Ruins Quotes - Page 9

• ... I see the green earth covered with the works of man or with the ruins of men’s work. The pyramids weigh down the earth, the tower of Babel has pierced the sky, the lovely temples and the gray castles have fallen into ruins. But of all those things which hands have built, what hasn’t fallen nor ever will fall? Dear friends, throw away the trowel and mortarboard! Throw your masons’ aprons over your heads and lie down to build dreams! What are temples of stone and clay to the soul? Learn to build eternal mansions of dreams and visions!

  Selma Lagerlöf

  Dream, Lying, Fall

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• Makin' mistakes ain't a crime, you know. What's the use of having a reputation if you can't ruin it every now and then?

  Simone Elkeles

  Mistake, Use, Reputation

  Simone Elkeles (2011). “Perfect Chemistry”, p.96, Simon and Schuster

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• I need to talk to you. I had a weird dream." "Let me guess. You got tied up by lady ninjas. With big hooters." "Uh, no." I take a sip of coffee and wince. It was ridiculously strong. My grandfather shoves a strip of bacon in his mouth with a grin. "Guess it would have been kind of weird if we'd had the same dream." I roll my eyes. "Well, you'd better not tell me anything else. Don't ruin the surprise in case I have it tonight.

  Holly Black

  Dream, Strong, Coffee

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• ...The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue. This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day. I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me. 'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!' - Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher

  Jim Butcher

  Lying, Eye, Gowns

  Jim Butcher (2003). “Death Masks: Book five of The Dresden Files”, p.359, Penguin Group

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• Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.

  Homer

  Daughter, Men, Feet

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• Roger stooped, picked up a stone, aimed and threw it at Henry-threw it to miss. The stone, that token of preposterous time, bounced five yards to Henry's right and fell in the water. Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

  William Golding

  Strong, Children, School

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• The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

  Heinrich Heine

  Thinking, Weather, Broken

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• Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Math, Religion, Democracy

  Antoine de Saint Exupery (1942). “Flight to Arras”

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• There are a million rules for being a girl. There are a million things you have to do to get through each day. High school has things that can trip you up, ruin you, people say one thing and mean another, and you have to know all the rules, you have to know what you can and can't do.

  Elizabeth Scott

  Girl, School, Mean

  Elizabeth Scott (2010). “The Unwritten Rule”, p.115, Simon and Schuster

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• He prefers not to ruin things with any more questions. What it is is what it is.

  Markus Zusak

  Markus Zusak (2007). “I Am the Messenger”, p.228, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• it's not called the Rusty Ruins because some guy called Rusty found them.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Guy, Found

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• ...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Falling In Love, Color, Mind

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• 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

  Sweet, Winter, Thinking

  'Adonais' (1821) preface

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• It took me a long time to realize that distance can ruin even the best of intentions.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Distance, Long, Realizing

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• I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Beautiful, Song, Winning

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• It was a well-known fact that the richness of buttery foods led to the moral ruin and confusion of the intellect.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Confusion, Facts, Moral

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• Well . . . he lets it ruin his life. He gets so obsessed with going after the one thing that hurt him that he loses sight of everything else. He becomes isolated from everyone and everything. Paranoid. He feels like he can't trust anyone around him ever. In the end, he loses everything, even his life. And for what? Total stupidity, if you ask me.

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Hurt, Sight, Stupidity

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2011). “Invincible: The Chronicles of Nick”, p.105, Macmillan

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• Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

  Peter Watts

  Running, Climbing, Dancer

  Peter Watts (2006). “Blindsight”, p.302, Macmillan

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• Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Responsibility, Sacrifice, Emotional

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.280, e-artnow

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• Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Life Is, Debris, Persons

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• The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Stupid, Hands

  Oscar Wilde (2018). “Oscar Wilde Collection”, p.11, Youcanprint

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• In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Lonely, Romance, Now And Then

  Elizabeth Kostova (2010). “The Swan Thieves”, p.302, Hachette UK

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• It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

  Alain de Botton

  Achievement, Challenges, Facts

  Alain de Botton (2009). “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, p.218, Penguin UK

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• I think I’m dying to get to know a particular guy. Then he opens his mouth and ruins it.

  Elizabeth Chandler

  Thinking, Guy, Dying

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• He gives me a conflicted look and touches his lips to my forehead, right between my eyebrows. I close my eyes. I don't understand this, whatever it is. But I don't want to ruin it, so I say nothing. He doesn't move; he just stays there with his mouth pressed to my skin, and I stay there with my hands on his waist, for a long time.

  Veronica Roth

  Moving, Eye, Hands

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