Buildings Quotes

It's possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it? ~ Martin Amis

And slowly the snow began to melt. First, doing a number on children's constructions; Then retreating to the foundations of barns and other buildings. Mangy grass poked through the receding snow. Patches of white were swallowed up in the till of the fields. New shapes emerged. Areas of the forest became INACCESSIBLE now that the snow no longer weighed down the weeds and brier ... Nothing fits together anymore. ~ Craig Thompson

There's no doubt in my mind over the next 25 years how we drive, how we build our houses, how we fly, how we build our buildings, will all change. ~ Vinod Khosla

I'm a New Yorker. I like the big streets and the big buildings. It's a great place to walk. ~ Ed Askew

The Founder-Director purposely designed the building in a U-shape, in the interior of which is a courtyard with a central fountain, to reflect the introspective nature of a true Muslim, a universal and perfect man. These interior parts of the building are hidden from the outside in contrast to secularized buildings which face the road and are exposed to the busy traffic of secular life and are therefore without real privacy and introspective spirit. ~ Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

Towers' is the name of the dormitory that I lived in in college; it's made up of these two towers – North and South – my girlfriend lived in one and I lived in the other. It's about falling in love, but also about what happens when you've long fallen out of love and those reminders are still there. You drive by them, these two buildings, and you look, and you realise that we really built that up. That we really built that love into these things, and for a long time afterward looking at them really made me feel sad; to see these empty buildings that I don't go in to anymore. But then, as time goes on, they start to become kind of joyous in their own way: you can look at them and think 'that love was great and these buildings still stand tall'. But there's also an element of the fact that they're just buildings – they're gonna fall down one day, and they're not that important because there's new love in your life and you've got to break things down that get built up. ~ Justin Vernon

if we can't worship the same God together inside the same church buildings, then we will still knock on your door and so irritate you thatyou cannot worship your white God in peace, that you cannot escape thinking about the problems of segregation even on Sunday morning, that we are just letting you know that every single aspect of your Southern Way of Life is under attack. ~ Stephen R. Haynes

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. ~ Edna Ferber

Going about one's native land one is inclined to take many things for granted, roads and buildings, roofs, windows and doorways, the walls that shelter strangers, the house one has never entered, trees which are like other trees, pavements which are no more than cobblestones. But when we are distant from them we find that those things have become dear to us, a street, trees and roofs, blank walls, doors and windows; we have entered those houses without knowing it, we have left something of our heart in the very stonework. Those places we no longer see, perhaps will never see again but still remember, have acquired and aching charm; they return to us with the melancholy of ghosts, a hallowed vision and as it were the true face of France. We love and evoke them such as they were; and such as to us they still are, we cling to them and will not have them altered, for the face of our country is our mother's face. ~ Victor Hugo

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic
shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling. ~ Pablo Neruda

Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough to
make them understood. It too often happens in some conversations,
as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have
Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress'd as those that
are full of precious Drugs.
They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level
Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the
Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have
need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the
Weather. ~ William Penn

Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his 'death,' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view! ~ Martin Bormann

Men and women of western Sydney, it's appropriate, you apparently believe, that Australia's oldest surviving Prime Minister should make the concluding remarks in Australia's oldest surviving Government House. I hope the building's foundations are a bit more substantial than mine. ~ Gough Whitlam

Now you're going to get it," I said, guessing Al was coming when the ones in the back scattered. "You should have been nice."
With a weird cry, the closest surface demon fell back, but it was too late. A flash of red light exploded overhead, smashing the buildings away as if I were at the center of an atomic explosion. The surface demons scattered like brown leaves, the remnants of their clothes and auras fluttering. It was Al, and he burst into existence in a grand mood, an old-fashioned lantern in his hand and a walking cane at his side.
"Rachel Mariana Morgan!" he shouted enthusiastically, raising the lantern high, and I painfully rose from my crouch, breaking my bubble with a small thought. "I've come to save you, love! ~ Kim Harrison

I just like artist-driven projects, but for artists themselves: artist spaces, artist mentor programs, and artists buying buildings and making lofts. Doing whatever we can do. Because at the end of the day, I really think that we as a community only have each other. ~ Mark Bradford

I feel this is very important for us to have serene buildings because our civilization is chaotic as it is, you see; our whole machine age has brought about a chaos that has to be somehow counterbalanced, I think. ~ Minoru Yamasaki

Events. Events in response to other events. Think about it. Nothing since the big bang has happened without a reason. And even the big bang might have come from something, because of something. One thing makes another thing, and then that thing makes the next thing. Look at these kids. These two brothers, still kids. They don't know themselves yet. They are acting in response, in reaction, passionate reaction to something that set them off, made them commit to violence. They would not be here if the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. The United States would not have had fertile ground for the lie it told about Irag, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, etc., etc., if not for Osama bin Laden and 9/11. Osama bin Laden would not have been able to recruit those men to learn how to fly planes and then crash them into buildings if not for propaganda about the persecution of the global Muslims, Afghanistan after the Russian invasion, Chechnya in the nineties, Bosnian genocides, or any instance of Islam under attack by the West, one culture trying to extinguish another. History is always a story of cause and effect. ~ Laleh Khadivi

The screen came up to light again, showing a devastated section of the city grid. No, not decimated. Had that part of the city been decimated, one out of every ten buildings would be destroyed. That's what decimated means. Personally, I think some early-years, respected television personality got decimated and devastated confused at some point, and no one wanted to point it out to him, so everyone started using them interchangeably. But dammit, words mean what they mean, even if everyone thinks they ought to mean something else. ~ Jim Butcher

The hidden village was something we found when we went to research in China we climbed a mountain in the Sichuan province where the panda sanctuary is based, and we climbed to this beautiful, mist-covered, almost primordial place and when we turned these corners these moss covered old buildings would come into view, revealing themselves and it was so beautiful and so unlike anything we'd seen that we literally took those moments and put them into the film [Kung Fu Panda 3]. ~ Jennifer Yuh Nelson

It is a well-known fact that of all the species on earth Homo sapiens is among the most adaptable. Settle a tribe of them in a desert and they will wrap themselves in cotton, sleep in tents, and travel on the backs of camels; settle them in the Arctic and they will wrap themselves in sealskin, sleep in igloos, and travel by dog-drawn sled. And if you settle them in a Soviet climate? They will learn to make friendly conversation with strangers while waiting in line; they will learn to neatly stack their clothing in their half of the bureau drawer; and they will learn to draw imaginary buildings in their sketchbooks. That is, they will adapt. ~ Amor Towles

Giuseppe would miss them as well, but in a different way than he would miss the city. A city would stay the same. The same buildings. The same streets. Not forever, but for a great long while. But Frederick and Hannah would never again be the people they were right now, standing on the dock, wishing him farewell. Tomorrow they would wake up and be a little bit different and a little bit different the day after that, and in no time they might become people he did not recognize. Giuseppe knew it because they were already different from when he had first met them. He knew it because he was different from when they had first met him. ~ Matthew J. Kirby

Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Where the light was strongest, there were no buildings. ~ H.G. Parry

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluste ~ Donna Tartt

It is discovered an extraordinary similarity between Nietzsche and the Hindu-Aryan Rishi, visionary poets of the Vedas.

They also thought the ideas from outside to inside: they 'appeared' to them. Rishi means 'he who sees'. See an Idea, express it, or try to express it. The job of the Rishis has been fulfilled for millennia and the vision of the Vedas was revised, elaborated, in subsequent visions, in scholastics, in doctrinal buildings and sophisticated verifications, through centuries.

In any case, he, who preached not to subtract anything that life offers as Will of Power, as possession, increasing its power, lived chaste, like a yoga, always looking for the highest tensions of the soul, climbing always, more and more lonely, to be able to open up to that style of thinking, where the Ideas could possess him as the most authentic expression of life, as his 'pulse', hitting him in the center of the personal being, or of the existence there accumulated, and that he called, long before Jung and any other psychologist, the Self, to differentiate it from the conscious and limited self, from the rational self.

Let's clarify, then. What Nietzsche called thinking is something else, Nietzsche did not think with his head (because 'synchronistically' hurt) but with the Self, with all of life and, especially, 'with the feet'. 'I think with my feet,' he said, 'because I think walking, climbing. ~ Miguel Serrano

They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. ~ Sitting Bull

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket.

Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.

I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ce ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I love New York. It just reminds me of so many movies ... I look up at buildings, and feel like Godzilla should be climbing up them or something. ~ Liam Hemsworth

When I take my old copies of the phenomenologies of religion down from the shelf and thumb through their pages, I feel as if I were walking through the halls of abandoned buildings. My graduate school notes lie heavy in the margins, like scrawls of graffiti on the walls, attesting to the fact that human once contested these spaces. I wonder, each time I close one of these volumes and put it back on the shelf, whether the puff of dust that arises from its binding is not a reminder that systems are built to crumble, and the grander the system, the more spectacular the fall. ~ Malcom David Eckel

Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design? ~ Jan Morris

This first part may be a little rough.' He waved a hand and did his best to appear as if he'd had enormous experience with levitating buildings. ~ Michael Pryor

You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life. ~ Bob Dylan

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became the opposite of east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking in the streets like cardboard cutouts. ~ Haruki Murakami

I froze in horror.
Not from the frightening vampire glaring at me from the end of the street. Nor from his ugly minions swarming the tops of the surrounding buildings, blocking my escape. But from one single realization - I'd run out of bubble gum. ~ A.D. Winter

One of the things that happened when the church moved from meetings in homes to having purpose-built buildings beginning before, but accelerated during, the Constantinian era, is that while the church itself was becoming less Jewish in character, it began to apply a more and more Old Testament hermeneutic to its discussions about church, ministry, and sacraments. The church began to be seen as a temple or basilica, the Lord's Supper began to be seen as a sacrifice, and naturally enough the ones offering the sacrifices, just as in Leviticus, were seen to be priests. There was the further move in this direction when Sunday began to be seen as the Sabbath, another example of this same sort of hermeneutic. There were considerable problems with this whole hermeneutic from the start, since nowhere in the New Testament is there set up a class of priests or clerics to administer any sacraments. Indeed, nowhere was there a clear separation between life in the home and life in church. What has often been missed in the discussions of the effects of all this is that it ruled women out of ministry in the larger church and indeed ruled them out of celebrating the Lord's Supper as well, since in the Old Testament only males were priests and only priests could offer sacrifices. ~ Ben Witherington III

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older ... ~ Mohsin Hamid

I think green buildings are extremely important but it's only part of the equation. A lot of people think that if I put a green building everything is going to be fine, but actually it's not just the green buildings we need, but green businesses, green governments, green economics. We have to extend the greening of buildings to our business and our lifestyles - that is the most important thing to do next. ~ Ken Yeang

The First World War killed fewer victims than the Second World War, destroyed fewer buildings, and uprooted millions instead of tens of millions - but in many ways it left even deeper scars both on the mind and on the map of Europe. The old world never recovered from the shock. ~ Edmond Taylor

O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th' dust
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape time's rust;
But he whose name is graved in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. ~ Anne Bradstreet

Civil disobedience was new to Lancre, but its inhabitants had already mastered some of its more elementary manifestations, viz, the jerking of rakes and sickles in the air with simple up-and-down motions accompanied by grimaces and cries of "Gerrh!," although a few citizens, who hadn't quite grasped the idea, were waving flags and cheering. Advanced students were already eyeing the more combustible buildings inside the walls. Several sellers of hot meat pies and sausages in a bun had appeared from nowhere* and were doing a brisk trade. Pretty soon someone was going to throw something. ~ Terry Pratchett

In order to gain mastery, you need to dismantle as much as you put together.'
'Then there'd be no buildings left in the world,' Jahan ventured. 'Everything would be razed to the ground.'
'We are not destroying the buildings, son. We are destroying our desire to possess them. Only God is the owner. Of the stone and of the skill. ~ Elif Shafak

Buildings are forms of performances. ~ Rafael Vinoly

Europe is equal to its historical task. Against the anti-spiritual, anti-heroic 'ideals' of America-Jewry, Europe pits its metaphysical ideas, its faith in its Destiny, its ethical principles, its heroism. Fearlessly, Europe falls in for battle, knowing it is armed with the mightiest weapon ever forged by History: the superpersonal Destiny of the European organism. Our European Mission is to create the Culture-State-Nation-Imperium of the West, and thereby we shall perform such deeds, accomplish such works, and so transform our world that our distant posterity, when they behold the remains of our buildings and ramparts, will tell their grandchildren that on the soil of Europe once dwelt a tribe of gods. ~ Francis Parker Yockey

What a sad and frightening time it was. Thousands of firefighters and other rescue workers swarmed the sixteen-acre disaster zone, searching for survivors. The area, which became known as Ground Zero, was extremely dangerous. Underground fires smoldered, and the smoke was a toxic mix of melted plastic, steel, lead, and many poisonous chemicals. Few of the rescue workers had on proper protective clothing or masks. And as it quickly became clear, there were not very many survivors to find. Only fourteen people were pulled out of the rubble alive, all within the first twenty-four hours of the collapse. About 50,000 people had been working in the buildings that day. Two thousand and sixteen died. Also among the dead: 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who were in or near the ~ Lauren Tarshis

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family") ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The good news is that by the second year, those cravings were about as half as frequent, and by the third year, half as much again. I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things crooked, I can't complain. After all those years of all kinds of abuse and crashing into trees at eighty miles an hour and jumping off buildings and living through overdoses and liver disease, I feel better now than I did ten years ago. I might have some scar tissue, but that's alright, I'm still making progress. ~ Anthony Kiedis

In remaking the world in the likeness of a steam-heated, air-conditioned metropolis of apartment buildings we have violated one of our essential attributes-our kinship with nature. ~ Ross Parmenter

Homes and buildings, many of which are old and drafty, eat up 40 percent of the energy America uses. Such inefficiencies perpetuate our reliance on foreign oil, imperiling our national security and increasing our contribution to climate change. ~ Peter Welch

You get to shoot things, and things blow up, and you're jumping off of buildings. It's insane! And hot girls. And you get to dress cool. And you're in a movie with Tom Cruise, come on! So it's a dream come true. Truly. ~ Josh Holloway

In New York, we're always confined with spaces. Our restaurants are difficult to navigate as cooks and to operate. We fight against the buildings we run in New York. ~ David Chang

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. ~ Maria Semple

I can dig my claws into the rim of a building's crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly. ~ China Mieville

Around the Godde there forms a Shelle of prayers and Ceremonies and Buildings and Priestes and Authority, until at Last the Godde Dies. Ande this maye notte be noticed. ~ Terry Pratchett

A jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce - like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa. ~ Prince Charles

The total cost of the Federal Arts Project was only $23 million. Many of these paintings, sculptures and prints were given to museums, courthouses, public buildings. . .. I think that today those in museums alone are worth about $100 million. ~ Studs Terkel

If you are in the country, you should notice landmarks - that is, objects which help you to find your way or prevent you getting lost, such as distant hills, church towers, and nearer objects, such as peculiar buildings, trees, gates, rocks, etc. ~ Robert Baden-Powell

Buildings are not very good at remembering the people who once occupied them. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Whenever I write lyrics, in the back of my mind I always see a guy driving to work, driving to a really bad job, one of those horrible institutions, or one of those low squat buildings in Los Angeles. I write with that person in my mind. ~ Henry Rollins

Past the sloping green lawn of the park, I entered a new world, regal and historic. Here I walked on swept sidewalks, past pristine buildings and small shops and young mothers or West Indian nannies with children in tow on their way to the playground. Stylish women carried twine-handled shopping bags. The cafes were busy and a church bell praised noon as I ducked underground. ~ Andrew Cotto

I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. ~ Donna Tartt

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal.
The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments.
If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, to ~ Meredith Mileti

Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Landscapes of fields and small clusters of buildings hurtle past outside like fragments of songs never sung in their entirety. ~ Glenn Haybittle

There's a mindset in other countries that if you're an American, you're a Christian. Well, those people are sadly misled; they don't know our country. Our country is wicked, and the Christians are few. Just like they're few in other countries, they're few here. There may be many churches and there may be church buildings on every street corner and every corner in our cities across this country, but the true Christians are few. ~ Tim Conway

And then she started picking up trash behind the dumpster. It was ankle deep back there, blown in from all over the city to a kind of wind eddy between buildings. We picked up newspaper pages and hamburger wrappers, straws, cigarette packs, plastic bags, as well as shop trash that had fallen out when the dumpster was overflowing. There was so much, we would've needed snow shovels to make a real dent in it, but I didn't think about what we were doing, more than to believe in easing a nervous breakdown with small bursts of insanity. ~ Wayne Harrison

Let's go inside. I always find walking inside buildings has this bizarre effect on me. I immediately forget uncomfortable situations, like when tiny midget women straddle my best friend's boyfriend and face-rape him. ~ Frankie Rose

Far to our left I could see a commercial airliner on final approach to Soekarno-Hatta. Far to our right I could see the outline of tall city buildings. The imagery was hard to ignore. In the midst was an impoverished world filled with dangerous radicals. Some believed it was God's will to crash airplanes into buildings. Some recruited children to self-detonate on buses and in coffee shops. It must be incredibly difficult to hold fast to hope when you live in such a world. It's also hard to keep faith with humanity when religious ideology is used as an impetus for war. But I also believe that for every war there is a hero ... and for me, Jakarta will always be Indira's city. ~ Tucker Elliot

The last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn, the gravestones for an entire world. ~ Dan Wells

I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down Jules said angrily. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone's office. Everybody sounds stoned because they're emailing people the whole time they're talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people ... And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck - Jules Jones ~ Jennifer Egan

We want our buildings to work like a machine that will create a pleasurable environment. ~ Helmut Jahn

I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. ~ George W. Bush

In New York City, when they develop something, they never use the old buildings. It's so wasteful. Why not use what's there? ~ Nellie McKay

In our town - our town of shadows, our town of mystery - it seems our buildings have, without reason, begun to disappear completely. Still full of their loyal inhabitants, the buildings and the people all disintegrate soundlessly. The air has been hard to breathe, full of regret and the glassy voices of the unsurprised dead. Our commuters have begun carrying photographs of their loved ones with them to work. On the bus, we look at each other, pictures of our sad wives and doubtful children huddled close to our chests, quietly imagining the silent elaborations of our own deaths. We are disappointed coming home that evening because the many photos betray our cowardice: We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything. ~ Joe Meno

In my judgment, my buildings are considerably less likely to burn to the ground during one of your visits if you are disoriented from being treated like a sultan. ~ Jim Butcher

The quality of authors determines the quality of books.
The quality of musicians determines the quality of songs.
The quality of artists determines the quality of paintings.
The quality of architects determines the quality of buildings.

The quality of generals determines the quality of warriors.
The quality of preachers determines the quality of sermons.
The quality of scientists determines the quality of inventions.
The quality of leaders determines the quality of followers.

The quality of scholars determines the quality of lectures.
The quality of teachers determines the quality of students.
The quality of schools determines the quality of graduates.
The quality of graduates determines the quality of nations.

The quality of plants determines the quality of air.
The quality of air determies the quality of animals.
The quality of animals determines the quality of food.
The quality of food determines the quality of the planet. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

I say we must have a movement that brings those troops home and launch a crusade to transform our school buildings, we launch a crusade to see to it that every citizen has adequate and affordable housing, we launch a crusade to make universal health care. We need not soldiers anymore in the world. We've had enough of them in western history. ~ James Lawson

They sat together at a table in the corner of a basement speakeasy, and they drank beer, and Mike related his favorite tale of how he had fallen five stories when a scaffolding gave way under him, how he had broken three ribs but lived to tell it, and Roark spoke of his days in the building trades. Mike did have a real name, which was Sean Xavier Donnigan, but everyone had forgotten it long ago; he owned a set of tools and an ancient Ford, and existed for the sole purpose of traveling around the country from one big construction job to another. People meant very little to Mike, but their performance a great deal. He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own field and he felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter. He loved buildings. He despised, however, all architects. ~ Ayn Rand

We build buildings based on the false assumption that women go to mosques half as much as they actually do. In fact, the US is the only country in the world where women and men report that they attend the mosque in equal numbers, but our institutions aren't representing this reality. ~ Dalia Mogahed

Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists. ~ Samuel Johnson

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

My first buildings, when I was about 30, were rejected for aesthetic reasons. ~ Peter Zumthor

They say, hell, let the earth become a vast hell destroying killing and setting fire to the buildings of men, to theatres, national assemblies, to museums, libraries, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, old and new, from which they free the slaves. ~ Monique Wittig

I bought all these ingredients and headed to Marlboro Man's house, choosing to ignore the fact that Marinated Flank Steak actually needs to marinate. Plus, I didn't know how to operate a grill--Los Angeles County apartment buildings had ordinances against them--so I decided to cook it under the broiler. Having not been a meat eater for years and years, I'd forgotten about the vital importance of not overcooking steak; I just assumed steak was like chicken and simply needed all the pink cooked out of it. I broiled the beautiful, flavorful flank steak to a fine leather.
With all my focus on destroying the main course, I wound up overcooking the angel hair noodles by a good five minutes, so when I stirred in all the cheeses I'd so carefully grated by hand, my Tagliarini Quattro Formaggi resembled a soupy pan of watery cheese grits. How bad could it possibly be? I asked myself as I poured it into garlic-rubbed bowls just like they did at Intermezzo. I figured Marlboro Man wouldn't notice. I watched as he dutifully ate my dinner, unaware that, as I later learned, throughout the meal he seriously considered calling one of the cowboys and asking them to start a prairie fire so he'd have an excuse to leave. ~ Ree Drummond

YOU CAN ALWAYS GET THERE FROM HERE A traveler returned to the country from which he had started many years before. When he stepped from the boat, he noticed how different everything was. There were once many buildings, but now there were few and each of them needed repair. In the park where he played as a child, dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges. Empty trash bags littered the grass. The air was heavy. He sat on one of the benches and explained to the woman next to him that he'd been away a long time, then asked her what season had he come back to. She replied that it was the only one left, the one they all had agreed on. ~ Mark Strand

I see water and buildings ... Oh my God! Oh my God. ~ Madeline Amy Sweeney

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it). ~ Alain De Botton

Fear is a great motivator. Look at what 9-11 has accomplished - My god. It's slammed the economy, It's - I can't even begin to detail all it's actually done, other than bring down the buildings and hit the Pentagon. It's stunned the entire nation. ~ Art Bell

Land and sea.
We may think of them as opposites; as complements. But there is a difference in how we think of them; the sea, and the land.
If we are walking around in a forest, a meadow or a town, we see our surroundings as being made up of individual elements. There are many different kinds of trees in varying sizes, those buildings, these streets. The meadow, the flowers, the bushes. Our gaze lingers on details, and if we are standing in a forest in the autumn, we become tongue-tied if we try to describe the richness around us. All this exists on land.
But the sea. The sea is something completely different. The sea is one.
We may note the shifting moods of the sea. What the sea looks like when the wind is blowing, how the sea plays with the light, how it rises and falls. But still it is always the sea we are talking about. We have given different parts of the sea different names for navigation and identification, but if we are standing before the sea, there is only one whole. The Sea.
If we are taken so far out in a small boat that no land is visible in any direction, we may catch sight of the sea. It is not a pleasant experience. The sea is a god, an unseeing, unhearing deity that does not even know we exist. We mean less than a grain of sand on an elephant's back, and if the sea wants us, it will take us. That's just the way it is. The sea knows no limits, makes no concessions. It has given us everything and it can take everything away from us.John Ajvide Lindqvist

Oceans Sea