tent quotes

Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder.

- Margaret Eleanor Atwood
  Procedures from Underground,'Habitation'.

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.

- Lyndon B(aines) also called LBJ Johnson
Of J Edgar Hoover. Quoted in David Halberstam TheBest and the Brightest (1971), ch.20.

If a man have a tent made in linen of which the apertures haveall beenstopped up, and it be twelve braccia across and twelve in depth, he will be able to throw himself down from any great height without sustaining injury.

-Leonardo daVinci
Description of a parachute. Notebooks. Quoted in Vincent Cronin The Flowering of the Renaissance (1969).

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

- Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
  The Ballad of Reading Gaol, pt.1, stanza 3.

Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes fixed upon nothing, A hand under his head. 934 Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

-W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  'Long-Legged Fly', l.5^10. Collected in Last Poems (1939).