Sand Castle Quotes

It isn't a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in. ~ Lauren DeStefano

We must be kind and forgive one another or we won't survive. But even among the most religious there seems to be a great blind spot covering the world, an inability to learn from past experience. Civilization is as precarious as a sand castle. All the care and effort it took to create it can be knocked down in a second by some bully or another. And the world is full of bullies. ~ Fannie Flagg

You think God created the world?" he asks me. "Bullshit. Any kind of benevolent and righteous being would never create a fucking world like this. It's impossible. God didn't fucking create the world."
Before he walks away completely, he turns back to me one final time, pointing his finger at me. Some people on the beach look over.
"Henry," he says, "the Devil created the world when God wasn't looking"
He kicks down the little kids' sand castle and goes somewhere with the girls. ~ Drew Lerman

Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all? ~ Dilgo Khyentse

The past is gone, Claire. It's like a sand castle washed away by the waves. We can remember what it looked like, but even if we build it again, it won't be the exactly the same. ~ Megan Hart

I recall those beautiful summer mornings with my parents by the sandy beach of Belek. My father used to teach me how to ride waves. I remember him constantly emphasizing the fact that no wave, no matter how big it is should stir enough fear inside me to keep me glued to the shore. He used to repeat those words while glancing at my mother with a smile that could set the whole sea on fire. My mother, sitting on the beach, too afraid of the deep blue sea, contented herself with building sand castles, ones my father would step on trying to drag her hopelessly into water.
Step on your sand castle and dive deep. Dive deep into the unknown. Life is damn too short for building sand castles. ~ Malak El Halabi

And then I cried a flood of tears as if I really were a mermaid who had absorbed too much sea into herself. The tears spilled like a balm, like a potion, like a charm. In them swam a little girl whose father was dying without ever having seen her. In them swam a girl whose mother's magic – the only thing the girl envied more than anything else in the world, the thing that had made her invisible, the most precious thing –might be dying too. In them swam a green-haired girl who had never been touched by the boy to whom she was so devoted that she would have lived with him forever in a shack by the sea or a ruined sand castle even if he never made love to her. My tears were for me, but they were also for him. They were to wash away the thing that had frightened him so much so long ago. The wound inside his thigh. My tears poured out of me and he drank them down his throat. He drank them in gulps deep into himself, swallowing sorrow.
Someday," he said, "when we are ready, I will give you back your tears. ~ Francesca Lia Block

The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

Apart from The Holiday, I haven't really spent a huge amount of time in LA. Not that I avoid it, it's just that I don't often go there unless I'm doing press. The one thing I have discovered about LA with kids is that it's really great for children. They really like the sun and making sand castles. ~ Kate Winslet

New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola. ~ Nancy Gibbs

Cruelty is seldom forgotten. You feel it as a child. Somebody takes away your toy or thoughtlessly kicks over your sand castle. A beautiful boy walks into your life, sees something he doesn't like or doesn't understand, and painstakingly endeavours to make you feel how much he hates you, to be constantly aware of the flaws that provoke that hatred. And then you grow older and wiser, but you don't forget the cruelty. You can't forget it, because there is nothing stronger, nothing more palpable in the human brain than the memory of mistreatment. ~ L. H. Cosway

The softly flowing,
white,
and parched clouds passed by.
I, colored gray,
merely kept staring at them
as they slowly vanished out of my sight.

Onto the sand castle that I'm building
from the stars I've been collecting,
my faint prayer
spills and drips down,
as the ocean waves lying in waiting
sweep and trip you up.

a world of darkness.
a world of silence.

Although my disappearing prayer
is being stirred up by the wind,
I will not let that fire go out.
No matter how many times I rebuild the sand castle
with my frosting hands tangled up in busyness,
the ocean waves lying in waiting
just keep sweeping it away...

...towards you. ~ Kanon Wakeshima

The man who stands firm in order to protect a sand-castle can never be relied upon; for he has given away his common sense. ~ Winston Churchill

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty.

I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the ~ Katy Butler

You know that moment when you hug somebody, when your heart feels warm and high in your chest and tingly? When you feel just for a second like a baby in a womb ... that nothing matters? That's how I want you to feel. That's what a girlfriend should do, I think. ~ Jake Vander Ark

There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief. ~ Barbara Castle

Don't whine ... laugh. ~ Roy Castle

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire. ~ George Sand

As I thought about endings and – being a lover of fairy tales – I knew immediately that the deeply rooted last line in folk stories, 'And they lived happily ever after', is the core of what we think we know about endings. We hear it always in our hindbrain because it's the last line most of us in the West have grown up with. That line stops the story at the point of greatest happiness. The wedding, the homecoming, the mystery unraveled, the villain disposed of, families reunited, babies born. If we went on in the story Cinderella, she might be whispered about in court: after all, her manners are not impeccable, she always has smudges of ash on her nose, and no one can trace her bloodline back enough generations. Perhaps she has grown fat eating all that rich food in the castle, and the prince's eye has strayed.

If we went on in The Three Little Pigs, the brother who builds with bricks will have kicked the other two lay-abouts out of his house, or hired them to run his successful company and they – angry at their lower status – plot to kill him. But, having little imagination, do it the only way they know how, by trying to boil him in the pot that still holds the memory of the wolf's demise, so of course the brick building pig finds them out.

But modern books pose a different problem. They present harder choices. It's no longer fairy tale endings we are talking about, but the other stuff, more realistic, stronger, difficult, and maybe not happy-ever-after ~ Jane Yolen

Inland Florida was not the Florida of blue ocean, white sand, and crushed-white-shell parking lots. It was a land sun bleached and sickened after too many droughts and wildfires. ~ Dennis Lehane

Back in the buffalo days, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had seen a vision of men with hair on their faces who would come bringing a white sand that was poison to Indians. The prophecy had come true, the white sand was sugar, and Adeline blamed the white man for poisoning her right up to two hundred pounds. ~ Christopher Moore

Our story begins with the Grail castle, which is in serious trouble. The Fisher King, the king of the castle, has been wounded. His wounds are so severe that he cannot live, yet he is incapable of dying. He groans; he cries out; he suffers constantly. The whole land is in desolation, for a land mirrors the condition of its king, inwardly in a mythological dimension, as well as outwardly in the physical world. The cattle do not reproduce; the crops won't grow; knights are killed; children are orphaned; maidens weep; there is mourning everywhere - all because the Fisher King is wounded. ~ Robert A. Johnson

Jeb frowns. "You didn't give Ivory the chance to explain, did you? You went flying all over the castle half-naked to find me without letting her finish."
I clench my jaw.
He turns me to face him. His face flushes with color and he looks strong and healthy again. His frown turns into a smile, those dimples a vision too lovely for words. "Classic Al." ~ A.G. Howard

Everything is fine, everything is just fine. It's ordinary. The problem is I don't want ordinary I want ... "
"Magic?"
"Yeah, you know what the problem is, we just aren't in love, neither one of us wants to admit it. ~ Richard Castle

I have just come from the castle, where I have seen the president of the republic, and I can tell you that he has accepted all of my proposals without making any changes. ~ Klement Gottwald

He behaved like an ostrich and put his head in the sand, thereby exposing his thinking parts. ~ George Carman

Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars. ~ Rebecca Stott

Gaunt men with sunken eyes squatted amidst sand and stones, shitting out their lives in stinking streams of brown and red. ~ George R R Martin

I like the night beach. The full moon. The moonlit sand, the waves silvery in the brightness. Nature is sexy, and that makes me think God is alive and has very good taste. ~ Beth Ann Bauman

There was of course a considerable concussion as the vessel drove up on the sand heap. Every spar, rope, and stay was strained, and some of the `top-hammer' came crashing down. But, strangest of all, the very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand. ~ Bram Stoker

Good writing is always a breaking of the soil, clearing away prejudices, pulling up of sour weeds of crooked thinking, stripping the turf so as to get at what is fertile beneath. It would be amusing to carry the simile further. Those bulbs that flower in the sand and wither! The gay fiction annual that has to be planted again every year! Those experimental plants from Russia, France, and Greenwich Village that are always getting winter killed - confound 'em! - is it worth while planting them again? The stocky perennial that keeps coming up and coming up - so easy to grow and so ugly. Scarlet sage that gives a touch of fiery sin to the edge of the suburbanite's concrete walk! And then the good flowers - as honest as they are beautiful! The well-ordered gar den! The climbing rose that escapes and is the most beautiful of all! ~ Henry Seidel Canby

Each star, numbered. Each star, named! Like every grain of sand. Every hair on his head. Every trouble that filled his day. Created. Numbered. Known. ~ Max Lucado

Since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

LXXIX
When I die, I want your hands on my eyes.
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once moreL
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.
I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else.
to continue to flourish, full-flowered.
So that you can reach everything my love directs you to.
So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song. ~ Pablo Neruda

My Ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to men: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't want to sit on the sidelines and not value the gift of being here. Instead of the idea of time ticking away, the grains of sand running out, I try to think of time as giving me another grain of sand, another gift. So time passing is an accumulation, rather than a diminishing. ~ Tori Amos

I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon. ~ Charles Bukowski

Different roads sometimes leads to the same castle. Who knows? ~ George R R Martin

You're not going to try to hug me or something, are you?" Phenex grumbled. "You've been into some weird shit since you got married. ~ Kendra Leigh Castle

It was only outside in the sun and heat that she began to feel the weight of what she had done. Her feet were terribly hot and slipping in her shoes, and the sand worked its way in. With each step she fell more into herself, and her stomach roiled with the curdled truth of her betrayal. I can see you, she imagined God saying. The basket of eggs hit her hip and one shell cracked, freeing yolk and white into a slippery mess, which dripped through the wicker and landed in thick shiny drops on her skirt. * ~ Rae Meadows

Twelve barrels of water are required to make one barrel of bitumen. This produces 400 million gallons a day of toxic wastewater at the tar sand mines. ~ Samuel Avery

Moving on sometimes is the best way to take all the bricks that life throws at you, and building a castle to chillax ~ Coleen Innis

To and fro, to and fro over the fine red sand on the floor of the dove house, walked the two doves. One was always in front of the other. One ran forward, uttering a little cry, and the other followed, solemnly bowing and bowing. "You see," explained Anne, "the one in front, she's Mrs. Dove. She looks at Mr. Dove and gives that little laugh and runs forward, and he follows her, bowing and bowing. ~ Katherine Mansfield

She sat down at a table, with books piled high around her and began looking through them rapidly, looking for some information concerning marriage with mortals. Dust rose from the books and swirled about her, dancing and glittering wherever the light struck it.

Mika leaned over her shoulder curiously, repeating softly to himself some of the incantations he read there. At once there were faint rustlings and sighs in the air.

"Stop, stop!" Flumpdoria cried. "You silly thing, do you want all the jinns and genii in the world bumping about in this room? Don't say those spells aloud. And stop looking over my shoulder. It gives me the creeps. ~ Marian Cockrell

Sending them was like sending a probe to Mars - he thought of its insect legs folding up into a squat, its motorized head casting this way and that. You could program it to do what you wanted, but it was no replacement for going there yourself and flinging your fingers into the red sand. ~ Jennifer DuBois

Elaboration is not beauty, and sand-paper never finished a piece of bad work. ~ William Morris Hunt