ruins quotes

Old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times.

- SirThomas Browne
  Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial), Epistle Dedicatory.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

-T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
  The Waste Land, pt.5,'What the Thunder Said'.

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.

- Edward Gibbon
Memoirs of My Life (published1796), ch.6, note. Variations of the lines can be found in the various drafts of Gibbon's autobiography and in the last lines of the Decline and Fall:'It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public' (vol.6, ch.71).

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

- Howard Nemerov
  New Poems,'The View from an  Attic Window'.

The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
Adonais, preface.