Lotus Tower Quotes

The Chinese construction of South Asia's tallest edifice, the Lotus (a Lotus Sutra in Buddhism) Tower, both points to Beijing's Peaceful Rise and unsettles some onlookers. For the nervous India and the United States, the cleverly designed and highly sophisticated rising communications tower is more than a Buddhist symbol of Peaceful Rise. ~ Patrick Mendis

How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven? Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music. ~ Peter Kreeft

The Night's Watch is thousands of years old," he said, "but I'll wager Lord Snow's the first brother ever honored for burning down the Lord Commander's Tower. ~ George R R Martin

Tower Bridge looked very grand in its new coat of blue, cream and gold paint. Gone was the dingy black and white of my youth. But otherwise it was just the same: gulls screaming overhead, and black water rushing past beneath. A magnificent view of the Tower from here. I took some pictures just for the record; then continued towards the East End which was only a short walk away. This would be the most painful part of my journey. ~ Bernie Morris

She was not a beauteous maiden and he had not rescued her from her tower. If anything, she had called down to him and he had pointed out there was a door. The many steps leading to her freedom had to be scaled by Linnet alone. ~ Alice Coldbreath

For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon. ~ Lewis Buzbee

Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.
Brown nodded. "I think this is it. ~ Stephen King

Harry, Ron, and Hermione joined the Gryffindors streaming up the marble staircase and, very tired now, along more corridors, up more and more stairs, to the hidden entrance to Gryffindor Tower. A large portrait of a fat lady in a pink dress asked them, "Password?" "Coming through, coming through!" Percy called from behind the crowd. "The new password's 'Fortuna Major'!" "Oh no," said Neville Longbottom sadly. He always had trouble remembering the passwords. ~ J.K. Rowling

myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time." This ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself. ~ John Leonard

Lord, where shall I find you? Your place is lofty and secret. And where shall I not find you? The whole earth is full of your glory! You are found in our innermost heart, yet you fixed earth's boundaries. You are a strong tower for those who are near and the trust of those who go far. I have sought to come near you; I have called to you with all my heart; and when I went out towards you, I found you coming towards me. ~ Judah Halevi

If you are guided toward a faith, use it as a stepping stone to God, not as a barrier between yourself and God's other children or as a tower to hold you aloft from others. If you are not guided toward a faith (or even if you are) seek God in the silence - seek within. ~ Peace Pilgrim

Wait a minute," Hadrian said. "Was it a beat-up brown leather notebook?
About this big?" He gestured with his hands.
"Yes," the Patriarch said.
Arista looked back and forth between them. "How do you know that?"
"I know it because I have lived in the Crown Tower," the Patriarch
said.
"And you?" Arista looked at Hadrian, who hesitated.
"Ha-ha! Of course, of course. I knew it!" Cosmos DeLur chuckled and
clapped his hands together in single applause while smiling at Hadrian.
"Such a wonderfully delightful rumor as that had to be true. That is
an exquisite accomplishment."
"You stole it?" Arista asked.
"Yes, he did," the Patriarch declared.
"Actually," Hadrian said, "Royce and I did, but we put it back the next night. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers. ~ Pearl S. Buck

Larry wanted us to reposition the tower. We wouldn't, and won't. He's been holding back our fees. We want to get paid. And that's it. It'll get solved and we'll carry on with planning Ground Zero. ~ Daniel Libeskind

He appears to be pointing at a massive water tower, all hinkered down overlooking the river.
'That's an old one.' This ancient, dark metal thing. It looks like a shadow of itself.
'Wait for it,' John says.
'For what?'
'It.'
A few minutes later, the sun slips behind the water tower. The effect is like a total solar eclipse, with the water tower blocking the sun.
'Whoa.'
'Thanks. I arranged that myself. ~ Susane Colasanti

One of the towers has fallen. When it's our turn to leave, it's like something in me is finally willing to listen, and suddenly I understand what it means. The tower doesn't exist anymore. Something I've seen my entire life - something so much larger than my entire life - is gone. That is my first reaction. And then I think about all the people inside. There must have been people inside. ~ David Levithan

Never did a tree fall
That did I not feel a pang
For rightly said when they are non man will be gone..
For The very air is replenished by them trees
When they are gone the air will thicken and we all will die
Will become rubbles our forts and tower..
Only weeds and stones to cover
The unsightly mounds we leave..
-Lonesome Gods ~ Louis L'Amour

Goodness gracious, no," Angie said, horrified. "Is that four inches? Girl, you're going to tower over him as it is. No need emphasizing the flaws. ~ Jessica Clare

Drop guilt! - because to be guilty is to live in hell. Not being guilty, you will have the freshness of dewdrops in the early morning sun, you will have the freshness of lotus petals in the lake, you will have the freshness of the stars in the night. Once guilt disappears you will have a totally different kind of life, luminous and radiant. You will have a dance to your feet and your heart will be singing a thousand and one songs. ~ Rajneesh

The Brown Coast"
"Not long after the affair had run its course, Bob and his wife were driving to town when Vicky looked up and saw the phantom outline of a woman's footprint on the windshield over the glove box. She slipped her sandal off, saw that the print did not match her own, and told Bob that he was no longer welcome in their home. ~ Wells Tower

You are a tower of God. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position. ~ Alan Moore

Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky. ~ Janet Fitch

... (my father) would say nothing,
And I could not find a silence
Among the one hundred Chinese silences
That would fit the one he created
Even though I was the one
Who had just made up the business
Of the one hundred Chinese silences-
The Silence of the Night Boat.
And the Silence of the Lotus,
Cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
Only deeper and softer ... ~ Billy Collins

Lotus flowers blossom while rooted in mud, a reminder that beauty and grace can rise above something ugly. ~ Lisa Genova

It's easy to judge not knowing the truth

Only seeing carefully built walls.

It's hard to undo years written in youth

But how amazing when the tower finally falls.

And I see you standing there

All sweet and kind of scared.

And you see me standing here.

Hope in my eyes but full of fear. ~ Kasie West

Andrea, in less than twelve hours, Atlanta will be full of demons. They will kill, feed, and release more demons. What emergency is more important than this one?
She hesitated. "I'm not supposed to disclose this. There's a man. His name is Roland ... "
I almost punched the wall. "What is he doing that's so damn crucial? What, is he building another tower? It will fall like all his other ones. Or did his eye finally grow back and he decided to have a battle to celebrate? ~ Ilona Andrews

How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find ho ~ Wirt Gerrare

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright. ~ Stephen King

If he came upon us burning in the street, I don't think he'd piss on us to put us out. ~ Stephen King

She is submarine, she is an octopus, she is
A biological process,
So Arnaut turned there
Above him the wave pattern cut in the stone
Spire-top alevel the well-curb
And the tower with cut stone above that, saying,
"I am afraid of the life after death."
and after a pause:
"Now, at least, I have shocked him. ~ Ezra Pound

The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle's ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated "Oh, my Lord, my God" seventy times over.8 ~ Malcolm Gladwell

He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal. ~ Peter Ackroyd

One day, the lotus spoke again. "You remember me? The flower that grows through the mud?" I did. I said as much. "Have you ever considered my significance? I'm everywhere - art, religion, nature.... Have you ever wondered why?"

... It spoke, "Nothing touches me. I radiate beauty. You can do the same."

"How?" I asked.

"Easy," it said. "I grow in a pond. I take the water and nutrients I need to grow, and let the rest sink to the bottom. What's in mud, anyway? Water, nutrients, life and a little bit of sludge. Let the sludge go like I do. Then stand tall above the leaves. ~ Dawn Casey-Rowe

And friends abroad must bear in mind
Friends at home they leave behind.
Oh, I shall be stiff and cold
When I forget you, hearts of gold;
The land where I shall mind you not
Is the land where all's forgot.
And if my foot returns no more
To Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,
Luck, my lads, be with you still
By falling stream and standing hill,
By chiming tower and whispering tree,
Men that made a man of me.
About your work in town and farm
Still you'll keep my head from harm,
Still you'll help me, hands that gave
A grasp to friend me to the grave. ~ A.E. Housman

Character is both formed and revealed by how one deals with everyday situations as well as extraordinary pressures and temptations. Like a well-made tower, character is built stone by stone, decision by decision. ~ Michael Josephson

James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They'd done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place. ~ Julene Bair

...In a way, though, I'm almost relieved.'
'Relieved? Why?'
'Because I thought he was going to tell us that he killed her himself. For his damned Tower.'
Susannah looked squarely into his eyes. 'But he thinks that's what he did. Don't you understand that? ~ Stephen King

The Lotus Sutra

The Lotus Sutra. Ultimate reality.
So far
you've been bashing me badly.
Now
I'll cudgel you, bastard.
Oh! Ouch!
You're made for bashing.
Oh! Ouch!
Oh! Ouch!

The Lotus Sutra dashed away
Fields open wide,
once the farmers have gone. ~ Ko Un

It dishonors the deaths of our loved ones to shut out happiness. We throw away what we could have been and waste our opportunities. We each have a purpose, a destiny, and to realize it, we must reach beyond what we think we are capable of ... A wise woman once told me that I needed to learn the lesson of the lotus flower: All of our human experience, both the good and the bad, grounds us like the sludge in a river. We may be rooted in pain or suffering but our job is to rise above it, find the sun, and bloom. Only then can you brighten the world for others. ~ Colleen Houck

My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced? ~ Claire Messud

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death. ~ Don DeLillo

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower. ~ Denis Diderot