A Quote by John Burroughs

One summer day, while I was walking along the country road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me the effect was quite startling. ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest.

John Burroughs

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About Along Atomic Born Century Changes Country Day Did Distant Down Effect Farm Fell Four General Grain Gravity Half Half A Century Long Material Me More Opposite Pressure Quite Rest Road Sand Section Startling Stillness Stone Sudden Suddenly Summer Summing Up Than Three Two Up Walking Wall While Yards Years

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John Burroughs
American - Author
April 3, 1837 - March 29, 1921

During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.

Stephen Ambrose

Only when the kulak refused to deliver grain to the State did [Joseph] Stalin, under the pressure of the Left Opposition, accomplish a sharp turn. Being the empiricist that he is, he moved, to the opposite extreme, and set as a task for two or three years the collectivization of all the peasantry, the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, and the compression of the Five Year Plan into four years.

Leon Trotsky

My gaze flew to him once more,noting the cigarette he set down even as he exhaled a long plume of white."Why are you lying there smoking while I'm chained to a wall?"I demanded.The look he gave me was a mixture of relief and cynicism."Since it seems you don't remember anything about the past two days,let me assure you,luv-I earned that smoke.

Jeaniene Frost

When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.

Stephen Graham Jones

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

Steve Martin

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.

Elizabeth Warren

At the age of two-and-a-half, I was run down by a truck. I had gone rogue in the house while my mother was bathing my sister. I went outside and met a friend who promised me candy. Afterward, I walked back by myself across the road where I fell down in the street. A 15-year-old boy delivering bread struck me down.

Trudie Styler

You know, you look at Israel - Israel has a wall and everyone said do not build a wall, walls do not work - 99.9 percent of people trying to come across that wall cannot get across and more. Bibi Netanyahu told me the wall works.

Donald Trump

Our problems stem from our childhood. Ray was, for so long, the only boy. Then I arrive and take all his limelight away from him. That must have quite a profound effect. I sometimes think that Ray was only happy for three-and-a-half years in his life. And those were the three-and-a-half years before I was born.

Dave Davies

If you make a film and then two and a half, three years later, suddenly the country's changed and you look like you just happened to hit it. I actually like being contrarian. I would have preferred to come out three years ago when everyone was disagreeing with me. But hopefully it asks a lot of questions about our responsibility in sending young men and women to war, especially a war that's so complex, where there's no right answer, where they're forced with impossible decisions every day.

Paul Haggis

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

Samuel Beckett

A prisoner lived in solitary confinement for years. He saw and spoke to no one and his meals were served through an opening in the wall. One day an ant came into his cell. The man contemplated it in fascination as it crawled around the room. He held it in the palm of his hand the better to observe it, gave it a grain or two, and kept it under his tin cup at night. One day it suddenly struck him that it had taken him ten long years of solitary confinement to open his eyes to the loveliness of an ant.

Anthony de Mello

'Cause a musician, you can't tell me, "I've got this message I want share with the public," and it's three-and-a-half minutes long. That's not it. If your message is only three-and-a-half minutes long, then we got nothing else to talk about. Because life is more complex than three-and-a-half minutes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

My road to success was a long road to success was a long road. You get out of something what you put into it. I put blood, sweat and tears into stand-up comedy and the entertainment realm in general. For me to just know be coming around is a blessing. It's a blessing and it's an honor. It makes me say I can get more and I can do more.

Kevin Hart

we left about midnight and walked down the hill in silence. the night was muggy, and all around me i felt the same pressure, a sense of time rushing by while it seemed to be standing still. whenever i thought of time in puerto rico, i was reminded of those old magnetic clocks that hung on the walls of my classrooms in high school. every now and then a hand would not move for several minutes -- and if i watched it long enough, wondering if it had finally broken down, the sudden click of the hand jumping three for four notches would startle me when it came.

Hunter S. Thompson

A friend of mine back in 1989 did an illegal rave in Vauxhall. He got Keith Haring to come along and tag the side of the wall. My friend cut it out of the wall and he kept it under his bed for 20 years. Then a few years ago he asks me if I want to buy it... so I spent £12,000 on a Keith Haring.

Ben Eine

A Quote by John Burroughs

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