"Backyard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... concentrated in my 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 terrified ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... a cottage in old Greenwich Village, With a tiny clay plot that was burnt brown and hard; But it softened at last to my girl's patient tillage, And the roses sprang up in our little backyard;" ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... 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 happy ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... this time 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 ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... been about, that's what I want to know," he went on with quiet cynicism. "What have I been sweating about—nothing. What is anyone's life? No more than mine. We're all like a lot of hens in a backyard, scratching so many hours a day. Some scratch a little deeper than those who aren't so skilled or so strong. And when I stand off a little, it's all alike. The end is as blind and senseless as the beginning on ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... suites—somewhat deteriorated by the use of boarders, but still numerous and habitable. Boarders—she abhorred them. They were people from afar, strangers and interlopers. She went over the place from garret to cellar, from front gate to backyard fence. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... 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
... are done. Then the Princess had a truly good 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 ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... of at least 45 deg., just before a snowball some five hundred times as big as the one our school-boys unitedly rolled up in the back-yard. It was a snowball, round, symmetrical, just such a magnified copy of the backyard one as might be expected to follow a boy in dreams after too much Johnny-cake for supper. And that was an avalanche. We have stood since then under the shadow of the Jungfrau, on the Wengern Alp, at the selfsame spot where Byron beheld the fall of so many. We had the noble ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the influences which haunt the house; and I strongly advise you to have the walls opened, the floor removed,— nay, the whole room pulled down. I observe that it is detached from the body of the house, built over the small backyard, and could be removed without injury to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... secure, what comforts, possessed by me now, would not a Mrs. Chillingly Mivers ravish from my hold and appropriate to herself! Instead of these pleasant rooms, where should I be lodged? In a dingy den looking on a backyard excluded from the sun by day and vocal with cats by night; while Mrs. Mivers luxuriated in two drawing-rooms with southern aspect and perhaps a boudoir. My brougham would be torn from my uses and monopolized by 'the angel of my hearth,' clouded ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that stood in the comer, Jonas turned sharply on his heel, took his hat, and went forth into the backyard of ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... excursion down the river, nor a revival, baptising, nor an 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, rumour said, had become a great man, ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... in this factory was the general wages—and subtract from that two shillings a week for the house and three shillings a week for fuel the operators are not likely to lay up large fortunes. As they have no gardens to the houses owned by the factory, nor backyard accommodation of any kind, the cleanliness and tidy appearance of houses and workpeople are a credit to them. But when times grow hard, and the mills run half time, and not even a potato to fall back upon, there must be great ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... the mean, ferrety face of a well-known low-class dealer thrust forward from among the crowd. This dealer was notorious for keeping a large number of big Danes and Newfoundlands in the miserable backyard of a cobbler's shop in the East End of London. He had been ordered out of show rings before that day for malpractices. He had never owned a Wolfhound, but he was a shrewd business judge of the values of dogs. He nodded to ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... here, the speaker bent over her, took a bandage from her head, and threw open a back door to let in the daylight upon it, from the smallest and most miserable backyard I ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... reined up his horse at the door, Squire Pleasants stepped briskly inside and pulled a string which communicated with a bell somewhere in the backyard. ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... 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 was a considerable number at the railway camp. ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... greater part of Pudding Lane, between Water street and Spring Lane. Nearly one hundred houses were destroyed, of which the debris was used to fill up Long Wharf. The fire "broke out," says an account in the Boston News-Letter, "in an old tenement within a backyard in Cornhill, near the First Meeting-house, occasioned by the carelessness of a poor Scottish woman by using fire near a parcel of ocum, chips, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... tutor for her grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application to the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a ball and bowled him, with a shrug for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 always are. Only $1.87 to buy ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... waiting his appearance, she became aware of a great event that was taking place in the backyard. It happened that a pet cat had met with some accident that had deprived it of life, and the children were indulging in a funeral. A grave had been dug at the back corner of the yard, and the procession of mourners was marching back and forth across the yard with many twists ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... part of July, with great secrecy, he armed himself, mounted Rozinante, and rode out of his backyard into the open fields. He was disturbed to think that the honour of knighthood had not yet been conferred upon him, but determined to rectify this matter at an early opportunity, and rode on soliloquising, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... wood-piles within reach of the kitchen door, and taking down the fly-screens, (One leaves these on, as a rule, till the double windows are brought up from the cellar, and one has to hunt all over the house for missing screws.) Sometimes one saw a few flashing lengths of new stovepipe in a backyard, and pitied the owner. There is no humour in the old, bitter-true stovepipe jests of ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling |
