Broken Windows Quotes

In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else's in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north. ~ Steve Erickson

Whom one is speaking to - or which aspect of their character - fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. 'Indulge Your Desires' comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than it does spray-painted across the broken windows of an SUV dealer. It follows that what you say is not nearly as important as how and when you say it. ~ CrimethInc.

A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows. ~ James Q. Wilson

The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors, metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobilized under a mustard sun.
That's where we had assembly this morning. ~ Bel Kaufman

After all, memoirs are not open doors into another person's house. They are more like broken windows, with the owner trying to explain away all of the damage. ~ Michelle Moran

Are broken windows a new decorating theme around here?" Archer asked, coming up behind Jenna and me and poking his head into the parlor.
"So it would seem," I said. I was still looking outside when a faint light appeared in the gloom. It took me a minute to realize that it was from Cal's cabin. Was someone out there? Was Cal out there?
But just as quickly as it had appeared, the light went out again. Frowning, I turned from the doorway, and I went to slip my arm through Archer's. Then I remembered what Nausicaa had said earlier. Now wasn't exactly the best time for PDA, probably.
The three of us trailed behind everyone else into the ballroom. Here, at least, things looked more or less the same. Of course, the ballroom had always been one of the more bizarre rooms at Hex Hall, so that didn't say much. Still, I was relieved to see the familiar jumble of tables and chairs and not, like, tree stumps or whatever. ~ Rachel Hawkins

in the crook of her elbow as she went. Above her, over an apartment building and a tavern, she saw the expanse of a large square building with a flat roof and a single cylinder chimney. It was a tan-brick warehouse with dark broken windows. An abandoned bird's ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

Desiree the child bride, and her sister Miranda, had gone grave-robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who'd been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery's most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule's, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom's jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk. ~ Timothy Schaffert

The one broken window that permanently wouldn't roll up had destroyed her perfectly curled blond prom-hair, and by the time we got to the gym she looked like Marie Antoinette with bedhead. ~ Kami Garcia

Love doesn't always mean rings and veils and walks down the aisle.
Sometimes love means broken windows and broken hearts,
and not being able to fix either.
And sometimes love means telling you,
there's no such thing as time in Heaven so don't rush to meet me.
Stay a while, and pick, girl, the roses. ~ Jennifer Gooch Hummer

The most intriguing candidate for that "something else" is called the Broken Windows theory. Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes: ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Police ought to protect communities as well as individuals ... Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police - and the rest of us - ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows. ~ James Q. Wilson

the habit of bed making is correlated with a sense of greater well-being and higher productivity. Other common broken windows include having a messy car; accumulating piles of laundry or trash; not being able to find important items, like a passport or a phone charger; hanging on to stacks of newspapers, magazines, and catalogs; wearing pajamas or sweats all day; or not shaving or showering ~ Gretchen Rubin

...Leaning on her maid, she stole through the winding galleries, and lightly descending the stairs, entered the long hall, which terminated in a dark arched passage that opened into the chapel. This was a wild and gloomy structure: beneath it were the vaults which contained the ancestors of the earl of Dunreath, whose deeds and titles were enumerated on gothic monuments: their dust-covered banners waving around in sullen dignity to the rude gale, which found admittance through the broken windows. The light which the maid held produced deep shadows, that heightened the solemnity of the place. ~ Regina Maria Roche

Traditional feminism would tell you that we should concentrate on the big stuff like pay inequality, female circumcision in the Third World, and domestic abuse. And they are, obviously, pressing and disgusting and wrong, and the world cannot look itself squarely in the eye until they're stopped. But all those littler, stupider, more obvious day-to-day problems with being a woman are, in many ways, just as deleterious to women's peace of mind. It is the "Broken Windows" philosophy, transferred to female inequality. In the Broken Windows theory, if a single broken window on an empty building is ignored and not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may break into the building and light fires, or become squatters. Similarly, if we live in a climate where female pubic hair is considered distasteful, or famous and powerful women are constantly pilloried for being too fat or too thin, or badly dressed, then, eventually, people start breaking into women, and lighting fires in them. Women will get squatters. Clearly, this is not a welcome state of affairs. ~ Caitlin Moran

No penance could be more terrible than this. Her very heart was dead. ~ Rachel Hartman

Because no windows were open and the air was so still and cold that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead. ~ Mark Helprin

A significant driver of opposition to abortion is the social construction of the Ideal Woman. In a culture that rarely, if ever, allows women simply to be people, value is ascribed based on a woman's relation to something other than herself. A woman on her own is like a bit of driftwood floating in the ocean. She is a broken object with no purpose, waiting either to wash up on the shore and be put to use as part of something else, or to sink and be forgotten forever. ~ Clementine Ford

I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fell in the Battle of Life,-The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife ... The hymn of the low and the humble, the weary, the broken in heart,Who strove and who failed, acting bravely a silent and desperate part. ~ William Wetmore Story

If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it. I have faith in the process of the law, and if it is carried out fairly, I can live with the results, whatever they may be. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

You really are F****** arresting, love, but I reckon I'll be the one doing the cuffing tonight. ~ L.J. Shen

Are you never afraid?" Jimmy asked, not bothering to hide his admiration.
"What is there to fear? Pain? I have suffered a thousand wounds. There is no part of my body that has not been gashed, gored, or broken. Death? I laugh at death. It can only come to me and then it is over. Shame or dishonour? I cannot know these as long as I don't fear pain or death. ~ O.R. Melling

I knew both from personal experience and by the example of many of my comrades that fighting in a war has an irreparably destructive effect on almost any man. I knew also that the constant proximity of death, the sight of the killed, wounded, dying, hanged and shot, the great red flame in the icy air above blazing villages on a winter's night, the carcass of a man's horse and those auditory impressions - the alarm bell, shell explosions, the whistle of bullets, the desperate, unknown cries – none of this ever passes with impunity. I knew that the silent, almost unconscious memory of war haunts the majority of people who have gone through it, leaving something broken in them once and for all. I knew myself that the normal, human ideas regarding the value of life and the necessity for a basic moral code – not to kill, not to steal, not to rape, to show compassion – had been slowly reasserted within me after the war, but they had lost their former persuasiveness and had become merely a system of theoretical morality, with whose correctness and necessity I couldn't, in principle, disagree. Those feelings that ought to have been inside me and that were a condition of the re-establishment of this code had been razed by war; they no longer existed, and there was nothing to take their place. ~ Gaito Gazdanov

To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements, and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world," - all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. ~ John Henry Newman

year-old girl. It was more than a habit, for a habit could be broken. This was a deep disposition, the outline experience had stencilled on character. It was not ~ Ian McEwan

I stand before you today heart broken, I know history and I love this country ... God blessed this country and it took sacrifice because even though they were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that's an inheritance. And if you are not willing to fight for you inheritance, even when you leave your children, if they won't fight for it, they don't keep it. Mean greedy evil people will take it away. ~ Louie Gohmert

It was as if we were having two different conversations. Which wasn't that surprising after all, as we were clearly having two entirely different experiences of breaking up. His was soft, cushioned; Jude and his friends had broken his fall. Mine was cold, empty and bereft. I was freefalling in space and time, with nobody standing by to stop me hurtling headlong into obscurity. ~ Ruth Mancini

When they gaze in confusion
at the broken, odd shaped, colorful
shards of glass that we are,

let them know

that we too belong here, here
in this gallery. Masterpieces,
we are not

here by accident

but have been carefully assembled
and put together and are held together
in this ceramic panel - our bodies of clay -
by good intentions.

We too are works of art. ~ Ayokunle Falomo

Oh, I hate him,' she said, and I noticed a flush of colour come into her cheeks and the manner in which the fingers of her left hand dug into her palm, as if she wanted something to take away the pain. 'I absolutely detest him. Afterwards, I didn't feel very much at all for a week or two. I suppose I was in shock. But then the fury rose and it hasn't subsided since. Sometimes I find it difficult to control. I think it was around the time that everyone stopped asking me whether I was all right, when lives went back to how they had been before. Had he been in Dublin I might well have gone over there, broken down his door and stabbed him as he slept. Fortunately for him, he was in Madagascar with his lepers.' (p. 268) ~ John Boyne

Hazel, like nearly all wild animals, was unaccustomed to look up at the sky. What he thought of as the sky was the horizon, usually broken by trees and hedges. ~ Richard Adams

When they were only a foot apart, both nude, she swayed toward him. He tugged her close, feeling her shock as heated skin met hot skin. God, he wanted her. His need was something he couldn't hide. Lord was she beautiful. Long, lean, muscled, but gently rounded everywhere.

"Are you--"

Her mouth latched onto his, silencing him as she began to explore his body.

Yeah, he;d have to say...she was sure. ~ Dale Mayer

You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. That's all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor. When you don't have that anymore, well, you know, there you go. Trust was broken. ~ George Tenet

The boys sat in front of your house at dusk,
the boys who still had parents.
Sometimes they held Marlboros out the car
Windows and even
If they didn't, sparks fell from their hands. ~ Brenda Hillman

On our second date, I picked up Missy at her house and told her we had to make a pit stop to pick up crawfish bait at the fish market. We'd figured out a way to speed up the process by using the fish market's gutbuckets instead of running nets ourselves. Through trial and error, we determined that the best crawfish bait was buffalo-fish heads. Unfortunately, when I pulled up to the market to get the garbage cans full of fish heads, I realized they had been outside for a couple of days. It was a warm day, and I could tell from the buzzing of hundreds of flies it was going to be nasty! I knew it was going to be the ultimate test of our relationship. The tubs were too heavy for one man to carry, so I told Missy, "I'm going to need your help on this." She crawled out the window, and I led her to the trash cans filled with buffalo heads waiting for us. Like an idiot, the first thing she did was open the lid of a trash can. Immediately, she started gagging and dry-heaving in the parking lot.
"Rule number two," I said. "Never pop the lid on a trash can."
Much to my surprise, Missy regained her composure and helped me load the trash cans into the back of my truck. Right then, I realized our relationship might work out. She was climbing through windows and hauling fish heads. ~ Jase Robertson

I think I'd hoped to be released by it, and solaced, just by hearing her tell me. But it wasn't like that. I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that's sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken-hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there's a name for it, a word we use often, without realizing the universe of peace that's enfolded in it. The word is free. ~ Gregory David Roberts

We are, without doubt, broken people living with other broken people in a broken world. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

It's quiet in the car, in a good way for once. No words, no music. Silence seems right. I roll down the windows and lean my head against the door frame, listening to the wind rush by and smelling the pine trees. I watch the stars materialize, like someone is dimming the switch on the night sky so each shining dot grows brighter and brighter. ~ Jennifer Salvato Doktorski

It was a pretty sight, and a seasonable one, that met their eyes when they flung the door open. In the fore-court, lit by the dim rays of a horn lantern, some eight or ten little field-mice stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, "Now then, one, two, three!" and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time. ~ Kenneth Grahame

I let the divine being leave first and gave him a few minutes to do whatever it was he needed to do to get back to Heaven. It seemed polite, though I'd only made that rule up in my head.

When I stepped out of the shack, Quentin was there by the roadside, waiting for me.

"Have a nice chat?"

I knew his peevish tone was his usual allergic reaction to Erlang Shen, but for some reason I didn't field it well today.

"Yeah, we really connected on an emotional level," I snapped. "I promised to turn into a stick for him."

That was perhaps the weirdest, most hyper-targeted dig I'd ever leveled at someone, but boy did it work. Quentin looked like I'd broken him in half and left him on the curb for pickup. He was completely silent the entire trip back to civilization.

He didn't call or text me that night either ~ F.C. Yee

I cannot recall a situation you did not think was special and required his presence," said Gabriel dryly. "You have been known to call upon Brother Zachariah for a broken toe. ~ Cassandra Clare

The vast majority of people do not have, nor will they ever have a personal computer. They haven't been exposed to Windows or Office, or anything like that, and in their lives it's unlikely that they will. ~ Stephen Elop

It must be hard to be a female in a David Mackenzie movie. I feel like women in his films are portrayed a certain way - like broken people. ~ Jamie Bell

I know who you are," the Chicano said to Thomas. "You're that Indian guy did all the talking." "Yeah," one of the African men said. "You're that storyteller. Tell us some stories, chief, give us the scoop." Thomas looked at these five men who shared his skin color, at the white man who shared this bus which was going to deliver them into a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack. He then looked out the window, through the steel grates on the windows, at the freedom just outside the glass. He saw wheat fields, bodies of water, and bodies of dark-skinned workers pulling fruit from trees and sweat from thin air. Thomas closed his eyes and told this story. ~ Sherman Alexie

Broken hearts never truly heal, they mend, beat a little differently, forever after. ~ Rachel Robinson

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms ~ T. S. Eliot