Mausoleum Quotes

What I got in exchange for my false prosperity was only a fearful destruction, a cold mask, and a pitch-dark castle like a mausoleum that the Phantom made. ~ Mizuki Nomura

As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home."
"I prefer normal music."
"Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse. ~ Beth Fantaskey

I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all ... the Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk.- It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. ~ Stephen Fry

Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?"
I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen?
"And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything."
But you can be ready for disaster.
A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up.
"If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Thankfully the rain had softened to a light drizzle, but the murky gray of the sky painted a dreary mausoleum atmosphere. ~ Rita Herron

But by the way, who is the murderer? The one who does not know my relatives, or myself, as I erect my new life like a fragile mausoleum where their shadowy figure is integrated, like a corpse, at the source of my wandering? ~ Julia Kristeva

Readers transform a library from a mausoleum into many theaters. ~ Mason Cooley

Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses. ~ John Simon

There, standing before the mausoleum, Michael's anxiety skyrocketed. His heart raced. His head spun. His stomach turned. For a few moments, he really thought he was going to have to run to the bushes and puke. He'd never heard of a ghost being able to actually curse someone, but he didn't want to risk it by vomiting on Bluidy Mackenzie's front lawn. ~ Jacqueline E. Smith

Reading Myself
Like thousands I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire
somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus ...
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work live long
enough for the sweet tooth bear to desecrate
this open book..my open coffin ~ Robert Lowell

He leaned closer. "That's what I'm trying to do. Your face is absolutely adorable when you blush."

My ears burned. Oh great, am I the color of a tomato now?

"Yeah, well, I can make you blush," I retorted. "By telling you how hot you are, and that when that little piece of black hair falls into your eyes, it's so sexy it makes me forget my words, and..." I stopped, suddenly aware of how warm the mausoleum was.

"Go on," Caspian prodded, shaking his head so that his hair covered one green eye. I blushed again, and glanced around me, slowly backing away from him. I just needed some... space to clear my head. He followed me, stalking my every move. My blood felt like pure oxygen racing through my veins, fizzy and bubbling and making me want to float away. A hard wall at my back stopped me, but Caspian kept coming. I thought desperately of some way to change the subject.

"I got you Moby-Dick," I blurted out. He gave me a sly smile.
"Mmmm, did you? How... interesting."
"And Treasure Island, and The Count of Monte Cristo." I babbled on. "I thought you might like some boy books." He stopped an inch away from me. I felt like I was his prisoner.

"Let's go back to the sexy and hot thing," Caspian said. "Could we add a gorgeous or mysterious in there, too?"
I gulped. "Like you don't already know you're all of those things. You probably had girls falling all over you before."

Caspian cocked his head to on ~ Jessica Verday

If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There, the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

A book is a beautiful, paper mausoleum, or tomb, in which to store ideas...to keep the bones of your thoughts in one place, for all time. I just want to say..."Hello. We can hear you. The words survived. ~ Caitlin Moran

Fuck You!' [Oskar said] 'Exuse me!' [His mom said] 'Sorry. I mean, screw you.' 'You need a time-out!' 'I need a mausoleum! ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.
'Jack,' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.'
My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.
'I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I've been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.'
'Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again,' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.
My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. 'I will contain my drinking until'- she thought hard here- 'after five o'clock, and,' she said,' what the hell, I'll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.'
'Do you know what you're saying?'
My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. 'Yes, I do. I think'
It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her?
It was obvious to everyone.

~pgs 213-214; Grandma Lynn and Jack; ~ Alice Sebold

Why not?" I asked, letting my tears spill over. It was easy to cry. All I had to do was look at Alex's limp body, and the tears came effortlessly. "You were happy enough to do it to me."
There was a beat. Then John said cautiously, "What do you mean?"
"The consequences, John?" I let out a bitter laugh. "Persephone wasn't doomed to stay in the Underworld because she ate a pomegranate. She was doomed to stay there because she did with Hades what we did last night. That's what the pomegranate symbolizes, right?"
John stared, speechless. But I could tell I was right by the color that slowly started to suffuse his cheeks…and the fact that he didn't try to contradict me.
And of course the fact that the whole thing was spelled out right in front of me by the statue Hope was sitting on. I didn't get why the Rectors were so obsessed by the myth of Persephone that they'd put a statue of it in their mausoleum, but it was clear enough they were involved in an underworld of one kind or another.
"Don't worry," I said, lowering my voice because I didn't want Frank to overhear. "I don't blame you. You asked me if I was sure, despite the consequences. I said I was. But I thought by consequences you meant a baby, and I already knew that could never happen. I guess Mr. Smith must have told you last night that he found out the pomegranate symbolized something completely different than babies or death-"
"Pierce." John grasped my hand. His fingers were like ice, but h ~ Meg Cabot

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. ~ Herbert Marcuse

Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja's room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space. ~ Anthony Marra

Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad. ~ Kingsley Amis

Επιθυμίες
Σαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασαν
και τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό,
με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά --
έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασαν
χωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιά
της ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό."

Desires
"Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; without any of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness. ~ Constantinos P. Cavafy

Welcome, Bell said, not rising from a large wooden chair that had been placed in the center of the room like it was a throne. Would that make him the king of sewer rats? ~ Kalayna Price

If I were your mother, I would also warn you to beware of buildings that claim to be the houses of God. If heard it said once, jokingly, that on their days off, when they are not actively intervening in human affairs or shoring up the sweetness of the earth, the orishas get together in a little apartment in a poor section of Havana around a very big screen television and laugh themselves silly a the unceasing soap opera that is our lives, all the while puffing on good Cuban cigars and swigging cheap rum. And, darling, whether you imagine one big white distant god or many more particular brown ones who like their little pleasures, I would tell you to get off your butt and out of the house if you want to make contact. If you go to a mausoleum, you'll find dead bodies. Living gods inhabit a living world. ~ Joyce Thompson

The computer beeped as the upload completed. A moment later, Ian Kabra appeared on the screen.
Dan was surprised. "Hey, Ian, isn't it, like, two in the morning back there?"
"It's called jet lag," Ian informed him. "I'm still on London time. I don't suppose you savages have any tea in this mausoleum."
"There's a diet Snapple in the fridge."
Ian shuddered. "I thought not. ~ Gordon Korman

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space. ~ Richard Corliss

When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone. My rapture was widely shared. Like many of my countrymen, I went out to buy the best liquors for a celebration with my family and friends, only to find the shops out of stock there was so much spontaneous rejoicing.

There were official celebrations as well exactly the same kinds of rallies as during the Cultural Revolution, which infuriated me. I was particularly angered by the fact that in my department, the political supervisors and the student officials were now arranging the whole show, with unperturbed self-righteousness.

The new leadership was headed by Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, whose only qualification, I believed, was his mediocrity. One of his first acts was to announce the construction of a huge mausoleum for Mao on Tiananmen Square. I was outraged: hundreds of thousands of people were still homeless after the earthquake in Tangshan, living in temporary shacks on the pavements.

With her experience, my mother had immediately seen that a new era was beginning. On the day after Mao's death she had reported for work at her depas'uuent. She had been at home for five years, and now she wanted to put her energy to use again. She was given a job as the numbe ~ Jung Chang

Is it a mausoleum, and I, the Egyptiab, mummified with pillows and my own flesh, through some oversight enbalmed alive? There must be some mistake. ~ Margaret Laurence

The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me. ~ Sylvia Plath

Can you just relax and let things happen?"

I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen?

"And Joy," shes says, "and Serenity, and Happiness and Contentment." She says all the names of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says, "You can't control everything. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. ~ Lee Siegel

I abide in a goodly Museum, Frequented by sages profound: 'Tis a kind of strange mausoleum, Where the beasts that have vanished abound. There's a bird of the ages Triassic, With his antediluvian beak, And many a reptile Jurassic, And many a monster antique. ~ May Kendall

Before I came to New York I lived here, in this mausoleum. I was nothing. I was dead. When I came to New York it was like a veil lifting. For the first time I felt I was alive, breathing. ~ Jacqueline Susann

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire ... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. ~ William Faulkner

Nothing is more interesting than repressed emotion. The appearance of sardonic coldness and stoicism which has deceived you is but a hollow mockery; beneath it I secrete a maelstrom of impassioned feeling and a mausoleum of blighted hopes. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

What had those vile creatures unleashed in me? What beast had they awakened? I think I vowed to kill the beast and bury it so deep in the abyss it would never again rear its ugly head. Part of me did make this promise. The other part embraced an unfolding of life's inextinguishable flames and the mind's unspoken bondage.
As far as reinforcing the strength of my mind's resolve, I supposed my body was a useless entity. Rather, it was this fancy thing I lived in - a mausoleum that beckoned the living, promising gratification, refuge, solace, peace, even immortality. It wasn't me. It wasn't mine. I realized then, it had never belonged to me. I could control what happened to it only if people were merciful. Watching Valentin was not merciful. It was a torturous joy. ~ Kyrian Lyndon

They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in. ~ Mark Twain