Madding

In the morning, traffic crept at a clogged and madding stop-go pace, cars and trucks halted mid-turn, stopped askew in the road. ❋ Brittany Newmark (2011)

New York filmmakers Lynn True and Nelson Walker and their Tibetan co-director Tsering Perlo capture the transcendental beauty of the Zachukha grasslands, in China's Sichuan Province, where the nomads spend each summer, far from the madding crowds, reflecting on the future—and keeping a herd of yaks in line. ❋ Steve Dollar (2011)

Elsewhere in the Observer the madding crowd strives away like billy-o, just as it did in the days of Richard Nixon and Reginald Maudling, but for those needing a refuge from the weekly din there's still the cool sequester'd vale inhabited by Azed. ❋ Francis Wheen (2010)

It is a burden, is creativity; but embrace it for, paradoxically, it will not hold you down but will lift you up, far above the madding crowd. ❋ Unknown (2009)

Radio 5 Live has been excelling itself with some reflective features far from the madding crowd of its usual breathless hurly-burly. ❋ Unknown (2011)

It's a quiet, serene place "far from the madding crowd." ❋ Nancy Davis (2011)

Paradoxically, the very men who had opened up the landscape to the people still dreamed of getting far from the madding crowd. ❋ Ian Pindar (2010)

Some of us prefer building their own 'masterpiece' according to their personal inspiration, beliefs and talents, taking greater pride and joy within their own little world, 'away from the madding crowd'. ❋ Unknown (2009)

No one could accuse his crosswords of blushing unseen – not even when they were exiled to a distant outpost in the travel section for a few years – but the poem was more fitting than he knew: "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,/Their sober wishes never learned to stray,/Along the cool sequester'd vale of life/They kept the noiseless tenor of their way." ❋ Francis Wheen (2010)

Wessex's two other footballing figures of grandeur left the madding crowds behind to return to their native heath and hearths. ❋ Unknown (2011)

The rally drew white people like grilled cheese to white bread, all in the name of civil rights that barely got a nod from the madding crowd. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Obama signed the bill in Denver, far from the madding crowd. ❋ JONATHAN ALTER (2010)

Melting and slipping lover's asking to touch and be touched music and light behind the dunes must end our running away from the crowd the madding crowd ❋ Derek Osborne (2010)

I have lived long enough and have seen it all but to see this election come down to a populairty contest instead of issues is so madding to me ... ❋ Unknown (2008)

Each summer, in campfire talks and her famous end-of-the-summer sermon, she'd exhort us to go against the grain if we thought that was right, to travel the opposite direction of the madding crowd. ❋ Unknown (2010)

From Plato he takes the lesson of occasionally putting distance between oneself and the madding crowd. ❋ Unknown (2010)

Lily Allen and the Big Pink camped in the positively blissful Green Fields and the Park, along with, I was told, Radiohead and Gorillaz, not far from the madding crowd, among whom they all mix freely, but miles from the maddening silliness of competing VIP status. ❋ Unknown (2010)