arch quotes

All experience is an arch to build on.

- Henry Brooks Adams
  The Education of Henry  Adams, ch.6.

Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approachesTam maun ride; That hour, o'night's black arch the key-stane, That dreary hourTam mounts his beast in.

- Robert Burns
  'Tam o' Shanter.  A  Tale'.

'Heads, headstake care of your heads!'cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entranceto the coachyard.'Terrible placedangerous workfive childrenmothertall lady, eating sandwiches forgot the archcrashknockchildren look roundmother's head offsandwich in her handno mouth to put it inhead of a family offshocking, shocking!

- CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
^7  Jingle. Pickwick Papers, ch.2.

New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic. San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington blink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one- trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle. St Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.

- Norman Kingsley Mailer
  Miami and the Siege of Chicago,'The Siege of Chicago'.

Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.

- Henry Valentine Miller
  The Air-Conditioned Nightmare,'With Edgar Var e' se in the Gobi Desert'.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, council, governments, Myself not least, but honoured of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windyTroy. I am part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life.

-Tennyson
  Poems,'Ulysses' (published1842), l.6^24.