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)
London, hast thou accused me Of breach of laws, the root of strife? Within whose breast did boil to see, So fervent hot, thy dissolute life, That even the hate of sins that grow Within thy wicked walls so rife, For to break forth did convert so That terror could it not repress.
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of— 1557 'London, hast thou accused me'.
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.
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
I have enough to eat till my hunger is stayed, to drink till my thirst is sated; to clothe myself withal; and out of doors not Callias there, with all his riches, is more safe than I from shivering; and when I find myself indoors, what warmer shirting do I need than my bare walls? what ampler greatcoat than the tiles above my head?
antisthenes— Xenophon, Symposium, iv. 34
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
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.
By his standards anyone who noticed how many walls the room had would be observant.
Raymond Chandler— 1953 On an interviewer. Letter to Roger Machell,15 Mar.
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.
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
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)
In one gallery they actually had a notice which said "No Sketching." How obnoxious! I said, "How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?"
David Hockney— "Portrait of the Artist as a Naughty Boy," interview with John Mortimer, In Character (1983), p.97
Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
Alan Bennett— Diary entry for June 27, 1988, p. 177
I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
richard m. stallman— On why he decided against writing proprietary software; quoted in Free as in Freedom : Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software (2002) by Sam Williams
Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage, Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.
— Richard Lovelace, "To Althea, From Prison" (1642)
And more than echoes talk along the walls.
Alexander Pope— Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), line 306.
