Dilapidated Quotes

Self-styled pioneers braved the dirt and crime of rundown neighborhoods where, in the early 1980s, they could buy as much as five thousand square feet in a dilapidated brownstone for as little as $25,000. ~ Jonathan Soffer

I sat on a bench and did what, as a girl, I had done whenever I needed to calm myself: instead of pressing the button with the number 4 on it, I let myself go up to the sixth floor. That space had been empty and dark for many years, ever since the lawyer who had his office there had left, taking with him even the light bulb from the landing. When the elevator stopped, I let my breath glide into my stomach and then return slowly to my throat. As always, after a few seconds, the light in the elevator went out, too. I thought of reaching my hand out to one of the door handles: you had only to pull it and the light would return. But I didn't move and continued to send my breath deep into my body. The only sound was that of the woodworms eating into the panelled walls.

Just a few months earlier (five, six?), on a sudden impulse, I had revealed to my mother, during one of my brief visits, that as an adolescent I used to retreat to that secret place, and I brought her up there, to the top. Maybe I wanted to try to establish an intimacy that there had never been, maybe I wanted to let her know in some confused way that I had always been unhappy. But she seemed to me only amused by the fact that I had sat suspended in the void, in a dilapidated elevator. ~ Elena Ferrante

Sea, autumnal sweetness, islands bathed in light, diaphanous cloak of delicate rainfall clothing Greece's eternal bareness. "Happy the person," I thought, "who is deemed worthy, before dying, to sail the Aegean." This world offers many pleasures: women, fruit, ideas. But I think no pleasure exists that plunges a person's heart into Paradise more than the joy of cutting across this sea on a gentle autumn day, murmuring the name of each island. Nowhere else are you transported from truth to dream with such serenity and ease. Boundaries fade; the mast of even the most dilapidated ship sprouts buds and grapes. Here in Greece, truly, necessity blossoms most certainly into miracle.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek (p. 23). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

The night garden felt like a home, with the glittering sky for the ceiling, the bushes our rug, and the dilapidated pavilion our bed. He lit up the place like a heart-warming hearth fire. He was the walls of my sanctuary, the food for my eyes, the scent of a home. He was everything. ~ Weina Dai Randel

An unexpected sight opens in front of my eyes, a sight I cannot ignore. Instead of the calm waters in front of the fortress, the rear side offers a view of a different sea - the sea of small, dark streets and alleys - like an intricate puzzle. The breathtaking scenery visible from the other side had been replaced by the panorama of poverty–stricken streets, crumbling house walls, and dilapidated facades that struggle to hide the building materials beneath them. It reminds me of the ghettos in Barcelona, the ghettos I came to know far too well. I take a deep breath and look for a sign of life - a life not affected by its surroundings. Nothing. Down, between the rows of dirty dwellings stretches a clothesline. Heavy with the freshly washed laundry it droops down, droplets of water trickling onto the soiled pavement from its burden. Around the corner, a group of filthy children plays with a semi–deflated soccer ball - it makes a funny sound as it bounces off the wall - plunk, plunk. A man sitting on a staircase puts out a cigarette; he coughs, spits phlegm on the sidewalk, and lights a new one. A mucky dog wanders to a house, lifts his leg, and pisses on it. His urine flows down the wall and onto the street, forming a puddle on the pavement. The children run about, stepping in the piss, unconcerned. An old woman watches from the window, her large breasts hanging over the windowsill for the world to see. Une vie ordinaire, a mundane life...life in its purest. These streets bring ~ Henry Martin

[..] the actual building was old and dilapidated and remained standing more out of habit than from any inherent structural integrity [..] ~ Douglas Adams

For two days, we had travelled the Labyrinth - across pits of darkness and around lakes of poison, through dilapidated shopping malls with only discount Halloween stores and questionable Chinese food buffets.
The Labyrinth could be a bewildering place. Like a web of capillaries beneath the skin of the mortal world, it connected basements, sewers and forgotten tunnels around the globe with no regard to the rules of time and space. One might enter the Labyrinth through a manhole in Rome, walk ten feet, open a door and find oneself at a training camp for clowns in Buffalo, Minnesota. (Please don't ask. It was traumatic.) ~ Rick Riordan

This was one of those non-glamorous parts about college that people never tell you about - worrying that the dilapidated apartment hosting a party would fall apart with you in it. ~ Alyssa Rose Ivy

The flat area immediately below was broken up into a formal pattern of beds containing oleander and more clipped clouds of box, a southern imitation of the grand parterres of aristocratic chateaux. A rose garden beyond was the first in a series of gardens created on descending levels, apparently linked by a magnificently overgrown wisteria. Dense lines of cypress hid any farther areas from view, including the memorial garden that was her special brief. As a whole, the garden was charming, luxuriant, but- from a professional point of view- dilapidated. ~ Deborah Lawrenson

I was tired of working in the lumber industry," Phil said. "I was sure I could find a better job, and look at me now - cook on a dilapidated submarine. Life keeps on getting better and better." "You always were an optimist," Klaus said. ~ Lemony Snicket

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
(A Teller of Tales) ~ W.B.Yeats

He had a dilapidated body and a face like the last days of the Raj: jowly, discredited, eager for the final defeat. ~ Eve Tushnet

It's impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won't. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I'd picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn't like the attention. ~ Banksy

He, who for an ordinary cause, resigns the fate of his patient to mercury, is a vile enemy to the sick; and, if he is tolerably popular, will, in one successful season, have paved the way for the business of life, for he has enough to do, ever afterward, to stop the mercurial breach of the constitutions of his dilapidated patients. He has thrown himself in fearful proximity to death, and has now to fight him at arm's length as long as the patient maintains a miserable existence. ~ Nathaniel Chapman

Forts, arsenals, garrisons, armies, navies, are means of security and defence, which were invented in half-civilized times and in feudal or despotic countries; but schoolhouses are the republican line of fortifications, and if they are dismantled and dilapidated, ignorance and vice will pour in their legions through every breach. ~ Horace Mann

With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another's style of consciousness inflects one's own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It's why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover's apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise stu ~ Lisa Robertson

Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast. ~ Hunter Murphy

...it is the smallest house in the Lane. And besides that, it is the only one that is rather dilapidated and needs a coat of paint. But Mr. Banks, who owns it, said to Mrs. Banks that she could have either a nice, clean, comfortable house or four children. But not both, for he couldn't afford it. And after Mrs. Banks had given the matter some consideration she came to the conclusion that she would rather have Jane...and Michael...and John and Barbara, who were Twins and came last. So it was settled... ~ P.L. Travers

It is a very long story, and I promise I'll spill all later. Condensed version: my mom is a Brannick, I am the unholy love child of a Brannick and a demon, and the bar for family dysfunction is now set super high."
Jenna, to her credit, knew when to just roll with it. "Okay, then."
"The more pressing question right now is, why are we back at Hex Hall?"
Jenna looked around, taking in the unnatural fog, the dilapidated (well, more dilapidated) feel of the house. "Something tells me it's not for a class ruinion."
"Did you get pulled through some kind of magic tornado, too?" I asked her.
"No, I flew in here as a bat. It's a new thing I learned from Byron."
"Ha ha," I said, swatting at her arm. ~ Rachel Hawkins

All they do is warm their seats for their long tenures and eventually even their seats get dilapidated with the amount of money they hog in illegally and the only way it comes out is by tilting their huge pot-bellied frames to one side and emitting poisonous gases that not only depreciate their beloved seats but also the nation as a whole and then they shout 'Global Warming.' Hallelujah! ~ Faraaz Kazi

Are you all right?" A crease appears between his eyebrows, and he touches my cheek gently.I bat his hand away.
"Well," I say, "first I got reamed out in front of everyone,and then I had to chat with the woman who's trying to destroy my old faction,and then Eric almost tossed my friends out of Dauntless,so yeah,it's shaping up to be a pretty great day,Four."
He shakes his head and looks at the dilapidated building to his right, which is made of brick and barely resembles the sleek glass spire behind me. It must be ancient.No one builds with brick anymore.
"Why do you care,anyway?" I say. "You can be either cruel instructor or concerned boyfriend." I tense up at the word "boyfriend." I didn't mean to use it so flippantly,but it's too late now. "You can't play both parts at the same time."
"I am not cruel." He scowls at me. "I was protecting you this morning. How do you think Peter and his idiot friends would have reacted if they discovered that you and I were..." He sighs. "You would never win. They would always call your ranking a result of my favoritism rather than your skill."
I open my mouth to object,but I can't. A few smart remarks come to mind, but I dismiss them. He's right. My cheeks warm, and I cool them with my hands.
"You didn't have to insult me to prove something to them," I say finally.
"And you didn't have to run off to your brother just because I hurt you," he says. He rubs at the back of his neck. "Besides-it worked,didn't it ~ Veronica Roth

My lack of faith in God is not a dilapidated house.
It does not need to be razed to the ground or burned down to cinders.
I refuse to be the wounded woman on a cross
that you crucify with your disapproval like nails;
I will only be the woman who believes in thunderstorms
the same way lightning loves the tops of trees it strikes
every time it gets tired of being pent up in an unforgiving sky,
the only difference is that I believe these are natural weather phenomenons,
not God's belly rumbling or synapses firing.
When my doorway is filled with groups of people
wielding religious conversion pamphlets like crossbows,
I will be the martyr who steps aside to let the arrows
crack through the plaster in my wall instead of piercing my chest.
This is not a eulogy to the believer I could have been.
This is a battle cry to the believer I always have been,
believer in sunsets like splashes of paint, handholding
like willow branches brushing one another, new mornings
after old nights spent drowning in despair, believer
in love as an entire language instead of a single word.
Just because my beliefs align themselves on a different spectrum
does not mean they are the wrong wavelength or color.
And even though I think the universe was created by the Big Bang
instead of a God with magic dust shooting from his fingertips,
my universe does not contain fewer stars. ~ Meggie Royer

It reminds me of the setting for a random, cheesy horror
flick. It makes me think that if we do break down, some
deformed hillbilly will probably drag us into a dilapidated
shack and eat us alive - just like what happened to those
kids in Wrong Turn . ~ Michelle A. Valentine

There is a misconception held by many Egyptian professionals, especially engineers, that informal housing is haphazardly constructed and liable to collapse. However, such precarious housing is almost unknown in informal areas. Since informal housing is overwhelmingly owner-built without use of formal contractors, it is in the owner's own best interest to ensure that care is taken in construction. In fact, one of the main features of informal housing construction is its high structural quality, reflecting the substantial financial resources and tremendous efforts that owners devote to these buildings. It is worth noting that in the 1992 earthquake in Cairo, practically all building collapses and the resulting fatalities occurred not in informal areas, but either in dilapidated historic parts of the city or informal areas…where apartment blocks had been constructed by (sometimes) unscrupulous developers and contractors. ~ David Sims

And that is true in 85 percent of kids; it's kids who live in old, dilapidated, mostly urban housing. But that still leaves 15 percent of the cases that occur in middle- or upper-class families, usually associated with home renovations. People are sanding paint, removing banisters, cleaning up windowsills, and they don't realize that they're spewing lead dust around in the house. And then the kids get it. ~ Deirdre Imus

Find a man who buys the half-dilapidated fixer-upper and not the guy who buys the brand new model. The guy who can see potential and is willing to roll up his sleeves and get to work and make it the best it can possible be, who will love discovering all the hidden gems hidden inside, all the history, all the layers, that's the kind of man you want to settle down with; not the guy who only sees the pretty, the perfect. Because one day, that pretty and perfect will need work. And he won't want to do that. He will just move on to the newer and prettier. ~ Jessica Gadziala

Sore, hungry, and dehydrated, Naomi Robertson lay on a festering bed and opened her eyes to the unfamiliar surroundings. Her head throbbed and she struggled to focus, due to the intake of Rohypnol. She ran her dry tongue between the gap where her front teeth had once been. Slowly, she made out the interior of the huge-dilapidated brick building ~ Anthony Hulse

They talk, you know, the dead. Not in words, of course; I am not losing my sanity. They talk in the wind and the rain, in the way the light falls on ruined buildings and dilapidated stone walls. ~ Iain Pears

He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition. ~ Haruki Murakami

I didn't know how long my sisters and I lay there together, just like we had once shared that carved bed in that dilapidated cottage. Then - back then, we had kicked and twisted and fought for any bit of space, any breathing room. But that morning, as the sun rose over the world, we held tight. And did not let go. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The rest of the place was so dilapidated-but-trying that some of its offices and classrooms were still housed in old buildings abandoned by the neighboring State Mental Hospital, unfit for the mentally challenged but perfetly fine for "educating" the parated of probably-ought-to-major-in-business willfully ignorant know-nothings that rotated in and out of its former cells for a couple of months each semester before dropping out. ~ Mark Panek

After about half an hour, Mr. Sorenson turns onto a narrow unpaved road. Dirt rises around us as we drive, coating the windshield and side windows. We pass more fields and then a copse of birch tree skeletons, cross through a dilapidated covered bridge over a murky stream still sheeted with ice, turn down a bumpy dirt road bordered by pine trees. Mr. Sorenson is holding a card with what looks like directions on it. He slows the truck, pulls to a stop, looks back toward the bridge. Then he peers out the grimy windshield at the trees ahead. "No goldarn signs," he mutters. He puts his foot on the pedal and inches forward. Out ~ Christina Baker Kline

She remained on the steps, waiting for Papa, watching the stray ash and the corpse of collected books. Everything was sad. Orange and red embers looked like rejected candy, and most of the crowd had vanished. She'd seen Frau Diller leave (very satisfied) and Pfiffikus (white hair, a Nazi uniform, the same dilapidated shoes, and a triumphant whistle). Now there was nothing but cleaning up, and soon, no one would ever imagine it had happened.
But you could smell it. ~ Markus Zusak

She was married for seven years to a concrete castle king. She said she wanted to learn to play the guitar and to hear her children sing. So I'd show up about once a week in my faded tight-legged jeans with a backlog full of hobo stories and dilapidated dreams. ~ Harry Chapin

I am old, but the word to me means familiar, comfortable. Accustomed after long and venerable use. Not dilapidated and useless. ~ Sherwood Smith

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath - "The Spouter Inn: - Peter Coffin." Coffin? - Spouter? - Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. ~ Herman Melville

I can't wait to escape the dilapidated/ crippled thoughts, feelings and intentions people who claim to love me have upon me.
I just wanna get off the hook,
Either with dusty clothes
Or muddy face
But i just wanna let go....
And look back with a canvas of pride on my face
And say
It was worth it!! ~ Bandile M. Matsenjwa

A series of books, dilapidated and faded, sit bundled together. Most of the bindings are separating from the yellowed pages, but each is at home in its battered state. Their wrinkled pages and discolored skin tell not of old age, but of a good life. These books, unlike so many others, were not just read, but revisited, loved, and experienced. ~ Kelseyleigh Reber

while Killian glanced nervously at a squad of soldiers marching down the street. When the soldiers left, Killian darted down an alleyway until they reached a maze of warehouses. Celestia cast protesting eyes at Killian, but the twin ignored her. As they jogged along, Talis could hear the lashing of whips inside warehouses, followed by groans and cries for mercy. His skin tingled as if covered in ice as the agonizing sounds trailed behind him. Soon they reached a smaller, dilapidated warehouse with an obese, thuggish guard standing watch outside. He turned as they approached and gave ~ John Forrester

Surely, I thought, a few bushes and some dilapidated wood couldn't stop someone's best and brightest blessing! Surely not! ~ Wendelin Van Draanen

My love and my joy, if I die from illness, madness or sadness, if before the time allotted me by fate is up, I can't get enough of looking at you, enough joy in the dilapidated mills on the emerald wormwood hills, if I don't drink my fill of the transparent water from your immortal hands, if I don't make it to the end, if I don't tell everything that I wanted to tell about you, about myself, if one day I die without saying farewell - forgive me. ~ Sasha Sokolov