Skyscraper Quotes

• There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Heaven, Battle, Poetic

  72 Copy quote

• Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Art, Strong, Civilization

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style”, Pantheon

  68 Copy quote

  Show source

• From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

  Ayn Rand

  Religious, Men, Mind

  81 Copy quote

• Go on and try to tear me down
  I will be rising from the ground

  Demi Lovato

  Song, Trying, Tears

  Song: Skyscraper, Album: Unbroken, 2011

  80 Copy quote

  Show source

• Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?

  Anthony de Mello

  Distance, Doe, Sun

  48 Copy quote

• By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

  Carl Sandburg

  Stars, Night, Soul

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  48 Copy quote

  Show source

• The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

  Roland Barthes

  Block, Men, Streets

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

  49 Copy quote

  Show source

• From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

  Gregory Maguire

  Men, Wings, Grew

  "Very Short Stories". www.wired.com. November 1, 2006.

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• A skyscraper is at the same time a triumph of the machine and a tremendous emotional experience, almost breath-taking. Not merely its height but its mass and proportions are the result of an emotion, as well as of calculation.

  George Gershwin

  Emotional, Triumph, Machines

  "Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources". Book editing by Daniel Albright (University of Chicago Press), essay "The Composer in the Machine Age" (1933), 2004.

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but how to remain human in the skyscrapers.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Civilization, Worship, Concern

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1955). “Insecurity of Freedom”, p.23, Macmillan

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel.

  Mason Cooley

  Glasses, Steel, Boast

  11 Copy quote

• The key is to photograph your obsessions, whether that’s old people’s hands or skyscrapers. Think of a blank canvas, because that’s what you’ve got, and then think about what you want to see. Not anyone else.

  David LaChapelle

  Thinking, Hands, Keys

  21 Copy quote

• I think it's necessary to evaluate a skyscraper at multiple scales, since that's how we experience it: from right next to it on the street to from across the river, as well as at all kinds of points in between. It's important to think of it as an element in a larger skyline, but also as an element in an immediate streetscape.

  Paul Goldberger

  Thinking, Rivers, Important

  "Ask the Author Live: Paul Goldberger on the World Trade Center". The New Yorker interview, www.newyorker.com. September 2, 2011.

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  New York, Character, People

  8 Copy quote

• The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Dream, Past, Cities

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.132, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• A skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay.

  Cass Gilbert

  Land, Machines, Pay

  Sharon Irish, Cass Gilbert (1999). “Cass Gilbert, architect: modern traditionalist”, The Monacelli Press

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Rain, Swans, Fog

  29 Copy quote

• I'm amazed every time I come back to Vancouver at how much it's changed. You go away for a month and there's three more skyscrapers.

  Bryan Adams

  Going Away, Vancouver, Three

  8 Copy quote

• And when God steps in, His working is like the difference between a skyscraper and a star.

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Stars, Differences, Steps

  Charles R. Swindoll (2007). “Wisdom for the Way: Wise Words for Busy People”, p.176, Thomas Nelson Inc

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Taking time to live is taking time to appreciate simple silence as better than any kind of talk, or watching a flower, or watching a guy wash the windows on a skyscraper and wondering what he is thinking.

  Douchan Gersi

  Flower, Simple, Thinking

  6 Copy quote

• America's skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living - including the inhabitants of the slums.

  Ayn Rand

  America, Rose, People

  12 Copy quote

• It is sound statesmanship to add two battleships every time our neighbour adds one and two stories to our skyscrapers every time he piles a new one on top of his to threaten our light. There is no limit to this soundness but the sky.

  Mark Twain

  Light, Sky, Two

  Mark Twain (1992). “Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays: 1891-1910”

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Men, Cities, Space

  16 Copy quote

• Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Mean, Fire, Different

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.245, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Do you have to make me feel like there's nothing left of me? You can take everything I have, you can break everything I am, like I am made of glass, like I am made of paper.Go on and try to tear me down I will be rising from the ground like a Skyscraper.

  Demi Lovato

  Glasses, Tears, Trying

  Song: Skyscraper, 2011

  23 Copy quote

  Show source