Quadrangle Quotes

This king [Sesostris] divided the land among all Egyptians so as to give each one a quadrangle of equal size and to draw from each his revenues, by imposing a tax to be levied yearly. But everyone from whose part the river tore anything away, had to go to him to notify what had happened; he then sent overseers who had to measure out how much the land had become smaller, in order that the owner might pay on what was left, in proportion to the entire tax imposed. In this way, it appears to me, geometry originated, which passed thence to Hellas. ~ Herodotus

It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote. ~ Roberto Bolano

It was the Easter Hat Parade, and the St. Angela's mothers were out in force, dressed up in honor of Easter and the first truly autumnal day of the new season. Soft, pretty scarves looped necks, skinny jeans encased skinny and not-so-skinny thighs, spike-heeled boots tapped across the playground. It had been a humid summer, and the crispness of the breeze and the anticipation of a four-day, chocolate-filled weekend had put everyone in good moods. The mothers, sitting in a big double-rowed circle of blue fold-up chairs around the quadrangle, were frisky and high-spirited. The older children who weren't taking part in the Easter ~ Liane Moriarty

Smiling, I cut across the quadrangle toward the commons. I felt better about life than I had in a very long time. We could do this, Lissa and me. We could do this together. ~ Richelle Mead

There, eastward, within a stone's throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring. Behind them, black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her belfry louvres; and Queen's with her dome of green copper; and, as the eye turned southward, Magdalen, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers; the Schools and the battlemented front of University; Merton, square-pinnacled, half-hidden behind the shadowed North side and mounting spire of St. Mary's. Westward again, Christ Church, vast between Cathedral spire and Tom Tower; Brasenose close at hand; St. Aldate's and Carfax beyond; spire and tower and quadrangle, all Oxford springing underfoot in living leaf and enduring stone, ringed far off by her bulwark of blue hills. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The vision shared by both [French utopian] Charles Fourier and Robert Owen was for an entire town to fit into one structure. Owen's design for what he called a "parallelogram" was essentially to have a whole city in one building, laid out around a huge quadrangle. Fourier's scheme was to build a massive Versailles-like structure that he called a "phalanstery." In both cases they had these architectural dreams that we now recognize as pretty unappealing. ~ Christine Jennings

he almost never spoke about himself, in my hearing at least: though once, shortly after his marriage, when he brought his wife to lunch with me, he said...looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, 'I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

What do we mean by a public square? For starters, it is rarely square. . . . It may be a quadrangle or rectangle or circle or pretty much any shape, and it can be open or closed. It might even be a park . . . through which people pass, going from one place to another, not simply a retreat. A square is porous, balancing its porousness with some focal point, like a fountain or a reliable patch of sun with some benches that marks a break from the cars and streets and invites people to stop, look, exhale, find one another [Michael Kimmelman, "Part One: Culture: Power of the Place, Introduction"]. ~ Catie Marron

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown. ~ Simon Callow