Listed Buildings Quotes

Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. ~ Bill Bryson

Frank had turned into a giant eagle to fly to Delos, but Leo hitched a ride with Hazel on Arion's back. No offense to Frank, but after the fiasco at Fort Sumter, Leo had become a conscientious objector to riding giant eagles. He had a one hundred percent failure rate. They found the island deserted, maybe because the seas were too choppy for the tourist boats. The windswept hills were barren except for rocks, grass, and wildflowers - and, of course, a bunch of crumbling temples. The rubble was probably very impressive, but ever since Olympia, Leo had been on ancient ruins overload. He was so done with white marble columns. He wanted to get back to the U.S., where the oldest buildings were the public schools and Ye Olde McDonald's. ~ Rick Riordan

Why can't unemployed people clean toilets, remove graffiti from vandalised war memorials, clear wasteland or derelict areas, or even decorate public buildings such as community centres. They could work in charity shops or down the local tip, sorting people's rubbish out. They could even look after cemeteries, cutting the grass, hedges and shrubs, keeping gravestones clean, or maybe even laying paving slabs for a new path. Or how about putting in raised flower beds in the park? ~ Karl Wiggins

I love church buildings, particularly cathedrals, and I like living in spaces that remind me of music or evoke that creative energy. ~ Laura Mvula

New ideas must use old buildings ~ Jane Jacobs

All of us should remember that the federal government is not some mysterious institution comprised of buildings, files and paper. The people are the government. What we create we ought to be able to control. ~ Ronald Reagan

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them. ~ Theodore Zeldin

An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre. ~ Alan Bennett

And Barron is probably right - we should give this up. Not for the reason he's saying but for the one that's implied. The one about it not being okay to lurk around outside buildings, spying on girls you like. ~ Holly Black

[ ... ]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked
insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words
Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most
remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in. ~ Douglas Adams

On the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Maddy opened her journal and made a list of the jewels and precious stones she'd held. Gold, diamond, emerald; ruby, turquoise, pearl; amber, jade, marble ... There were some she had forgotten. Beneath these she listed what she thought were the most perfect tastes and smells. Coffee, cinnamon, peaches; vanilla, honey, basil; baking bread, fresh bread, toasting bread. ~ Sonya Hartnett

In London, like in conches, Mr. MacDowell or MacDowness, time could be seen. Time was stamped in stone, in iron and in marble. And it was not only the buildings; people also occupied a place in the stratified flow of decades and centuries. ~ Sylvia Iparraguirre

Yet, it was precisely our failure to differentiate between work and politics, between reality and illusion; it was precisely our mistake of conceiving of politics as a rational human activity comparable to the sowing of seeds or the construction of buildings that was responsible for the fact that a painter who failed to make the grade was able to plunge the whole world into misery. And I have stressed again and again that the main purpose of this book - which, after all, was not written merely for the fun of it - was to demonstrate these catastrophic errors in human thinking and to eliminate irrationalism from politics. It is an essential part of our social tragedy that the farmer, the industrial worker, the physician, etc., do not influence social existence solely through their social activities, but also and even predominantly through their political ideologies. For political activity hinders objective and professional activity; it splits every profession into inimical ideologic groups; creates a dichotomy in the body of industrial workers; limits the activity of the medical profession and harms the patients. In short, it is precisely political activity that prevents the realization of that which it pretends to fight for: peace, work, security, international cooperation, free objective speech, freedom of religion, etc. ~ Wilhelm Reich

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings. ~ Thom Mayne

Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they're jumping. This is what we've done: We've tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We've boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They're making the decision that it's better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they've inherited. ~ Tommy Orange

Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything. ~ Don DeLillo

Don't bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled.

Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border.

It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world.

But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence.

Regulations like these were part of our daily li ~ Jung Chang

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

Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But - and here is the truly remarkable thing - because that gloopy mortar was contained between two impermeable outer layers, air couldn't get to it, so it took a very long time - forty years to be precise - to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedral masons had to build doorjambs, lintels, and the like at slightly acute angles so that they would ease over time into the correct alignments. And that's exactly what happened. After forty years of slow-motion sagging, the building settled into a position of impeccable horizontality, which it has maintained ever since. To me, that is just amazing - the idea that people would have the foresight and dedication to ensure a perfection that they themselves might never live to see. ~ Bill Bryson

Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have to chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings and buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay or disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead, when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth. ~ Michelle Alexander

He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn't be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important. ~ Annie Dillard

I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting. ~ Boyd K. Packer

You listed the three options you believe you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you're fucked before you begin. ~ Cheryl Strayed

How To Make A Human

Take the cat out of the sphinx
and what is left? Riddle Me That.

Take the horse from the centaur
and you take away the sleek grace,
the strength of harnessed power.
What is left can still run across fields,
after a fashion, but is easily winded;
what is left will therefore erect buildings
to divide the open plains so he no longer
must face the wide expanse where once
his equine legs raced the winds
and, sometimes, won.

Take the bull from the Minotaur
but what is left will still assemble
a herd for the sake of ruling over it.
What is left will kill for sport,
in an arena thronged with spectators
shouting "Ole" at each deadly thrust.

Take the fish from the Merman:
What is left can still swim,
if only with lots of splashing; gone
is the sleek sliding through the waves,
alert to the subtle changes in the current.
What is left will build ships
so he can cross the oceans without
getting his feet wet, what is left won't care
if his boats pollute the seas he can no
longer breathe so long as their passage
can keep him from sinking.

Take the goat from the satyr
but what is left will dance out of reach
before you have the chance
to get that Dionysian streak of myschief,
the love of music and wine, the rutting parts
that like to party all th ~ Lawrence Schimel

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

But who's ever safe? Down below us are the kind of people who walk armed into churches and movie theaters and through libraries, blast fevers into federal buildings, and build bombs out of things they bought cheap at a hardware store. What kind of myth is it, that people like them are keeping the rest of us safe? ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

Take the perspective of a journalist or scientist. Really study what's around you. What are people wearing, what do the interiors of buildings look like, what noises do you hear? If you bring your analytical powers to bear, you can make almost anything interesting. ~ Gretchen Rubin

Heaven is actually a country that we build within ourselves, or that we continue to build. We come from it, and we harvest materials for it while we are here, doing this through sharing our talents with others, and through being dedicated to our relationships in life, through loving others and through strengthening our ability to believe, through our faith. What is faith? Faith is the strength to believe even when believing is a very difficult thing to do! I think that faith is acquired here in this world, because there is no need to have faith in our eternal countries. But here, as we acquire faith in the midst of our hardships, we are begetting unto our eternal countries the strong glue that holds some buildings and some temples together. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Julian is somewhere among those lights, in that blur of people and buildings. I wonder whether he's scared. I wonder whether he's thinking of me. ~ Lauren Oliver

After the destructionofthe Second Temple Jewslived by an ancient and fundamental insight, that God does not live in buildings but in the human heart. ~ Jonathan Sacks

If the building's still standing when we've finished then we've failed. ~ Charles Gayle