Bricks Quotes

A brick represents a single unit, weak and useless alone, but useful and powerful when organized and grouped with other bricks. So it is with man. ~ Jarod Kintz

The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples - that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. ~ Mark Twain

The highest prison walls in the universe are not made of bricks or stone, but of ignorance. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I like using LEGO bricks as a medium because I enjoy seeing people's reaction to artwork created from something with which they are familiar. ... My goal is to elevate this simple plaything to a place it has never been before. I also appreciate the cleanliness of the LEGO brick. The right angles. The distinct lines. But, from a distance, those right angles and distinct lines offer new perspectives, changing to curves. ~ Nathan Sawaya

Thus when a barber and a collier fight, The barber beats the luckless collier-white; The dusty collier heaves his ponderous sack, And big with vengeance beats the barber-black. In comes the brick-dust man, with grime o'erspread, And beats the collier and the barber-red: Black, red, and white in various clouds are tost, And in the dust they raise the combatants are lost. ~ Christopher Smart

I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story," said Ford.
"Eh?"
"Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?"
"Yes of course I do."
"Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting 'Gotcha'. It wouldn't have any difference if they hadn't eaten it."
"Why not?"
"Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end."
"What are you talking about?"
"Never mind, eat the fruit. ~ Douglas Adams

The sky is raining bricks right into my skull. ~ Tahereh Mafi

It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house. ~ Jerry Spinelli

A brick could create a clear winner in a fight if instead of fighting pillows against blankets, you fought bricks against blankets. ~ Amy Summers

Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks. ~ Khaled Hosseini

She spilled rice on my knee, and she smiled. I wanted her to spill a thousand things on me, lava, acid, bricks, anything, and smile each time ~ Ann Brashares

An economy made of paper could never be as strong as one of bricks, guns and widgets. ~ Ivo Stourton

The ordinary build houses when they have bricks; the extraordinary build mansions when they have pebbles. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

HENRY:
Leave me out of it. They don't count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn't. I don't know. It doesn't count. He's a lout with language. I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Act II, Scene 5, HENRY and ANNIE ~ Tom Stoppard

Sorry to tell you, but that's a very old chestnut. My mother used to say when God slams a door on you, he opens a window.'

Tig gave this two seconds of respectful consideration before rejecting it. 'No, that's not the same. I'm saying when God slams a door on you it's probably a shitstorm. You're going to end up in rubble. But it's okay because without all that crap overhead, you're standing in the daylight.'

'Without a roof over your head, it kind of feels like you might die.'

'Yeah, but you might not. For sure you won't find your way out of the mess if you keep picking up bricks and stuffing them in your pockets. What you have to do is look for blue sky. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I've been cut down, destroyed, and demolished. Someone once told me that the human mind is like a temple. A sound structure. Compiled by bricks, cement, and straw.
Built by sweating slaves after hours and hours of back-breaking labor.
But I disagree ... I disagree because even the most sound and well-built structures can crumble.
I've had days where I felt like my mind was crumbling in the palms of my hands and I was frantic, with fear and desperate with trembling fingers to put the pieces back together.
I felt like that until my husband saved me.
I want to cherish the way I feel about Elijah forever. ~ Lauren Hammond

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all. ~ Dorothy Allison

My disinterest in your bullshit is so tangible you could make bricks out of it ~ Scott Lynch

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -
books, bricks, grief -
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down."
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply? ~ Mary Oliver

To be a successful person you often have to create a strong foundation with the bricks others throw at you. ~ Rod Judkins

A brick could be dropped in a toilet to replicate the sound of shitting bricks. But we wouldn't have to go through all that trouble if you'd just eat the bricks I put on your plate. ~ Jarod Kintz

There are all sorts of things embodied in the LEGO brick - geometry and mathematics and truth and proportion and shape and colour ... It is a faintly spiritual activity that everybody connects with. ~ James May

We have embraced the 21st century by entering such cutting-edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation and paint. Try to control your excitement. ~ Warren Buffett

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Drop some of them bricks you keep hauling around with you. Life just ain't that heavy. ~ Cynthia Rylant

Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone. ~ E. M. Forster

Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick
and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave. ~ Mark Twain

There is no end. There is no cure. It gets worse with time. Cure. How can you cure an institution, we are bricks crumbling in the walls of despair. Death is inevitable for us all. But the insanity is here to stay. ~ Stephen Richards

For a player to be good enough to play for Liverpool, he must be prepared
to run through a brick wall for me then come out fighting on the other side. ~ Bill Shankly

She imagined what it must be like to have Charlie's mind - to believe that red shoes are faster then other shoes; to believe, as he did, that ducks could drive fire engines and that pigs built houses out of bricks and straw. There were plenty of people who weren't three-and-three-quarters who believed equally implausible things ... and when to war over them. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Apparently after six days baking pigs and herding bricks, the inhabitants would kick back with a spot of cock-fighting, bullbaiting, and ratting. It was the sort of place an adventurous gentleman might venture only if he didn't mind being beaten, rolled, and catching an exciting venereal disease. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

A brick could be used to show you how to live a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. Don't you want to have fulfillment and meaning saturating your existence? I can show you how you can achieve this and so much more with just a simple brick. For just $99.99 - not even an even hundred bucks, I'll send you my exclusive life philosophy that's built around a brick. Man's used bricks to build houses for centuries. Now let one man, me, show you how a brick can be used to build your life up bigger and stronger than you ever imagined. But act now, because supplies are limited. This amazing offer won't last forever. You don't want to wake up in ten years to find yourself divorced, homeless, and missing your testicles because you waited even two hours too long to obtain this information. Become a hero today - save your life. Procrastination is only for the painful things in life. We prolong the boring, but why put off for tomorrow the exciting life you could be living today? If you're not satisfied with the information I'm providing, I'm willing to offer you a no money back guarantee. That's right, you read that wrong. If you are not 100% dissatisfied with my product, I'll give you your money back. For $99.99 I'm offering 99.99%, but you've got to be willing to penny up that percentage to 100. Why delay? The life you really want is mine, and I'm willing to give it to you - for a price. That price is a one-time fee of $99.99, which of course everyone can afford - even if they can't aff ~ Jarod Kintz

Bricks could be used to fill my empty trophy cabinet. But first I've got to win them. ~ Jarod Kintz

You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the past. ~ Steve Irwin

Brick's detachment is at last broken through. His heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more rapid and his voice hoarse. The thing they're discussing, timidly and painfully on the side of Big Daddy, fiercely, violently on Brick's side, is the inadmissible thing that Skipper died to disavow between them. The fact that if it existed it had to be disavowed to "keep face" in the world they lived in, may be at the heart of the "mendacity" that Brick drinks to kill his disgust with. It may be the root of his collapse. Or maybe it is only a single manifestation of it, not even the most important. The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man's psychological problem. I'm trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one's own character to himself. This does not absolve the playwright of his duty to observe and probe as clearly and deeply as he legitimately can: but it should steer him away from "pat" conclusions, facile definitions which make a play just a play, not a snare for the truth of human experience. ~ Tennessee Williams

You can't change the bricks, and together, you still have to build a wall. ~ Chris Hadfield

I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a ... well, as a place, a building ... a house ... of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can ... well, nest. ~ Tennessee Williams

When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks. ~ Feist

Maybe things happen for a reason but that reason is stupid... I am a flat tire and you are a pothole full of lug nuts. I am a pile of bricks and you are holding a sledgehammer, which is to say I would not exist without you. ~ Neil Hilborn

I consider myself a laborer, building my career brick over brick under the sun. ~ Shakira

Since 1963, LEGO bricks have been manufactured from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer - ABS copolymer for short - a plastic with a matte finish. It is very hard and robust - import criteria for a children's toy. Laboratories in Switzerland and Denmark regularly test the quality of the ABS. The plastic is distributed to factories as granules rather than in liquid form. These grains of plastic are heated up to 232ºC and converted into a molten mass. Injection moulding machines weighing up to 150 tonnes squeeze the viscous plastic mass into the desired injection moulds - of which there are 2,400 varieties. After seven seconds, the brick produced in this way has cooled down enough to be removed from the mould. The injection moulding method is so precise that out of every million elements produced, only about 18 units have to be rejected. Unsold bricks are converted back into granulates and recycled. ~ Christian Humberg

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories. ~ Lord Dunsany

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets
dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion. ~ Janet Frame

She needed facts. Facts were bricks. Maybe she could build herself a wall with them, too, one tall and wide and strong enough to keep her alive when he was gone. ~ Vicki Pettersson

His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see he loved like a thousand bricks. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Jaipur is the finest jewelry ever created on earth, where king was the jeweler and bricks his gems. ~ Vinita Kinra

No building should be
A secret from Apollo
Or drop bricks on him ~ Rick Riordan

If you look at the top 20 companies of the world, 19 of them are still brick-and-mortar companies. I have nothing against tech companies. What I am saying is that if you have a car manufacturer or an oil and gas manufacturer, you won't get the supply over the Net. ~ Anil Ambani

Baseball is a lot like the ivy-covered wall of Wrigley Field
it gives off a great appearance, but when you run into it, you discover the bricks underneath. At times, it seems that we're dealing with a group of men who aren't much different than others we've all run into over the years, except they wear neckties instead of robes and hoods. ~ Hank Aaron

Houses are built brick-by-brick. HOMEs are built word-by-word. Houses don't build themselves. So YOU must build your home ~ Fela Durotoye

I am very sorry, sir, but I cannot give you the Windsor crown," Rita said calmly. "I do not have it, and even if I did, it is not mine to give away."
"I don't know if you heard me correctly," the sergeant repeated, his words falling like bricks. "I said, hand it over."
Rita smiled serenely and stood, holding her thin hands clasped in front of her. Nora glanced up at her, a worried look in her eyes.
"Quite possibly it was you who did not understand my reply. I said, I am very sorry, but I am afraid I cannot give you the crown. But I can offer you a nice cup of tea, and I just baked a batch of cheddar scones."
A muffled snicker went through the room. I could even see Wesley, who stood by the door, trying not to smile. ~ Galaxy Craze

In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups
big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups
so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist. ~ Michael Perry

Old friends are the bricks and mortar of your life. ~ Nora Roberts

I swear, talking to you is like talking to a really good-looking and mildly stupid brick wall. ~ Derek Landy

YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED THE PRESENT. WORK HARD, BE HAPPY, AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE IN WAYWARD PINES! ~ Blake Crouch

A brick could be wrapped in plastic and sold individually to toddlers as toys. (Warning: Bricks can be harmful if swallowed. If ingested, please contact a physician first, and then the manager of a circus.) ~ Jarod Kintz

You are more thoughtful because you don't act as quickly anymore. When I turned 70 it was the first time I felt young for my age. Fifty dropped on me like a ton of bricks - there is something about that number - but when 70 came along I felt good about it. ~ Jack Nicholson

Vivian's first impression of Solidago was that she had travelled back in time, but not to a time where architecture had been invented. All houses were twisted out of shape, to say the least. Windows either too large to open or too small to make a difference peppered the city in places one would never dream of having one.

The walls were mostly cast in brickwork by the kind of stonemason whose day job was financial advising. Skewed walls with more bricks than mortar, knotted chimneys keeping the smoke inside and cupping rooftops whose main purpose was to gather rainwater – Solidago had it all and more.

As the oldest civilization of the cosmos, Alarians might have been excellent at healing, philosophizing and weaving into the fabric of reality, but they were very poor city builders. ~ Louise Blackwick

That city is well fortified which has a wall of men instead of brick. ~ Lycurgus Of Sparta

As a child I had no toys; our house was bombed, but there were lots of bricks. Ruins are wonderful because they are the beginning of something new, you can do something with them. ~ Anselm Kiefer

Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize.
Behind every word flows energy. ~ Sonia Choquette

The world, with all its impossible variegation and the basic miracle of its existence, draws most mourners out of their grief and back into itself. The homosexual forsythia blooms; the young Irish dancers in Killarney dance, their arms as rigid as shovel handles; secret deals are done involving weapons or office space or crude oil or used cars or drugs; new lovers, believing they will never really have to get up, lie down together; the Large Hadron Collider smashes the Higgs boson into view; snow drapes its white stoles on the bare limbs of winter; the crack of the bat swung by a hefty Dominican pulls a crowd to its feet in Boston; bricks for the new hospital in Phnom Penh are laid in true courses; the single-engine Cessna lands safely in an Ohio alfalfa field during a storm. How can you resist? The true loss in only to the dying, and even the won't feel it when the dying's done. ~ Daniel Menaker

I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on. ~ Alan Moore

We have got to extend the hand of friendship, we have got to take the peacelines down brick by brick ~ David Ervine

The only way to tell my Dad something is to write it on a note, and tie it to a brick, and throw it through a window. Of course, now Dad's armed with a brick. ~ Christopher Titus

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick. ~ Jeanette Winterson

On his youth, Yoshiro had prided himself of always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. Confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar fora structure called «individuality». ~ Yōko Tawada

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. And ~ Douglas Adams

Bricks could be used as breast implants. Lady Squaretits is really particular about the shape of her boobs. ~ Jarod Kintz

Kat might have built the wall, but I handed her the bricks. ~ Meghan March

Build your life brick upon brick,
Live a life of truth,
And you will look back on a life of truth.
Live a life of fantasy,
And you will look back on delusion. ~ Ming-Dao Deng

I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasure of gold and gems as so many bricks
and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of
fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of,
magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the
illuminated one as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of
daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs
as but traces left by the four seasons. ~ Gautama Buddha

You have those walls up all around you ... Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then? ~ Jacqueline Woodson

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go. ~ Sarah Dessen

Brick walls are there for a reason. And once you get over them - even if someone has practically had to throw you over - it can be helpful to others to tell them how you did it. ~ Randy Pausch

Bricks could be used to promote social progress. If we could amass enough bricks to build a prison big enough to cage every citizen, then everybody would be equal. And I think our current political leadership is savvy enough to see this, and is taking steps to implement this as soon as possible. ~ Jarod Kintz

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

[And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number. ~ Anne Michaels

This is the arena in which a spiritualized disobedience means most. It doesn't mean a second New Deal, another massive bureaucratic attack on our problems. It doesn't mean taking to the streets, throwing bricks through the window at the Bank of America, or driving a tractor through the local McDonald's. It means living differently. It means taking responsibility for the character of the human world. That's a real confrontation with the problem of value. In short, refusal of the present is a return to what Thoreau and Ruskin called "human fundamentals, valuable things," and it is a movement into the future. This movement into the future is also a powerful expression of that most human spiritual emotion, Hope.
p.124 ~ Curtis White

Sloth kept him in bed awhile. Restlessness drove him downstairs to the tiny court behind his kitchen, where the sun made more mist. Under its warmth everything gave off ghosts. They work from the bricks, rose with a deep reluctance, disappeared. ~ Denis Johnson

A hotel is more than bricks and blankets. A hotel is a welcoming atmosphere, and a place to engage in a business transaction with a prostitute. ~ Jarod Kintz

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a 'miracle. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I grew up in a brick house. What's wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, "You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish." ~ Carl Andre

I hoped there weren't any vomit chunks in my wavy auburn locks. That would be sure to ruin Marlboro Man's dinner.
"You okay?" Marlboro Man asked when I returned to our table. He'd ordered a Coke, and his bread plate was covered with crusts. I'd been gone over ten minutes.
"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry; I just…I just got a little sick all of a sudden."
"What's wrong?" he said, by then probably alarmed by the green tinge of his new wife.
"I have no idea--it just hit me like a ton of bricks," I explained. "I'm fine now, though!"
"Maybe you're pregnant," he said with a sly grin.
I knew enough about the timing of conception and morning sickness to know that pregnancy likely wasn't the problem. "I don't think that's it--," I began. Then it hit me again even more violently than before, and I ran back to the bathroom, where I lost it again--this time in a different stall.
Sydney, we have a problem. ~ Ree Drummond

I'm surprised there isn't a jet airplane designed in the shape of a brick. Some people (aeronautical engineers) might say that's because bricks aren't aerodynamic. Yeah, right. I'd like to see someone make that claim as they watch a brick flying towards their face at a high velocity. ~ Jarod Kintz

My big awakening happened when I was fourteen. I'd been trying to get into this older girl's pants for a while, and she finally let me come over to her house. We hung out, smoked some pot and listened to Aerosmith's Rocks. It hit me like a fucking ton of bricks. I sat there listening to it over and over, and totally blew off this girl. I remember riding my bike back to my grandma's house knowing that my life had changed. Now I identified with something. ~ Slash

Bricks could be used to fill Fort Knox. I know, I know. You're probably thinking, if we fill Fort Knox with bricks, where will we keep all the gold that's kept there? I still need to get precise measurements, and move all my clothes, but I think it'd be a good idea to store the gold in my closet. ~ Jarod Kintz

I've always wanted to go out with a bang, that's why I carry two bricks around with me wherever I go, so when I leave a room I clap them together. ~ Nicole McKay

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work. ~ Paula McLain

I used to believe I was merely words and I do not know whether I shall start hoping for something more. You planted that sense of hope in a secret deeply hidden place; it had walls made of bricks and huge abandoned gardens full of despair. It was covered in dusty waves and it was kept underground where no soul would ever walk. And you walked there - you planted hope. And now I cannot imagine myself without it. ~ Katherine Mansfield

There was a time when I was practicing law in New York and I wanted to find something else to do. So I ended up leaving the practice of law to pursue my art and it just happened to be out of Lego bricks. ~ Nathan Sawaya

There are no shortcuts to building a team each season. You build the foundation brick by brick. ~ Bill Belichick

Geoff Hurst had a hammer in his left boot and good left feet are like bricks of gold. ~ Jimmy Greaves

Cleverness builds ever more elaborate structures of self-justification ... But in the end you know what is and what is not right. All men do, though they may spend their years trying to bury that knowing, burying it beneath words, hatred, lusts, sorrow, or any of the other bricks from which they build their lives ... When the time comes, you'll know. But knowing is never enough. ~ Mark Lawrence

I used to help out my father, a bricklayer, in the summer. I'd catch the bricks (that were dropped). And it made me strong, catching those bricks. I wouldn't change anything about it. That's why I'm where I am today. Really. ~ Jerry Rice

I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins. ~ Quincy Jones

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. ~ Shirley Jackson

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children. ~ Brian Doyle

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. ~ Stephen Crane