have something nobler to do by far than jest at a friend's expense, Or blacken a name in a public bar or over a backyard fence. And this you learn from the libelled past, though its methods were somewhat rude — A nation's born where the shells fall fast, or its lease of life renewed. We in part atone for the ghoulish strife, and the crimes of the peace we boast, And ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... 'Is it gold?' I said that if that were gold it could be easily tested, first by its malleability and next by acids. I took a piece in my teeth and the metallic lustre was perfect. I then called to the clerk, Baden, to bring in an ax and hatchet from the backyard. When these were brought, I took the largest piece and beat it out flat, and beyond doubt it was metal and a pure metal. Still we attached little importance to the fact, for gold was known to exist at San Fernando at the south and yet was ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... mention,' said Saxon. 'There was another, Van Helstatt, who was a man of learning, and cast horoscopes in consideration of some small fee or honorarium. I have never met so wise a man, for he would talk of the planets and constellations as though he kept them all in his own backyard. He made no more of a comet than if it were a mouldy china orange, and he explained their nature to us, saying that they were but common stars which had had a hole knocked in them, so that their insides or viscera protruded. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exposure. Returning to the window, he glanced to the left, and found that he was overlooked by the side veranda of another villa in the rear, evidently on its way to take position on the line of the street. Although in actual and deliberate transit on rollers across the backyard and still occulting a part of the view, it remained, after the reckless fashion of the period, inhabited. Certainly, with a door fronting a thoroughfare, and a neighbor gradually approaching him, he would not ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... seen a good deal of the house and its frequenters. As there was a certain handsome room with a billiard table in it—on the ground floor, eating out a backyard—which might have been Mr Lammle's office, or library, but was called by neither name, but simply Mr Lammle's room, so it would have been hard for stronger female heads than Georgiana's to determine whether its frequenters were men of pleasure or men of business. Between the room and the men ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... has Europe or Asia in his backyard, nor a lifetime of leisure for research, for special learning, on the moot questions of church-scholarship. Progress consists in each man's doing his best to advance the interests of the kingdom of God in his ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... the TV interview, though, and she would have avoided it if it had been politely possible. But what could she do when the line of cars and trucks pulled into the drive and the technicians got out and started setting up their equipment in the backyard? What could she say when the suave young man came up to her and said, "We want you to know that we're all very proud of your boy up there, ma'am, and we hope you'll do us the honor of ...
— Star Mother • Robert F. Young
... for all we're worth," said Stevens. "But this is your first big game away from home. It's really the toughest game of the season. Place is a hard nut to crack any time. And her players on their own backyard are scrappers who can take a lot of beating and still win out. Then there's another thing that's no small factor in their strength: They are idolized by the students, and rooting at Place is a science. They have a yell that beats anything you ever heard. It'll paralyze a fellow at a critical ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... had been busy in the Craig's backyard garden, clipping, training, loosening the earth around lilac, honeysuckle, and Rose of Sharon. The little German florist on the corner had sent in two loads of richly fertilised soil and a barrel of forest mould. These she sweetened with lime, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... the clock that stood in the comer, Jonas turned sharply on his heel, took his hat, and went forth into the backyard of his farm. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... had left Dublin for the country, and rented a cottage with a small backyard, he returned to town and purchased a monkey. Not a word of his scheme would he disclose to his ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... at home. In towns, not one thunderstorm in fifty that performs an exploit more magnanimous than knocking down an old wife from a chimney-top—singeing a pair of worsted stockings that, knit in an ill-starred hour, when the sun had entered Aries, had been hung out to dry on a line in the backyard, or garden as it is called—or cutting a few inches off the tail of an old Whig weathercock that for years had been pecking the eyes out of all the airts the wind can blaw, greedy of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... smiled the livelong day; boy rabbits and girl rabbits, mother rabbits and father rabbits, and goodness knows how many aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, second cousins and distant relatives-in-law! They all lived under one big roof in the backyard of the good old woman who kept them, and they had such jolly times together that it seemed ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... progress is the astonishment of the world! Why, not only are our ultramodern plants, built largely with foreign assistance, working on a twenty-four hour a day basis, but thousands of secondary smelters, some so small as to be operated by a handful of comrade citizens, in backyard establishments, by schoolchildren, working smelters of but a few tons monthly capacity in ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... sawmills; the air was almost free of their dust, and there were hints of holiday on all the town. Farmers' wagons were arriving early, and ribbons of orange and blue were fastened in the horses' headgear. From the backyard of Downey's Hotel the thumping of a big drum was heard, and the great square piles of yellow lumber near Ford's Mill gave back the shrilling of fifes that were tuning up for the event. As the sun rose high, the Orangemen of the Lodge appeared, each wearing regalia—cuffs and a collarette ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... them were covered with shell holes, a little cemetery flanked one side of the zigzag way, and the big dugouts of the reserves were everywhere in this backyard of the trench area. Out of narrow, crooked side avenues soldiers poured into the communication trench which the wire carriers were following, falling in ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... cared much, until a gloomy set of men in a General Assembly, when Charles I was King of England, threw it down and broke it up, because it was an idolatrous emblem. Luckily, some wise person hid all the pieces in the church; but after a while another person not so wise threw them out into the backyard. There they stayed until a Doctor Duncan thought he would have the cross put up in his manse garden: and some great Norwegian scholars, to whom he sent copies of the writings, grew very excited, and contradicted each other about ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... way along in the dark and descended the black stairs. He was not expecting to meet anybody, for all interest was centered in the other part of the house now; his calculation proved correct. By the time he was passing through the backyard, Mrs. Pratt, her servants, and a dozen half-dressed neighbors had joined the twins and the dead, and accessions were still arriving at the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the door into his outer office, walked to the window, looked contemplatively out upon the hotel backyard, and returned ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... the grassy meads of America. The work is done by clerks employed at moderate salaries for eight hours a day. For the cerebration of whatever new ideas may be needed, several French literary men are kept in chains in the backyard, being fed exclusively on absinthe and caviare sandwiches during their periods of creative activity. No less than forty different brands of drama are turned out, each with its description stamped clearly on the can. While a complete equipment ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... with the old house in the Rue Pirouette. On the ground floor he passed through the faint odours pervading the premises of the purveyor of cooked vegetables. Big pans of boiled spinach and sorrel stood cooling in the little backyard. Then he ascended the winding staircase, greasy and dark, with worn and bulging steps which sloped in a disquieting manner. The Mehudins occupied the whole of the second floor. Even when they had attained ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... near a place called Aldgate. In this camp were congregated all classes and conditions of men, of several nationalities. I was in charge of the barracks one evening when a report came in from the foot police station that a girl had been nearly murdered. She had been found in the backyard of a small house in a disreputable quarter of the city, with her throat cut and a dagger wound in her breast. The nature of the wound pointed to the attempted murder being the work of a foreigner, probably an Italian, of whom there ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... faint yellow gaslight of the dining-room. The giggling Eliza held the door open before her, and followed her in. The shutters had been closed streaks of daylight showed above and below them. The green-and-black tablecloths of the school dining-tables were supported on the clothes-line from the backyard. The line sagged in a graceful curve, but it answered its purpose of supporting the curtains which concealed that part of the room which ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... I live without oats, while I sat there, homesick for money and without a cent to my ambition, there came on the breeze the most beautiful smell my nose had entered for a year. God knows where it came from in that backyard of a country—it was a bouquet of soaked lemon peel, cigar stumps, and stale beer—exactly the smell of Goldbrick Charley's place on Fourteenth Street where I used to play pinochle of afternoons with the third-rate actors. And that smell drove my troubles through me and clinched ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... a tub of hot water," snapped Mrs. Peters. "You'll find the tub in the backyard, and the kettle's near on the boil. Look sharp and get the tub, and then go upstairs and get a ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... earth is small. But in each backyard, on each acre or square mile of earth, decisions may be made or are being made that determine survival, utility, order, beauty. The results of those decisions appear constantly in the life all ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... heart: She was always kind to her pets. She never slapped her hippopotamus when it broke her dolls in its playful gambols, and she never forgot to feed her rhinoceroses in their little hutch in the backyard. Her elephant was devoted to her, and sometimes Mary Ann made her nurse quite cross by smuggling the dear little thing up to bed with her and letting it go to sleep with its long trunk laid lovingly across her throat, and its pretty head ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... "You see," he began at his lightning rate, "we haven't much land anyway, seeing as we live in the village. I can have the backyard, such as it is, but that's precious little use. It's never been used for a garden, and it's full of rock. One of our neighbours says I may have a piece of her corn patch for my corn, if I'll take care of hers, too. Of course I took her offer. Just ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the backyard and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose—a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid. All sorts of ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... the time for Dick and Dora to depart. An auto was at the door, gaily decorated with white ribbons, and bearing on the back a sign painted by Tom which read, "We're Just Married." Another auto was in the backyard, to take some of the guests ...
— The Rover Boys in New York • Arthur M. Winfield
... and Germans generally—alas, how many men universally—cry towards celestial luminaries of the governing kind with the most deepest devotion, in their extreme need, under their unsufferable injuries; and are truly like dogs in the backyard barking at the Moon. The Moon won't come down to them, and be eaten as green cheese; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... smiled, as through a leafy opening of shrubbery he caught a glimpse of a last survivor, still loyally alert, the haughty head thrown back in everlasting challenge and one foreleg lifted, standing in a vast and shadowy backyard with a clothesline fastened ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... by the great plain that lay golden in the West. Idly, he let himself float down the mountain sides, in long descending diagonals, and suddenly found himself above a farm in the plain. In the backyard, children were playing; a man was sharpening a plowshare at a wheel, and out of the kitchen-shed there came a clatter of dishes and the voice of a woman in song. Seized by a sudden perverse humor, Charles-Norton swooped into the chicken-yard and ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... next few months Stringfield did yeoman duty as Cincinnati's one-man UFO center by sifting out the wheat from the chaff and passing the wheat on to the Air Force. As he told me the other day, half his nights were spent in his backyard clad in shorts and binoculars. Fortunately his neighbors were broad-minded and the UFO's picked ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... of New York did not understand. He peered around. Was it that dark, little house in the far backyard that flamed? Forgetful of his robes he hurried down,—a brave, white figure in the sunset. He found himself before an old, black, rickety stable. He could hear the mules ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... was, in the image of a house; but yet, from the moment its countenance appeared on the scene, that lost and lorn prairie seemed to have found a place for itself. The whole interminable region attached itself to the shack and became a front and backyard; the landscape was situated and set right, knowing its right hand from its left. Four walls, a roof, and a door—all the things necessary to make a threshold, that magic line across which woman faces the world with the courage of divine right. At the end of a lonesome, ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... backyard," said Hugh. That evening the poor old image, as disgusted as a piece of rock could possibly be, was carried to the river and tossed into the rapids, his successors standing with the multitude ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... them to take their picture books and sit quietly in the parlour as good children should on a Sabbath afternoon. So they had noisily pretended to obtain the picture books and then quietly tiptoed out into the backyard, which was not so stuffy ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... at the sky and remarked that it looked like rain. The others already had resumed the march toward the village. The incident was closed. For some unaccountable reason the whole thing reminded me of a friend who once shot a cat in his backyard. For three weeks he talked ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... returned the novelist, a twinkle in his eye, "I had exactly the same notion when I first began, and I remember what a much older hand said to me when I told him I was going down to Cornwall for romantic background. 'Young man,' said he, 'have you placed a romance in your mother's backyard yet?' I had not, but I did so at once instead of going to Cornwall, and sounder advice I never had in my life. Material, like charity, begins at home; nor need you suppose that nothing ever happens down here. That is the universal idea of the native about his or her own heath, but I can ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... stables stood, was a road which ran down the hill and across the stream and beyond the woods, and on the other side of this road near the bottom of the hill was the little house in which lived Johnny Stout and his mother. They had no fields or lots, but only a backyard in which there were chickens and pigeons and, in the Fall, just before Tommy's visit to Santa Claus, two white goats, named "Billy" and "Carry," which Johnny had broken and used to drive to a little rough wagon which he had made ...
— Tommy Trots Visit to Santa Claus • Thomas Nelson Page |
