Piers Quotes

• Those we love can but walk down to the pier with us - the voyage we must make alone.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Voyages, Walks, Those We Love

  William Makepeace Thackeray, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Sir Leslie Stephen (1899). “The works of William Makepeace Thackeray”

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• A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

  Julian Barnes

  Dream, Disappointment, Bridges

  Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

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• Some people wait so long for their ship to come in, their pier collapses.

  John Goddard

  Long, People, Waiting

  55 Copy quote

• Arithmetic arithmetock Turn the hands back on the clock How does the ocean rock the boat? How did the razor find my throat? The only strings that hold me here Are tangled up around the pier.

  Tom Waits

  Ocean, Rocks, Hands

  Song: There's Only Alice, Album: Alice, 2002

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• A house is built of logs and stone, of tiles and posts and piers; a home is built of loving deeds that stand a thousand years.

  Victor Hugo

  Friendship, Home, Years

  15 Copy quote

• Hurry not a woman's favor; neither forcer her hastily to surrender to thee. For she goeth into love as she goeth into the waters at the seashore; first a hand and then a lip goeth she in by littles. She diveth not, she leapeth not from the pier; but by gentle shocks and cries of protest she entereth slowly; yet when the waters of love encompass her, then she is supported. She swimmeth in her joy; she floateth on the tide of happiness.

  Gelett Burgess

  Love, Women, Hands

  13 Copy quote

• August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.

  W. H. Auden

  August, Islands, People

  'Look, Stranger!' (1936) no. 30

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• The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

  Ross Macdonald

  Memories, Moving, Sea

  Ross Macdonald (2012). “The Drowning Pool”, p.183, Penguin UK

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• People tend to read books about a guy who goes back in time or a guy who is living under a pier.

  Andy Andrews

  Book, People, Guy

  "Andy Andrews Interview: Modern Day Will Rogers Details His Latest Novel, 'The Noticer'". Interview with Melissa Parker, smashinginterviews.com. June 11, 2009.

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• The secret studies of an author are the sunken piers upon which is to rest the bridge of his fame, spanning the dark waters of oblivion. They are out of sight, but without them no superstructure can stand secure.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Dark, Sight, Bridges

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “Hyperion”, p.185, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Her entire body quivered. "What is it about me that you're attracted to?" "For starters, the sexy underwear you put on beneath your clothes." "You've only seen my underwear once." "Twice," he said. "I looked down your top at the pier." "You did not." "Pink-and-white polka-dot bra." "Oh my God." "That's what I was thinking." -Mallory and Ty

  Jill Shalvis

  Sexy, Thinking, White

  FaceBook post by Jill Shalvis from Jul 16, 2013

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• Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me.

  Pablo Neruda

  Love You, Twilight, Tired

  Pablo Neruda, “Here I Love You”

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• It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year;
  The boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier.
  The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro,
  A flash of sun is on the veering of the vane.
  Autumn leaves and rain,
  The passion of the gale.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Rain, Passion, Autumn

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)”, p.3781, Delphi Classics

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• As the surface of the seashore rocks were pitted by by the waves and gathered limpets that further disguised what lay beneath, so time made truth of what appeared to be. The days that passed, in becoming weeks, still did not disturb the surface an assumption had created. The weather of a beautiful summer continued with neither sign nor hint that credence had been misplaced. The single sandal found among the rocks became a sodden image of death; and as the keening on the pier at Kilauran traditionally marked distres brought by the sea, so did silence at Lahardane.

  William Trevor

  Beautiful, Summer, Rocks

  William Trevor (2011). “The Story of Lucy Gault”, p.36, Penguin UK

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• With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Heart, People, Sorrow

  9 Copy quote

• A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.

  Herb Caen

  Girl, Flower, Dark

  Herb Caen (1967). “San Francisco, City on Golden Hills”

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• If you work in the city long enough, it begins to deal with you on a personal level. Streets reveal their moods. Sometimes the signal light loves you. Sometimes they fight you. When you're hunting for a new building, you hope the city is on your side. You have to use a little bit of thinking--you might call it the process of elimination--and you need a little bit of instinct, but not too much of either. If you think too hard, you overshoot your target and end up at the Pier or the Tenderloin. If you relax and let the city help, the destination does all the work for you.

  Scott Adams

  Love You, Fighting, Thinking

  8 Copy quote

• In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Bridges, Broken, Expectations

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2008). “The Narrative Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.136, Wildside Press LLC

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• The flood will lift the ghosts from the Hollywood lawn cemetery and they will disappear like ether in the now dead air. All the names will be erased from the billboards and the theatres and the piers and the magazines and the monuments. You live by myths of immortality, and your myths are not safe.

  Robert Montgomery

  Air, Names, Theatre

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• Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - old churches, country lanes, people saying 'Mustn't grumble,' and 'I'm terribly sorry but,' people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings - every bit of it.

  Bill Bryson

  Summer, Country, Sorry

  "Notes from a Small Island". Book by Bill Bryson, 1995.

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• I had a dream about a motorcycle," said Harry, remembering suddenly. "It was flying." Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry, his face like a gigantic beet with a mustache: "MOTORCYCLES DON'T FLY!" Dudley and Piers sniggered. "I know they don't," said Harry. "It was only a dream.

  J. K. Rowling

  Dream, Uncles, Car

  8 Copy quote

• I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Thinking, Osmosis

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• First impressions of mediaeval life are usually coloured by the courtly romances of Malory and his later refiners. Chaucer brings us down to reality, but his people belong to a prosperous middle-class world, on holiday and in holiday mood. Piers Plowman stands alone as a revelation of the ignorance and misery of the lower classes, whose multiplied grievances came to a head in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

  William Langland

  Holiday, Ignorance, Reality

  15 Copy quote

• I haven't been down to Navy Pier in such a long time. I know that's probably the touristy thing to do, but it just reminds me so much of 2000 when I was here shooting ["Hardball"].

  Michael B. Jordan

  Long, Navy, Shooting

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• There's nothing good on the news. You're not telling me CNN is all cats in trees, are you? Nothing can be that good if Piers Morgan is in it, you know what I mean?

  Noel Gallagher

  Cat, Mean, Cnn

  "Noel Gallagher: 'If Obama loses, I'll run for president myself'" By Ben Wyatt, www.cnn.com. March 6, 2012.

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