Backyard Football Quotes

Sebastian: I have to say something to you. You don't have to respond. You don't have to tell me anything. All you need to do is listen while I clear something up. When did we meet? At six? Seven? Lena: Eight. We moved into this house when I was eight, and you were outside, in the backyard throwing a football with your dad. Sebastian: Yeah, that's right. You were out on this balcony watching me. Lena: You saw that? Sebastian: I saw you. I also heard your dad telling you to get your butt back in the house and start unpacking. I think you responded by telling him unpacking boxes violated child labor laws. That's when I fell in love with you.

The grand tour of our tiny flat," Henry amends. "It's ours, though, so we're not complaining. Not everyone can live in posh brick houses with park-like gardens." Ben frowns. "My house isn't that posh." "It really is," Steve says. Traitor. "A pool doesn't make a house posh." Henry tilts his head, chin raised in challenge. "Five cars and a football pitch in the backyard do, though." "It's a small practice pitch." "It's a practice pitch in the backyard.

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of 'Mr. Belvedere.' I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

we now know that UFOs apparently come in an array of shapes and sizes. They are shaped like ovals, cigars, triangles, trapezoids, disks, spheres, coins flipped on their sides, boomerangs, crescents, hexagons, Vs, lenticulars, diamonds. They are black, silver, metallic, smooth, textured, and can change colors and shapes. They range in sizes as huge as a football stadium and as small as a VW. The crafts reportedly move at incredible speeds, can hover, hang seemingly motionless in the sky, and are capable of astounding maneuvers. They usually make no sound, don’t have wings, often have a dome on top, and even lit portholes.

Maureen Wanket is one of the many white people who has joined the Black Lives Matter movement. She’s a middle-aged teacher who once worked at Sacramento High, the school where a young man named Stephon Clark used to play football and ace his first-period history tests. On March 18, 2018, two Sacramento police officers responding to a vandalism call shot at Stephon twenty times, killing him before identifying themselves. Many of those rounds were fired into Stephon’s back. The twenty-two-year-old father of two was killed in his grandmother’s backyard. The only “weapon” police found was a cellphone. Yet the officers faced no criminal charges because they could claim that they had been in fear for their lives.

Most of poker was mental, which was what made it so entertaining— But it also brought out the worst in loved ones, much like the game Monopoly, or college football, or bringing fat-free ranch dressing to a picnic.

Baseball is fathers and sons,” the poet Donald Hall wrote. “Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

Traditions are conditioned reflexes. Throughout Part 2 of this book, you will find suggestions for establishing family traditions that will trigger happy anticipation and leave lasting, cherished memories. Traditions around major holidays and minor holidays. Bedtime, bath-time, and mealtime traditions; sports and pastime traditions; birthday and anniversary traditions; charitable and educational traditions. If your family’s traditions coincide with others’ observances, such as celebrating Thanksgiving, you will still make those traditions unique to your family because of the personal nuances you add. Volunteering at the food bank on Thanksgiving morning, measuring and marking their heights on the door frame in the basement, Grandpa’s artistic carving of the turkey, and their uncle’s famous gravy are the traditions our kids salivated about when they were younger, and still do on their long plane rides home at the end of November each year. (By the way, our dog Lizzy has confirmed Pavlov’s observations; when the carving knife turns on, cue the saliva, tail wagging, and doggy squealing.) But don’t limit your family’s traditions to the big and obvious events like Thanksgiving. Weekly taco nights, family book club and movie nights, pajama walks, ice cream sundaes on Sundays, backyard football during halftime of TV games, pancakes in Mom and Dad’s bed on weekends, leaf fights in the fall, walks to the sledding hill on the season’s first snow, Chinese food on anniversaries, Indian food for big occasions, and balloons hanging from the ceiling around the breakfast table on birthday mornings. Be creative, even silly. Make a secret family noise together when you’re the only ones in the elevator. When you share a secret that “can’t leave this room,” everybody knows to reach up in the air and grab the imaginary tidbit before it can get away. Have a family comedy night or a talent show on each birthday. Make holiday cards from scratch. Celebrate major family events by writing personalized lyrics to an old song and karaoking your new composition together. There are two keys to establishing family traditions: repetition and anticipation. When you find something that brings out excitement and smiles in your kids, keep doing it. Not so often that it becomes mundane, but on a regular and predictable enough basis that it becomes an ingrained part of the family repertoire. And begin talking about the traditional event days ahead of time so by the time it finally happens, your kids are beside themselves with excitement. Anticipation can be as much fun as the tradition itself.

For fifteen years Daedalus labored, creating what looked like a trench warfare playground in the backyard of the palace. Fortunately, it was a really big backyard. If you put the Mall of America, Walt Disney World, and twenty football stadiums together, they would all fit inside the Labyrinth with room to spare.