Fluted Columns Quotes

The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers ... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape? ~ Neil Gaiman

Lilies, I rule, heads, you do," he [the King] said, and threw the coin into the air.
"Lilies, you rule, heads, you throw again," said Attolia.
The coin dropped. Eugenides looked at it and then showed it to her. "No need," he said. The coin sat in his palm, obverse, showing the lilies of Attolia. He flipped it again and again and again. Each time it landed showing the lilies.
...
(Relius)
He wanted to dismiss the coin toss as slight of hand. Any circus performer could control the drop of a coin, but he'd been puzzled. The queen had been undismayed; she had seemed almost vindicated in her manner. It had been the King who was more disturbed with each toss of the coin. He'd looked almost sick, Relius thought, by the time he put the coin away.
...
Walking away along the arcade that lay perpendicular to the one where Relius lurked, the king pulled the coin from his pocket. He looked at the gold stater in sudden disgust and pitched it hard between the columns of the arcade into the shrubbery. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

Running through the grey-eyed dawn with last night's trash in mind, the brown dog scuttles through fluted gates while birds sing on above the world about a bit of fallen cheese, the shish kebob he ate and all the vagaries of plates ~ Andre Alexis

How are you giving it magic?" he said, through his teeth.

"I already found the path!" I said. "I'm just staying on it. Can't you - feel it?" I asked abruptly, and held my hand cupping the flower out towards him; he frowned and put his hands around it, and then he said, "Vadiya rusha ilikad tuhi," and a second illusion laid itself over mine, two roses in the same space - his, predictably, had three rings of perfect petals, and a delicate fragrance.

"Try and match it," he said absently, his fingers moving slightly, and by lurching steps we brought our illusions closer together until it was nearly impossible to tell them one from another, and then he said, "Ah," suddenly, just as I began to glimpse his spell: almost exactly like that strange clockwork on the middle of his table, all shining moving parts. On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around. "What are you - " he began, and then abruptly we had only a single rose, and it began to grow.

And not only the rose: vines were climbing up the bookshelves in every direction, twining themselves around ancient tomes and reaching out the window; the tall slender columns that made the arch of the doorway were lost among rising birches, spreading out long finger-branches; moss and violets were springing up across the floor, delicate ferns unfurling. Flowers were blooming everywhere: flowers I had never seen, s ~ Naomi Novik

On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. "When I see those columns," he said, "I think of what happened to Greece and Rome." "They lost their will to live," he said. "They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period. ~ Tim Weiner

The heat swept off the black asphalt in waves as our ragged group started down the street between two columns of people. At first, the crowd was sparse, well-dressed, and relatively quiet, obviously high-ranking party officials. As the crowd got thicker and louder, a guard shouted:'Bow your heads!' The words shot through me like a streak of lightning. I shouted:'You are Americans! Keep your heads up! ~ Jeremiah A. Denton Jr.

Three Songs 1 Mountain. I whip my quick horse and don't dismount and look back in wonder. The sky is three feet away. 2 Mountain. The sea collapses and the river boils. Innumerable horses race insanely into the peak of battle. 3 Mountain. Peaks pierce the green sky, unblunted. The sky would fall but for the columns of mountains. ~ Mao Zedong

I'm good at marketing myself through the columns. But compared to other people I know, as far as networking and pushing yourself out there, I'm not very good at that. ~ Joel Stein

There has been considerable comment over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a soldier. I am afraid this does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others. I know a great deal of the horrors and tragedies of war ... The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones. I am deeply moved to find some means or method of avoiding another calamity of war. ~ George C. Marshall

Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse. ~ J.G. Ballard

Media reporters have pointed out that the paragraphs in my Time column this week bear close similarities to paragraphs in Jill Lepore's essay in the April 22nd issue of The New Yorker. They are right. I made a terrible mistake. It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault. I apologize unreservedly to her, to my editors at Time, and to my readers. ~ Fareed Zakaria

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran. ~ George Bernard Shaw

For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again. ~ Bobby Fischer

If we were in a spreadsheet, we'd be in different columns." She'd be under uptight/nerdy/homely girls, and he'd be under badass men with bodies of..um..Navy SEALS.
He grunted. "Just so you know, I hate spreadsheets with a hot, burning passion. ~ Dana Marton

Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of - stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper - won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What ~ Kevin Kelly

My father, a bakery-truck driver, was the epitome of the work ethic that probably kept me knocking out columns six days a week for a rough total of 12,600 over 50 years. ~ Irv Kupcinet

Hollywood is right. A good and strong movie can have a more powerful social impact than any and all political speeches or newspaper editorials and columns. ~ Mike Royko

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom. ~ Michael Lewis

Why was fabulousness important? The world was a scary, sad place and adornment was one of the only ways she knew to make herself and the people around her forget their troubles. That was why she had opened her store almost five years ago. Everyone who entered the little square white house with miniature Corinthian columns, cherub statues, and French windows seemed to leave carrying armloads of newly handmade and well spruced-up recycled vintage clothing, humming sixties girl-group songs, seventies glam and punk, eighties New Wave one-hit wonders, or nineties grunge, doing silly dances, and not caring what anyone thought.
Weetzie loved the old dresses she found and sold, because they had their own secret histories. She always wondered where, when, and how they had been worn. What they had seen. Old dresses were like old ladies. ~ Francesca Lia Block

The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies. ~ Geoffrey Blainey

Our lives aren't so different from a crossword puzzle, sure. But the thing about life is we don't get to draw the grid; we take the rows and columns we're given. Our bodies, parents, mental health issues, all that. What we do get to do is fill the cells. ~ Arvin Ahmadi

At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes. ~ Thomas Pynchon

He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And here the scent was thick and motionless. Costly marqueterie; Palissy candlesticks reflected in half-concealed mirrors framed in embossed silver; antique Nankin vases brimming with pot-pourri; in one comer a suit of Milanese armour, fluted, damasquinee, by Felippo Negroli; in another a tripod table of porphyry, spectrally repeating in its polished surface the opal hues of a vessel of old Venetian glass half filled with some topaz-coloured liqueur - such and many more tokens of a luxurious aestheticism wrought in the observer an immediate sense of pleasurable enervation. He noticed, with a swaying thrill of delight, that his feet were on a padded rug of Astrakhan - one of many, disposed eccentrically about the yellow tassellated-marble floor; and he noticed that the sole light in the chamber came from an iridescent globed lamp, fed with some fragrant oil, that hung near an alcove traversed by a veil of dark violet silk.

("The Accursed Cordonnier") ~ Bernard Capes

The column's worked out great for me. I've gotten a ton of ego satisfaction, had a lot of fun, won a batch of prizes and occasionally done some public good. ~ Allan Sloan

A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing. ~ Mary Schmich

Unfortunately, I don't get to read nearly as much as I want because I'm always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns. ~ Carl Hiaasen

Stranger, think long before you enter,
For these corridors amuse not passing travellers.
But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself.
Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue.
These columns rose not, for the such as you.
But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander
On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees.
The earth has many flowery roads; choose one
That pleases your whim, and gods be with you.
But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude
Which like the deep dream world of the sea
Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins;
Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods;
And mermaids, with flowing golden hair
That charm a patch of silent darkness
Into singing sunlight. ~ G.A. Kulkarni

Like a soldier, the carpenter sharpens his own tools. He carries his equipment in his tool box, and works under the direction of his foreman. He makes columns and girders with an axe, shapes floorboards and shelves with a plane, cuts fine openwork and bas reliefs accurately, giving as excellent a finish as his skill will allow. This is the craft of the carpenters. When the carpenter becomes skilled, he works efficiently and according to correct measures. When he has developed practical knowledge of all the skills of the craft, he can become a foreman himself. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

Mother's estate - our estate - a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai. Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky. Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind. ~ Dan Simmons

His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink. ~ Dara Horn

We could see the bombing in London and we heard of the battles going on in Africa and other places. But what made me really furious was the occupation. When I arrived in Paris from Normandy, shortly after July 14, 1940, notices were placarded, "Mr. So and So was shot last night." There were notices like that on columns along rue de Rivoli. Those poor people had been caught outside after the curfew, taken to a police station, and if there was any action whatsoever against the Germans during the night, they were shot. ~ Pearl Witherington Cornioley

Of course the no-government ethics will meet with at least as many objections as the no-capital economics. Our minds have been so nurtured in prejudices as to the providential functions of government that anarchist ideas must be received with distrust. Our whole education, from childhood to the grave, nurtures the belief in the necessity of a government and its beneficial effects. Systems of philosophy have been elaborated to support this view; history has been written from this standpoint; theories of law have been circulated and taught for the same purpose. All politics are based on the same principle, each politician saying to people he wants to support him: "Give me the governmental power; I will, I can, relieve you from the hardships of your present life." All our education is permeated with the same teachings. We may open any book of sociology, history, law, or ethics: everywhere we find government, its organisation, its deeds, playing so prominent a part that we grow accustomed to suppose that the State and the political men are everything; that there is nothing behind the big statesmen. The same teachings are daily repeated in the Press. Whole columns are filled up with minutest records of parliamentary debates, of movements of political persons. And, while reading these columns, we too often forget that besides those few men whose importance has been so swollen up as to overshadow humanity, there is an immense body of men - mankind, in fact - growing and dying, livin ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

K, n. A consonant; originally precisely that of our H, but altered to its present shape to commemorate the destruction of [one of two lofty columns in] the great temple of Jarute. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The columns of the Cathedral porch were still supported on featureless porphyry lions worn smooth by generations of loungers; and above the octagonal baptistery ran a fantastic basrelief wherein the spirals of the vine framed an allegory of men and monsters symbolising, in their mysterious conflicts, the ever-recurring Manicheism of the middle ages. Fresh from his talk with Crescenti, Odo lingered curiously ~ Edith Wharton