Bollow Tower Quotes

Seriousness in play. At sunset in Genoa, I heard from a tower a long chiming of bells; it kept on and on, and over the noise of the backstreets, as if insatiable for itself, it rang out into the evening sky and the sea air, so terrible and so childish at the same time, so melancholy. then I thoughts of Platos's words and felt them suddenly in my heart: all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless ... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

This country [the Philippines] is like a pyramid, like a tower. It is made up of millions of stones ... And the foundation stone of this pyramid is the common man. ~ Ramon Magsaysay

My dad died in 9/11. They opened up the museum to families today, so I went this morning. My plan was to go to work after, but I just couldn't do it.""What happened to him?""He was a cop. He actually had the day off. But as soon as he heard, he drove into the city and got there just in time for the second tower to fall. A witness said that my dad had started to run when the tower fell, but turned back because a trapped woman was calling to him.""What do you remember?""I was in science class. And my teacher told us that there had been a plane crash. That's all she said. Then I noticed all these kids around me getting phone calls and text messages, and they'd run out of class. So I knew something big was happening. Soon we got let out of school. On the ride home, I remember thinking that my dad was going to be working overtime on this. I imagined he'd be down there everyday, saving people. 'I bet I won't see him for weeks,' I said. ~ Brandon Stanton

Following a private conversation with Harry, Minerva McGonagall later took the controversial decision to add a portrait of Severus Snape to the gallery of old headmasters and headmistresses in her tower office. ~ J.K. Rowling

How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven? Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music. ~ Peter Kreeft

No, Rodion Romanovitch, Nikolay doesn't come in! This is a fantastic, gloomy business, a modern case, an incident of to-day when the heart of man is troubled, when the phrase is quoted that blood 'renews,' when comfort is preached as the aim of life. Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories. Here we see resolution in the first stage, but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the crime. He forgot to shut the door after him, and murdered two people for a theory. He committed the murder and couldn't take the money, and what he did manage to snatch up he hid under a stone. It wasn't enough for him to suffer agony behind the door while they battered at the door and rung the bell, no, he had to go to the empty lodging, half delirious, to recall the bell-ringing, ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers. ~ Barbara Hambly

You have to understand, I grew up in the shadow of the Safeco tower. ~ Mike McGavick

Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. ~ Tom Robbins

Her hair was well brushed that day and sheened darkly in contrast with the lusterless pallor of her neck and arms. She wore the striped tee shirt which in his lone fantasies he especially liked to peel off her twisting torso. The oilcloth was divided into blue and white squares. A smear of honey stained what remained of the butter in its cool crock.
'All right. And the third Real Thing?'
She considered him. A fiery droplet in the wick of her mouth considered him. A three-colored velvet violet, of which she had done an aquarelle on the eve, considered him from its fluted crystal. She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him.
Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The dark tower. Childe Roland to the dark tower came. ~ Harper Lee

Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows. ~ Dante Alighieri

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did. ~ Ray Bradbury

Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground on either side and a few poorly-stocked little shops. Several ultra-fast staircases give access to the building, running up from the cellars to the roof-gardens. The comfort of this place leaves nothing to be desired and only the greatest luxury is acceptable, but every Friday the residents gather on the ground floor to read from a bible bound in the skin of a blind man. The psalmic words they intone rise up through the pipes, sigh in the stoves and sweep the chimneys coated inside with black grease which leaves dirt on the skin. Water runs constantly in the bathrooms and the showers beat down on the numbered bodies, peppering them with sand. On Sundays the bed linen unrolls by itself and nobody makes love. For this tower block, like an obscure phallus scraping the vulva of the sky, is usually a hive of sexual activity. The most beautiful woman lives there, but no-one has ever known her. It is said, that dressed in furs and feathers, she keeps herself shut away in a first-floor apartment as if in a white safe. Her windows are scissors which cut short both shadow and breath. Her name is AURORA. ~ Michel Leiris

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation. ~ Steven Johnson

The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would some day come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle. ~ Stephen King

Ferris, himself fed up with construction delays and Burnham's pestering, had told Gronau to turn the wheel or tear it off the tower. ~ Erik Larson

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. ~ Stephen King

So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. ~ William James

It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva's hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady suck-and-hiss that's like the systole and diastole of a beating heart. ~ Neal Stephenson

Even if you escaped this place, which is impossible," Death said, "you would never reach her.

I glanced up at Death. "So my plan should be to wait here, docile, until you murder me? Along with the rest of your lackeys?"

Saying these words out loud was like a corner turned, a line crossed. One answer rang through me.

Never.

After my mother's sacrifice for me, I'd be damned if I rolled over now. I owed it to her to fight.

I had a new mission: self-preservation. I had to get this cuff off, so I could protect myself from Death. Sooner or later the novelty of having me here, his princess in the tower, would wear off.

I needed to be ready.

"Why didn't you tell me about Jack earlier? And Matthew? Why not just torpedo me from the beginning?"

"My reasons are my own. But I did warn you not to give Deveaux your innocence."

I rolled my eyes at his terminology. "Really, Father Time? And what business is it of yours anyway? ~ Kresley Cole

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie. ~ Joanne Harris

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin what what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno. ~ Mark Twain

It's not supposed to end this way. Whatever else Roland and his ka-tet knows, that's one thing that they ken for sure. This business ain't supposed to end, and end bloody, at the base of some godforsaken pile of rock called Jericho Hill. Because John Farson is evil, and they're good, and good may have its setbacks and bumps along the road, but when the final bell gongs, only good is left to hear its peals. They know that. They just…they know it. This ain't how it's gonna end. 'Cept, deep down…they know it is. ~ Stephen King

It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
- Vladimir Nabokov ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power. ~ Mark Rippetoe

No one had more impact on my career than Gil Hodges. Playing for him was a
learning experience, and he was a tower of strength. Not everbody liked him, but
everybody respected him. He went about his job in a very professional manner,
and it caused me to do the same with my job. ~ Tom Seaver

In this jangle of causes and effects, what had become of their true selves? Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king. Ah, no; there was beauty and adventure behind, such as the man at her feet had yearned for; there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the limits that fetter us now. As a prisoner looks up and sees stars beckoning, so she, from the turmoil and horror of those days, caught glimpses of the diviner wheels. ~ E.M. Forster

I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows. I know little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

My father built low- and moderate-income housing in Queens and Brooklyn. I learned a lot from him. But I went in a different direction. I built Trump Tower in Manhattan, the most luxurious building in the world. It's not going to be easy for my son, but maybe it shouldn't be easy. Life is, after all, a test. ~ Donald Trump

After almost two hours, the phone rang. I could guess who it was.
"Hello, Blix," I said before he could say anything. "Adding kidnapping to your long list of felonies?"
"We prefer to think of it as 'vacationing at the specific invitation of His Majesty," replied Blix. "Open the top drawer of the bureau."
I did so, and found a contract for Kazam to concede the competition, with all the details that Blix had already outlined. The document had been prepared by a law firm in Financia and registered with the Ununited Kingdoms Supreme Court, so even if King Snodd had wanted to reverse the deal, he couldn't.
"It's all there," said Blix. "I knew my or the King's word wouldn't be good enough, so I made it official. Sign it and your vacation in the North Tower is over."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you'll stay there until six Mondays from now, and we'll have Kazam for nothing."
"Blix?"
"Yes?"
"Are you in the castle watching the top of the North Tower at the moment?"
"I might be."
I ripped the phone from the wall and tossed it out the open window. The telephone took almost five seconds to hit the ground. It was a pointless gesture, but very satisfying. ~ Jasper Fforde

See the turtle of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth. If you want to run and play, come along the beam today. ~ Stephen King

Determination is all very well if you want to jump off a tower. But will power is not enough when it comes to cooking beef and noodles. ~ Erich Kastner

There, eastward, within a stone's throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring. Behind them, black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her belfry louvres; and Queen's with her dome of green copper; and, as the eye turned southward, Magdalen, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers; the Schools and the battlemented front of University; Merton, square-pinnacled, half-hidden behind the shadowed North side and mounting spire of St. Mary's. Westward again, Christ Church, vast between Cathedral spire and Tom Tower; Brasenose close at hand; St. Aldate's and Carfax beyond; spire and tower and quadrangle, all Oxford springing underfoot in living leaf and enduring stone, ringed far off by her bulwark of blue hills. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The animal kingdom has nothing else like this column of flesh and bone always in danger of toppling, this proud unsteady tower. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Seville is a tower full of fine archers ... Under the arch of the sky, across the clear plain, she shoots the constant arrow of her river. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Egwene remembered her pity for poor Meidani. No sister should be treated in such a way. Imprisonment was one thing. But beating a woman down, toying with her, hinting at the torture to come? It was insufferable.
Each of these things was a pain inside of Egwene, a knife to the chest, piercing the heart. As the beating continued, she realized that nothing they could do to her body would ever compare to the pain of soul she felt at seeing the White Tower suffer beneath Elaida's hand. Compared with those internal agonies, the beating was ridiculous.
And so she began to laugh. ~ Robert Jordan

Character is both formed and revealed by how one deals with everyday situations as well as extraordinary pressures and temptations. Like a well-made tower, character is built stone by stone, decision by decision. ~ Michael Josephson

For you to find a needle in-God, not even in a haystack. A needle in a tower full of other needles.'
'Plunge your hand into a tower of needles,' said Magnus, 'and you are likely to cut yourself badly. ~ Cassandra Clare

Oh Florence, Florence, patroness
of the lovely tyrannicides!
Where the tower of the Old Palace
pierces the sky
like a hypodermic needle,
Perseus, David and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side -
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many David and Judiths!
My heart bleeds for the monster.
I have seen the Gorgon.
The erotic terror
of her helpless, big-bosomed body
lay like slop.
Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone,
her severed head swung
like a lantern in the victor's hand. ~ Robert Lowell

What is a church?-Our honest sexton tells, 'Tis a tall building, with a tower and bells. ~ George Crabbe

Then there are the words that the Song of Solomon provides a man. The enchanting words of courtship."
She closed her eyes and, lips parted, began to chant. "How beautiful you are, my love, your eyes are doves.... Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate.... Your neck is like the tower of David.... Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies. ~ Talia Carner

Who reflects too much will accomplish little. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years. ~ Stephen King