Horse Manure Quotes

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The story is told that when Joe was a child his cousins emptied his Christmas stocking and replaced the gifts with horse manure. Joe took one look and bolted for the door, eyes glittering with excitement. 'Wait, Joe, where are you going? What did ol' Santa bring you?' According to the story Joe paused at the door for a piece of rope. 'Brought me a bran'-new pony but he got away. I'll catch 'em if I hurry.' And ever since then it seemed that Joe had been accepting more than his share of hardship as good fortune, and more than his share of shit as a sign of Shetland ponies just around the corner, Thoroughbred stallions just up the road.
Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion)
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
Ray Bradbury
Then hearing Elvis today made me think I didn't have a lot to bitch about, but when I said that to Mr. Nak after group, he said, "Don't get to thinkin' just because some other guy's sinkin' in horse manure, the stuff up around your neck is chocolate puddin'. A wound is a wound, young Brewster. Remember that. Don't diminish the pain of your own just because you see some other gut-shot cowboy bleedin' to death.
Chris Crutcher (Ironman)
We're an Ag college," I explain to them. "Not as good as the one in Yanco but we have livestock." "Cows?" Anson Choi asks, covering his nose. "Pigs, too. And horses. Great for growing tomatoes. The Cadets are wanna-be soldiers. City people. They may know how to street fight but they don't know how to wade through manure. "I'm going to throw up," one of the guys says. "Don't feel too bad," I explain. "Some of our lot did while they were laying out this stuff. Actually, right there where you're standing.
Melina Marchetta (On the Jellicoe Road)
Jacob: I've never seen so much manure. Wade: Baggage stock horses. They pack'em in 27 a car. Jacob: how do you stand the smell? Wade: what smell?
Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants)
THE BARN was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell—as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.
E.B. White (Charlotte's Web)
But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. “It was a lot of travelling—ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smelled like popcorn and horse manure. One night we were in San Antonio, and I was having a bit of a melt-down—wanting my own room, you know, my dog, my own bed—and Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess—I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a full moon, it’s like he’s telling me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where you are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
For the man in the paddock, whose duty is is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.
Henry Miller
When the world's on the Way, they use horses to haul manure. When the world gets off the Way, they breed warhorses on the common. The greatest evil: wanting more. The worst luck: discontent. Greed's the curse of life. To know enough's enough is enough to know.
Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
Your office is full of hay and smells like horse manure.” “Doesn’t get any better than that.
Maggie McGinnis (A Cowboy's Christmas Promise (Whisper Creek, #2))
What I liked about her, she didn't give you a lot of horse manure about what a great guy her father was. She probably knew what a phony slob he was.
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
All I know is that I'm a helpless hunk of helpful horse manure looking in your eye saying Help me
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
With the onset of winter Burnham ordered all hydrants packed in horse manure to prevent freezing. On the coldest days the manure steamed, as if the hydrants themselves were on fire.
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
It's like Eldridge Kestenbaum always says - you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." "Horse manure catches more flies than honey and vinegar put together," retorted Mark.
Gordon Korman (Radio Fifth Grade)
You got hair like a girl,” Mr. D said. “And you smell like bubble bath. At least I can get a trim.” “I’m wearing Old Spice.” “Next time try something stronger. Like horse manure.” Mr.
J.R. Ward (Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #6))
Simon walks back to the house alone. The night is clear and warm, with a moon, almost full, enclosed in a nimbus of mist; the air smells of mown grass and horse manure, with an undertone of dog.
Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)
God, but it was fun! It was the way I liked it. No arguing, no talking to the stupid peasants. I just walked into that room with a tommy gun and shot their guts out. They never thought that there were people like me in this country. They figured us all to be soft as horse manure and just as stupid.
Mickey Spillane (One Lonely Night (Mike Hammer #4))
News flash, horses poop about fifty pounds of manure a day. That’s per horse. Of course cows poop about three times that, so we have it easy by comparison.
Susan Mallery (A Very Merry Princess (Happily Inc, #2.5))
She was like a farmer who keeps horses in order to haul away the manure that they generate.
Paula Marantz Cohen (Jane Austen in Boca)
This isn't a courtroom, pal," I said to Nelson, "this is the gutter. No fancy robes, no platitudes engraved in marble, no brass railing dividing the sides. This is the streets and the alleys. this is the Chicago we really live in. Here justice isn't dispensed with a wooden gavel, it's taken with your bare hands. It may be Tubby's world, a part of it, but it's also August Jansen's world, and my world, and yours. Darrow's a great man but this work comes after the fact, after the real battles of life are fought. Lawyers and judges pick up the pieces after the dust settles. Their job is to make sense of what's happened, not make it happen. That occurs in the gutter where blood and bone and horse manure and coal dust and sweat and fear blend and roil. In the end you either have hope or sewage. It can go either way, but it goes on.
James Conroy (Literally Dead)
I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town. But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become selfconscious about. Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places. And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning. As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures. In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
Ray Bradbury
I envied the sons their life in the country. I wasn’t even jealous of how at home they were in the fields and woods and barns; of how they could do so many things I couldn’t, drive tractors, take apart and fix motors, pluck eggs from under a hen, shove their way into a stall with a stubborn horse pushing back: I just marveled at it all, and wanted it. They and the boys who lived on farms near them were also so enviably at ease in their bodies: what back in the city would be taken as a slouch of disinterest, here was an expression of physical grace. No need to be tense when everything so readily submitted to your efficiently minimal gestures: hoisting bales of hay into a loft, priming a recalcitrant pump … Something else there was as well, something more elusive: perhaps that they lived so much of the time in a world of wild, poignant odors—mown grass, the redolent pines, even the tang of manure and horse-piss-soaked hay. Just the thought of those sensory elations inflicted me with a feeling I still have to exert myself to repress that I was squandering my time, wasting what I knew already were irretrievable clutches of years, now hecatombs of years, trapped in my trivial, stifling life.
C.K. Williams (All at Once: Prose Poems)
Well, horses take a lot of work, they’re dirty animals, so every weekend he puts on his waders, goes out in the barn, and shovels the manure, and the dirty hay, and puts the new hay in, and feeds the horses, and cleans up their piss. It’s not a good job. It’s miserable, but someone has to shovel the shit so the family can enjoy what they have. That is how he framed it for me. ‘You shovel the shit so your family, so the United States, can have what we have and live the way we do.’ 
Eric Blehm (Fearless: The Heroic Story of One Navy SEAL's Sacrifice in the Hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the Unwavering Devotion of the Woman Who Loved Him)
Robert crossed Pulteney Bridge with a light step. He grinned at the boy raking odiferous horse manure to the curb and tipped him well for his service. He nodded—with a grin—to the puzzled driver of a hack heading into the city. And he bowed—with a grin—as he stepped aside to allow the weary-looking woman with two toddlers to pass. None to see him would realize that Robert had fallen under the hooves of a racing carriage and risen from the other side unscathed—metaphorically speaking, of course.
Cindy Anstey (Duels & Deception)
open your eyes to why God’s put you here, stop all that staring at the floor, you and Perry both you’re crazy—I’ll draw you magic moon circles’ll change all your luck”—I look her dead in the eye and it is blue and I say “O Billie, forgive me”—“But you see you go there talkin guilty again”—“Well I dont know all those big theories about how everything should be goddamit all I know is that I’m a helpless hunk of helpful horse manure looking in your eye saying Help me”—“But when you make those big final statements it doesnt help you
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living? You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he’s nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn’t have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy… You’ve got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition-man! You’ve got it. You’re young, I guess: you’d call thirty young, and you’re strong. You don’t have much education, but you’ve got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that, with all you’ve had to do with this is as far you’ve got And something tellys you, you’re not going much farther if any. And there is nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop wondering… …Maybe you had too much ambition. Maybe that was the trouble. You couldn’t see yourself spending forty years moving from office boy to president. So you signed on with a circulation crew; you worked the magazines from one coast to another. And then you ran across a little brush deal-it sounded nice, anyway. And you worked that until you found something better, something that looked better. And you moved from that something to another something. Coffee-and-tea premiums, dinnerware, penny-a-day insurance, photo coupons, cemetery lots, hosiery, extract, and God knows what all. You begged for the charities, You bought the old gold. You went back to the magazines and the brushes and the coffee and tea. You made good money, a couple of hundred a week sometimes. But when you averaged it up, the good weeks with the bad, it wasn’t so good. Fifty or sixty a week, maybe seventy. More than you could make, probably, behind agas pump or a soda fountain. But you had to knock yourself out to do it, and you were standing stil. You were still there at the starting place. And you weren’t a kid any more. So you come to this town, and you see this ad. Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker. And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like a right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manute Hating it. Hating yourself. And hoping.
Jim Thompson (A Hell of a Woman (Mulholland Classic))
The negativity bias—the tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones—sure isn’t helping matters. Then there’s anchoring: the predilection for relying too heavily on one piece of information when making decisions. “When people believe the world’s falling apart,” says Kahneman, “it’s often an anchoring problem. At the end of the nineteenth century, London was becoming uninhabitable because of the accumulation of horse manure. People were absolutely panicked. Because of anchoring, they couldn’t imagine any other possible solutions. No one had any idea the car was coming and soon they’d be worrying about dirty skies, not dirty streets.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
Do you condemn the kids for not having been blessed with I.Q.s of 120? Can you condemn the kids? Can you condemn anyone? Can you condemn the colleges that give all you need to pass a board of education examination? Do you condemn the board of education for not making the exams stiffer, for not boosting the requirements, for not raising salaries, for not trying to attract better teachers, for not making sure their teachers are better equipped to teach? Or do you condemn the meatheads all over the world who drift into the teaching profession drift into it because it offers a certain amount of paycheck every month security ,vacation-every summer luxury, or a certain amount of power , or a certain easy road when the other more difficult roads are full of ruts? Oh he’d seen the meatheads, all right; he’d seen them in every education class he’d ever attended. The simpering female idiots who smiled and agreed with the instructor, who imparted vast knowledge gleaned from profound observations made while sitting at the back of the classroom in some ideal high school in some ideal neighborhood while an ideal teacher taught ideal students. Or the men who were perhaps the worst, the men who sometimes seemed a little embarrassed, over having chosen the easy road, the road the security, the men who sometimes made a joke about the women not realizing they themselves were poured from the same streaming cauldron of horse manure. Had Rick been one of these men? He did not believe so…. He had wanted to teach, had honestly wanted to teach. He had not considered the security or the two-month vacation, or the short tours. He had simply wanted to teach, and he had considred taeaching a worth-while profession. He had, in fact, considered it the worthiest profession. He had held no illusions about his own capabilities. He could not paint, or write, or compose, or sculpt, or philopshize deeply, or design tall buildings. He could contribute nothing to the world creatively and this had been a disappointment to him until he’d realized he could be a big creator by teaching. For here were minds to be sculptured, here were ideas to be painted, here were lives to shape. To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do.
Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle)
there was this family who had two boys who were twins, and the only thing they had in common was their looks. If one felt it was too hot, the other felt it was too cold. If one said he liked the cake, the other said he hated it. They were opposites in every way. One was an eternal optimist, and the other a doom and gloom pessimist. Just to see what would happen, on the twins’ birthday, the father loaded the pessimist brother’s room with every imaginable gift – toys and games, and for the boy who always sees the brighter side of life, with horse manure. That night, the father went to check on the doom guy’s room and found him sitting amidst his new gifts sobbing away bitterly. “Why,” the father said in anguish, “after all this?” The boy replied, “Because my friends are going to be jealous, I will have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff, I will constantly need batteries, and my toys will eventually be stolen or broken.” Passing by the optimist twin’s room, the father found him dancing for joy on the pile of manure. “What are you so happy about?” the father asked. The boy replied, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!
Sadhguru (Mystic’s Musings)
Together with an elderly artist (I regret that I don't remember his name) he occupied a separate room in the barracks. And there Yuri painted for nothing schmaltzy pictures such as Nero's Feast and the Chorus of Elves and the like for the German officers on the commandant's staff. In return, he was given food. The slops for which the POW officers stood in line with their mess tins from 6 a.m. on, while the Ordners beat them with sticks and the cooks with ladles, were not enough to sustain life. At evening, Yuri could see from the windows of their room the one and only picture for which his artistic talent had been given him: the evening mist hovering above a swampy meadow encircled by barbed wire; a multitude of bonfires; and, around the bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now become beastlike creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and were all swarming with lice. Not all those two-legged creatures had died as yet. Not all of them had yet lost the capacity for intelligible speech, and one could see in the crimson reflections of the bonfires how a belated understanding was dawning on those faces which were descending to the Neanderthal.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
Central Park It’s hard to describe how that day in the park was altered when I stopped to read an official sign I came across near the great carousel, my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Ambrose. As the carousel turned in the background, all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope, I was learning how the huge thing was first designed to be powered by a blind mule, as it turned out, strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen room directly below the merry turning of the carousel. The sky did not darken with this news nor did a general silence fall on the strollers or the ball players on the green fields. No one even paused to look my way, though I must have looked terrible as I stood there filling with sympathy not so much for the harnessed beast tediously making its rounds, but instead for the blind mule within me always circling in the dark— the mule who makes me turn when my name is called or causes me to nod with a wooden gaze or sit doing nothing on a bench in the shape of a swan. Somewhere, there must still be a door to that underground room, the lock rusted shut, the iron key misplaced, last year’s leaves piled up against the sill, and inside, a trace of straw on the floor, a whiff of manure, and maybe a forgotten bit or a bridle hanging from a hook in the dark. Poor blind beast, I sang softly as I left the park, poor blind me, poor blind earth turning blindly on its side.
Billy Collins (Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems)
Hey." Jesse leaned on a rail to watch as Wyatt bent to his task. "When did you get back?" Wyatt barely paused. "Not sure. Time passes,you know?" "Yeah." Jesse arched a brow. "Something eating you,cuz?" "I'm fine." "Yeah.I can see that." Jesse turned to Zane and rolled his eyes. "We're heading up to the north range. Want to ride along?" "I'm fine here." "Well,yeah,you're doing a great job on that stall.But when you're through shoveling manure,what're you planning on doing the rest of the day?" Instead of te laugh he was expecting, Wyatt swore. Loudly. Fiercely. "I guess that means you'd like to be alone." Jesse shoved his hands into his back pockets. "Speaking from experience as an old married man,I'd say this also means that you and the lovely Lee have had a lovers' spat." In response Wyatt dug the pitchfork into a pile of dung and tossed it Jesse's way. Jesse ducked,avoiding most of the mess, except for a few bits of straw that clung to his hair. From a safe distance Zane gave a roar of laughter. "I think that means he isn't seeking your sage device, O Ancient One." "Your loss,cuz.I could have told you that what women really want is for you to admire their minds. Even when they don't make any sense at all." Jesse picked out the pieces of straw and tossed them aside before turning to Zane. "Come on.We've got a herd to deal with. Let's leave Mr. Happy to work out his problems in this pile of...horse manure." Laughing,the two strolled out of the barn. Wyatt swore gain and continued shoveling until every stall sparkled. Then he moved on to the cow barns, working his way through a mountain of frustration.
R.C. Ryan (Montana Destiny)
Jd_O wti d-d- God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. -GENESIS 1:31 As we look at life, are we bound to the idea that bad things happen to people? Look at all the bad news on television and radio. The newspapers are full of disasters: people dying of illness, accidents, drownings, fires destroying property, uprisings in countries abroad, and on and on. Do you sometimes ask God, "Why me?" As we look around, we get the idea that everything is falling apart, and our whole world is in a spiral downward. Charles L. Allen expressed this idea about our perspective: Our glasses aren't half-empty; they are really half-full. He says, It seems to be a general belief that the will of God is to make things distasteful for us, like taking medicine when we are sick or going to the dentist. Somebody needs to tell us that sunrise is also God's will. In fact, the good things in life far outweigh the bad. There are more sunrises than cyclones. His glass was certainly half-full. There's a story of a young boy who was on top of a pile of horse manure digging as fast and as hard as he could. His father, seeing his son work so hard on a pile of smelly waste, asked, "Weston, what are you doing on that pile of horse manure?" Weston replied, "Daddy, with this much horse manure there must be a pony here somewhere." This son certainly had his glass half-full. You, too, can choose to be positive in all events of life. There is goodness in everything-if we will only look for it. PRAYER Father God, thank You for helping me be a positive person. I appreciate You giving me
Emilie Barnes (The Tea Lover's Devotional)
But it isn't easy to find the right person. It would have to be someone good with kids and horses, and ho'd be able to pitch in with the administrating to some extent and wouldn't quibble about shoving manure.Plus I'd have to be able to depend on them, and get along with them. And they'd have to be diplomatic with parents, which is often the trickiest part." Travis picked up his soft drink again. "I might be able to point you in the right direction there." "Oh? Listen, Dad, I appreciate it, but you know, a friend of a friend or the son or daughter of an aquaintance. That kind of thing gets very sticky if it doesn't work out." "Actually, I was thinking of someone a little closer to home.Your mother." "Ma?" With a half laugh, Keeley sat again. "Ma doesn't want this headache, even if she had time for it." "Shows what you know." Smug now, he drank. "Just mention it to her, casually. I won't say a word about it.
Nora Roberts (Irish Rebel (Irish Hearts, #3))
I look back now and can see how much my father also found his own freedom in the adventures we did together, whether it was galloping along a beach in the Isle of Wight with me behind him, or climbing on the steep hills and cliffs around the island’s coast. It was at times like these that I found a real intimacy with him. It was also where I learned to recognize that tightening sensation, deep in the pit of my stomach, as being a great thing to follow in life. Some call it fear. I remember the joy of climbing with him in the wintertime. It was always an adventure and often turned into much more than just a climb. Dad would determine that not only did we have to climb a sheer hundred-and-fifty-foot chalk cliff, but also that German paratroopers held the high ground. We therefore had to climb the cliff silently and unseen, and then grenade the German fire position once at the summit. In reality this meant lobbing clumps of manure toward a deserted bench on the cliff tops. Brilliant. What a great way to spend a wet and windy winter’s day when you are age eight (or twenty-eight, for that matter). I loved returning from the cliff climbs totally caked in mud, out of breath, having scared ourselves a little. I learned to love that feeling of the wind and rain blowing hard on my face. It made me feel like a man, when in reality I was a little boy. We also used to talk about Mount Everest, as we walked across the fields toward the cliffs. I loved to pretend that some of our climbs were on the summit face of Everest itself. We would move together cautiously across the white chalk faces, imagining they were really ice. I had this utter confidence that I could climb Everest if he were beside me. I had no idea what Everest would really involve but I loved the dream together. These were powerful, magical times. Bonding. Intimate. Fun. And I miss them a lot even today. How good it would feel to get the chance to do that with him just once more. I think that is why I find it often so emotional taking my own boys hiking or climbing nowadays. Mountains create powerful bonds between people. It is their great appeal to me. But it wasn’t just climbing. Dad and I would often go to the local stables and hire a couple of horses for a tenner and go jumping the breakwaters along the beach. Every time I fell off in the wet sand and was on the verge of bursting into tears, Dad would applaud me and say that I was slowly becoming a horseman. In other words, you can’t become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again a good number of times. There’s life in a nutshell.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
You okay?” Marlboro Man called out. I didn’t answer. I just kept on walking, determined to get the hell out of Dodge. It took him about five seconds to catch up with me; I wasn’t a very fast walker. “Hey,” he said, grabbing me around the waist and whipping me around so I was facing him. “Aww, it’s okay. It happens.” I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted him to let go of me and I wanted to keep on walking. I wanted to walk back down the hillside, start my car, and get out of there. I didn’t know where I’d go, I just knew I wanted to go. I wanted away from all of it--riding horses, saddles, reins, bridles--I didn’t want it anymore. I hated everything on that ranch. It was all stupid, dumb…and stupid. Wriggling loose of his consoling embrace, I squealed, “I seriously can’t do this!” My hands trembled wildly and my voice quivered. The tip of my nose began to sting, and tears welled up in my eyes. It wasn’t like me to display such hysteria in the presence of a man. But being driven to the brink of death had brought me to this place. I felt like a wild animal. I was powerless to restrain myself. “I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life!” I cried. I turned to leave again but decided instead to give up, choosing to sit down on the ground and slump over in defeat. It was all so humiliating--not just my rigid, freakish riding style or my near collision with the ground, but also my crazy, emotional reaction after the fact. This wasn’t me. I was a strong, confident woman, for Lord’s sake; I don’t slump on the ground in the middle of a pasture and cry. What was I doing in a pasture, anyway? Knowing my luck, I was probably sitting on a pile of manure. But I couldn’t even walk anymore; my knees were even trembling by now, and I’d lost all feeling in my fingertips. My heart pounded in my cheeks. If Marlboro Man had any sense, he would have taken the horses and gotten the hell out of there, leaving me, the hysterical female, sobbing on the ground by myself. She’s obviously in the throes of some hormonal fit, he probably thought. There’s nothing you can say to her when she gets like this. I don’t have time for this crap. She’s just gonna have to learn to deal with it if she’s going to marry me. But he didn’t get the hell out of there. He didn’t leave me sobbing on the ground by myself. Instead he joined me on the grass, sitting beside me and putting his hand on my leg, reassuring me that this kind of thing happens, and there wasn’t anything I did wrong, even though he was probably lying. “Now, did you really mean that about not wanting to do this the rest of your life?” he asked. That familiar, playful grin appeared in the corner of his mouth. I blinked a couple of times and took a deep breath, smiling back at him and reassuring him with my eyes that no, I hadn’t meant it, but I did hate his horse. Then I took a deep breath, stood up, and dusted off my Anne Klein straight-leg jeans. “Hey, we don’t have to do this now,” Marlboro Man said, standing back up. “I’ll just do it later.” “No, I’m fine,” I answered, walking back toward my horse with newfound resolve.
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
me in my office the first morning I met her didn’t include any of this. Especially, it didn’t include the manure pile.” “What? A manure pile? You’re kidding.” “Nope. A story about a manure pile and some horse stables. At first I thought it was... uh... horseshit.” “The story,” Hank said, “not the manure. Got it.” “Right,” I told him. “So there was this bit of concrete poking up at the edge of the manure pile. It had a rusted out lid on it and an old
George Wier (The Last Call (Bill Travis Mysteries, #1))
Where is Mistress Denny? I thought she was going to bring Angus herself." John tried unsuccessfully to mask a smile. His eyes watered from laughter and he brought up his sleeve to wipe them, turning slightly away from Ruairi. When the man laughed, he looked ten years younger. "Ye see, my laird, Angus leaped on Mistress Denny and pushed her down into a pile of horse manure. When a couple of Ruairi's men passed in front of Torquil's door carrying a tub, Ruairi stared at John and then turned to Fagan as the men burst out laughing. Fagan threw back his head, slapping his hands on his thighs. "You couldn't just leave well enough alone, could you?" asked a voice from the hall. Ravenna stepped into the room and the men gazed at her with wide eyes. When Angus rose and attempted to move toward her, she help up her hand to stay him. "Don't. You. Dare. You wicked, wicked beast. I've had enough of you for one day. Sit Down!" When Angus sat on command, Fagan murmured, "Bloody coward.
Victoria Roberts (My Highland Spy (Highland Spies, #1))
The stables of Versailles in December were not renowned for illumination, but Eliza could hear the gentleman’s satins hissing and his linens creaking as he bowed. She made curtseying noises in return. This was answered by a short burst of scratching and rasping as the gentleman adjusted his wig. She cleared her throat. He called for a candle and got a whole silver candelabra, a chevron of flames bobbing and banking like a formation of fireflies through the ambient miasma of horse breath, manure gas and wig powder.
Neal Stephenson
The most pressing concern was horse pollution: The urban historians Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have calculated that New York’s horses carpeted city streets with as much as four million pounds of manure every day.
Anonymous
Now Santa put toys, fruit and nuts in the stockings of good children, while bad children got coal, or birch switches, which was better than back in Zurich, where bad children received horse manure and rotten vines (although not yet in stockings). In Zurich, Samichlaus also brought trees for all children, while in Germany the Christmas tree remained, for the moment, something for the prosperous and the urban. The less prosperous became familiar with the custom in institutions – in schools, hospitals, orphanages and the like – where they had become a feature of charitable giving: patrons and donors attended candle-lighting ceremonies, at which carols were sung and gifts were handed to the poor.
Judith Flanders (Christmas: A Biography)
Innovation has helped with problems in the past, e.g. whale oil use, horse manure in the streets, increasing grain yields. “When we innovate and find a cheap, technological solution, we solve major challenges and generate broadly shared benefits. We need to apply that lesson to the problem of climate change.
Bjørn Lomborg
The volume of water and feed that city horses consumed was matched by their daily output of urine and manure. A working horse produced about a gallon of urine daily and thirty to fifty pounds of manure. That volume filled the New York streets daily with about four million pounds and a hundred thousand gallons of redolent excreta that had to be cleared away. When it wasn’t, the streets mired up.
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
I can't get him to clean his room, but he'll clean a hundred tons of horse manure out of some monster's stables?
Rick Riordan (The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #4))
The volume of water and feed that city horses consumed was matched by their daily output of urine and manure. A working horse produced about a gallon of urine daily and thirty to fifty pounds of manure. That volume filled the New York streets daily with about four million pounds and a hundred thousand gallons of redolent excreta that had to be cleared away. When it wasn’t, the streets mired up. Urban manure, both human (night soil) and animal, was a valuable by-product of city living throughout the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. Street-cleaning departments collected horse manure from stables and streets and sold it to local farmers, who used it to fertilize the gardens, pastures, and fields where they grew food, hay, and grain for the city.
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
The experts extrapolated the likely growth during this period, and the expected consequences. They then confidently proclaimed that if population growth wasn’t halted, by 1980, New York City would require so many horses to stay viable that every inch of it would be knee-deep in manure. Knee-deep! In horse manure! As someone interested in technology and future trends, I love this story, even if it turns out to be apocryphal, because it does a brilliant job of highlighting the dangers of extrapolating the future, since we aren’t capable of foreseeing game-changing technologies that often appear. Even now. Even at our level of sophistication and expectation of change. But while we can’t know what miracles the future will hold, we’ve now seen too much evidence of exponential progress not to know that Jim Kirk would no longer be relatable to us. Because it seems impossible to me that we will remain as we are. Remain even the least bit recognizable. This assumes, of course, that we avoid self-destruction, a fate that seems more likely every day as WMDs proliferate and fanaticism grows. But post-apocalyptic science fiction has never been my thing, and if we do reach a Star Trek level of technology, we will have avoided self-destruction, by definition. And I prefer to be optimistic, in any case, despite the growing case for pessimism. So if we do ever advance to the point at which we can travel through hyperspace, beam ourselves down to planets, or wage war in great starships, we can be sure we won’t be human anymore
Douglas E. Richards (Oracle)
I breathe deeply when we hit the barn. The sweet smell of clover and manure and horse sweat may sound disgusting to some, but it sings home to me.
Lynetta Halat (Used (Unlovable, #1))
pollution and public health. In 1908 Gotham’s 120,000 horses deposited 60,000 gallons of urine and 2.5 million pounds of manure on the city streets every day.
Mike Wallace (Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (The History of NYC Series Book 2))
There were piles of horse manure in the entrance court and noisome heaps of refuse that would not bear investigating on the street outside the kitchen door. In some wings the stench of chamber pots was pervasive; in others the odor was unidentifiable and indescribable, but just as overpowering.
Jennifer Blake (Royal Passion (Royal, #2))
The osteopath Dr. Joseph Mercola observed,102 “This idea that ivermectin is a horse dewormer that poses a lethal risk to humans is pure horse manure, shoveled at us in an effort to dissuade people from using a safe and effective drug against COVID-19. . . . The intent is clear. What our so-called health agencies and the media are trying to do is confuse people into thinking of ivermectin as a ‘veterinary drug,’ which simply isn’t true. Ultimately, what they’re trying to do is back up the Big Pharma narrative that the only thing at your disposal is the COVID shot.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
If your information didn't come from the horse's mouth, then it came from the horse's ass-ociated member, and well, that's just pure horse manure.
Deanna L. Lawlis (Of Ashes and Embers: Exploring Self Awareness After Spiritual Trauma)
Don’t get to thinkin’ just because some other guy’s sinkin’ In horse manure, the stuff up around your neck is chocolate puddin’. A wound is a wound, young Brewster. Remember that. Don’t diminish the pain of your own just because you see some other guy-shot cowboy bleedin’ to death.
Chris Crutcher (Ironman)
splash of my signature perfume: it had notes of mud, manure, hay, and sweat. The
Natalie Keller Reinert (Friends With Horses (Briar Hill Farm Book 2))
The last guy who asked me this favor—oh, he was way better-looking than you, by the way—he convinced me, and that was the worst mistake I’ve ever made! Do you have any idea what all that horse manure does to my ecosystem? Do I look like a sewage treatment plant to you? My fish will die. I’ll never get the muck out of my plants. I’ll be sick for years. NO THANK YOU!
Rick Riordan (The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #4))
Our garden stinks for awhile, but our fruit trees, the vegetables and rose bushes simply love the stuff. Horse manure enriches the soil and changes the lives of our plants and trees.
Werner Langer (About a Gardener)
How much horse manure was dumped on the streets in 1880? Sadie scoured the Department of Sanitation’s books from that year and found the answer: approximately one hundred thousand tons.
Fiona Davis (The Lions of Fifth Avenue)
They say they can make fuel from horse manure. Now I don’t know if your car will be able to get thirty miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.” —Billie Holliday
Bathroom Readers' Institute (Uncle John's Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, #26))
In the 1890’s horses, carrying people to work, dropped 4.5 million tons of manure on the streets of Manhattan, every year. That was the big environmental problem of the day. “NYC will be buried in horse manure by 1950!” screamed the headlines. It doesn’t matter what your opinion about this was. None of the people living in NY solved the problem despite the 1000s of opinions. People with passion for mechanics in Detroit made something called a car. Problem solved.
James Altucher (The Rich Employee)
about a manure pile and some horse stables. At first I thought
George Wier (The Last Call (Bill Travis Mysteries, #1))
So the Ukraine came to resemble “one vast Belsen.” 93 A population of “walking corpses” struggled to survive on a diet of roots, weeds, grass, bark and furry catkins.94 They devoured dogs, cats, snails, mice, ants, earth-worms. They boiled up old skins and ground down dry bones. They even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. Cannibalism became so commonplace that the OGPU received a special directive on the subject from Moscow and local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.” 95 Some peasants braved machine-guns in desperate assaults on grain stockpiles. Others robbed graves for gold to sell in Torgsin shops. Parents unable to feed their offspring sent them away from home to beg. Cities such as Kiev, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Odessa and Belgorod were overrun by pathetic waifs with huge heads, stunted limbs and swollen bellies. Arthur Koestler said that they “looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles.” 96
Piers Brendon (The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s)
I have no doubt that she is sincerely desirous of seeing all the evils of suffering humanity remedied, and that she thinks this might easily be done, if Government would only undertake it. But, alas! that poor unfortunate personage, like Figaro, knows not to whom to listen, nor where to turn. The hundred thousand mouths of the press and of the platform cry out all at once:-- "Organize labour and workmen. "Do away with egotism. "Repress insolence and the tyranny of capital. "Make experiments upon manure and eggs. "Cover the country with railways. "Irrigate the plains. "Plant the hills. "Make model farms. "Found social workshops. "Colonize Algeria. "Suckle children. "Instruct the youth. "Assist the aged. "Send the inhabitants of towns into the country. "Equalize the profits of all trades. "Lend money without interest to all who wish to borrow." "Emancipate Italy, Poland, and Hungary." "Rear and perfect the saddle-horse." "Encourage the arts, and provide us with musicians and dancers." "Restrict commerce, and at the same time create a merchant navy." "Discover truth, and put a grain of reason into our heads. The mission of Government is to enlighten, to develop, to extend, to fortify, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people." "Do have a little patience, gentlemen," says Government in a beseeching tone. "I will do what I can to satisfy you, but for this I must have resources. I have been preparing plans for five or six taxes, which are quite new, and not at all oppressive. You will see how willingly people will pay them." Then comes a great exclamation:--"No! indeed! where is the merit of doing a thing with resources? Why, it does not deserve the name of a Government! So far from loading us with fresh taxes, we would have you withdraw the old ones. You ought to suppress "The salt tax, "The tax on liquors, "The tax on letters, "Custom-house duties, "Patents." In
Frédéric Bastiat (Essays on political economy)
The consequences of dependence on the horse in 1870 involved negative externalities unrecognized by GDP, including manure and urine distributed on the streets and the cost of the unlucky laborers assigned to clean up the tons of horse waste, not to mention the diversion of a substantial part of agricultural production to feed the ubiquitous horses, in 1870 numbering 8.6 million, or roughly one horse for every five people.
Robert J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 60))
If wishes were horses, my house would stink of manure.
Alex Hill
Then I realized I smelled like horses and manure,
Ann M. Martin (Baby-sitters' Summer Vacation (The Baby-Sitters Club Super Special, #2))
1891 “The Ripper is here.” The whispered words somehow found their way through the cacophony of noise surrounding me. Wrapping around my chest in a vice-like grip, threatening to crush my ribs and pulverise my heart. I sucked in a shaking breath of air, smelling sweat and horse manure, coal and brimstone. Hell is Auckland city on a protest rally day. A scream rang out, and then another. The high pitched sound an
Nicola Claire (Fearless (Scarlet Suffragette, #1))
In 1898, New York hosted the first international urban planning conference. The agenda was dominated by horse manure, because cities around the world were experiencing the same crisis. But no solution could be found. “Stumped by the crisis,” writes Eric Morris, “the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)