Walls Quotes
More Walls Quotes
It is notorious that we speak no more than half-truths in our ordinary conversation, and even a soliloquy is likely to be affected by the apprehension that walls have ears.
Eric Robert Linklater— Juan in America, book 2, part 4 (1931)
Taking courage and looking forward from the standpoint of higher ideas born of the multiplication of the arts, they gave up huts and began to build houses with foundations, having brick or stone walls, and roofs of timber and tiles; next, observation and application led them from fluctuating and indefinite conceptions to definite rules of symmetry. Perceiving that nature had been lavish in the bestowal of timber and bountiful in stores of building material, they... embellished them with luxuries.
vitruvius— Chapter I, Sec. 7
Dinocrates, I appreciate your design as excellent in composition, and I am delighted with it, but I apprehend that anybody who should found a city in that spot would be censured for bad judgement. For as a newborn babe cannot be nourished without the nurse's milk, nor conducted to the approaches that lead to growth in life, so a city cannot thrive without fields and the fruits thereof pouring into its walls.
Alexander the Great— Vitruvius, De Architectura Bk.2, Introduction, Sec.3
Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there’s space for someone else, between the words and in the margins.
Tammara Webber— Where You Are, Chapter 1 (2011)
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger one of the waxen wings of flight. It may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge.
charles lindbergh— Reader's Digest (November 1939), "Aviation, Geography, and Race," pp. 64-67.
The walls of spiders' legs are made, Well mortised and finely laid; He was the master of his trade It curiously builded; The windows of the eyes of cats, And for the roof, instead of slats, Is covered with the skins of bats, With moonshine that are gilded.
Michael Drayton— 1627 Nymphidia, the Court of Fairy.
Its clones have hung on so many suburban walls over the decades that it has become the Mona Lisa of the vegetable world.
robert hughes— On Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers. In Time, 13 April 1987.
I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death. That's what attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the 'human fly' who scales the walls of the same building.
harry houdini— As quoted in The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini? (1993) by Ruth Brandon, p. 153
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
shirley jackson— Ch. 1 (The Haunting of Hill House (1959))
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
mervyn peake— Titus Groan (Opening lines) (1946)
Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.
George Steiner— "In a Post-Culture"
Oh, we have had great lovers that we followed to the pyre; Our boasts out-do the Sabine girls the Mosque of St. Sophia. And we are very sure of ours, for when a city falls, They seize us and they love us and they hurl us from the walls.
nathalia crane— "Our Lovers"
Only in the theatre was it possible to see the performers and to be warmed by their personal charm, to respond to their efforts and to feel their response to the applause and appreciative laughter of the audience. It had an intimate quality; audience and actors conspired to make a little oasis of happiness and mirth within the walls of the theatre. Try as we will, we cannot be intimate with a shadow on a screen, nor a voice from a box.
Robertson Davies— Lew Fields (1941)
Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.
e. m. forster— What does it matter? A morality
The nucleus of Jaipur was the palace and garden of Jai Niwas, the foundations for which were laid in 1725. The building of the city and its surrounding walls and gates was started with due propitiatory rites ( sankalpa ) on 18 November 1727
— In p.205 (A History of Jaipur: C. 1503-1938)
The palace and open space around it are surrounded by walls and still give a sense that it was once a fort. In the fort, we find several Hindu temples, each of which belongs to different sect…The usual composition of the temples within the Mysore fort compound gIves the impression of a spatial configuration in which the king is at the centre of a religious domain as the protector of his people and dharma (the moral order) within his kingdom.
Aya Ikegame— Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to Present (p. 120)
Alarmed by the famine of 1770, captain John Garstin built this huge granary Golghar for the British army in 1786. The massive structure is 29 m high and the walls are 3.6 m wide at the base. The winding stairway around this monument offers a brilliant panoramic view of the city and the Ganga flowing by.
— Bihar State Tourism Development Corporation, in "Destinations: Patna"
Broken spears lie in the roads; We have torn our hair in our grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls Are red with blood.
Miguel Leon-Portilla— Nahuatl poem from Miguel Leon-Portilla, Precolombian Literatures of Mexico (1969)
Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers, Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours. The early cherry, with the later plum, Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come: The blushing apricot, and woolly peach Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
Ben Jonson— 1616 The Forest,'To Penshurst'.
In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung, The floors of plaister, and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies.
Alexander Pope— 1733 Epistles to Several Persons,'To Lord Bathurst', l.229-35.
Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works.
alan cox—
Stone walls do not a prison make,Nor iron bars a cage,Minds innocent and quiet takeThat for an hermitage.
— Richard Lovelace, "To Althea, From Prison" (1642)
Let this always be plain to thee, that this piece of land is like any other; and that all things here are the same with all things on the top of a mountain, or on the sea-shore, or wherever thou chooses to be. For thou wilt find just what Plato says, Dwelling within the walls of the city as in a shepherd's fold on a mountain.
marcus aurelius— X, 23. (Book X)
The young man [Turgot] destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought; his studies, his reading, his professors, his associates, all were combined to keep from him any results of observation or reflection save those prescribed: probably, of all means for stifling healthy and helpful thought, a theological seminary, as then conducted whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, was the most perfect.
Andrew Dickson White— p.167 (Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915))
