Shadows Of Ruins Past Quotes

For in those times when our hearts are in the darkest shadows, the slightest rays of hope can gleam like eternal sunshine ~ A.W.Chrystalis

Half a century of digging among the ruins of the past had made me painfully familiar with the feet of clay which were buried deeply in the sands of time and which only too often supported the magnificent superstructure of some of the statues erected to our departed gods and half-gods. But, on the other hand, where would we have been - yes, where would we be today - unless occasionally there had been feet of granite, willing and able to carry their owners into the realm of the unknown and find new roads toward progress? The answer was - nowhere at all. We needed those voortrekkers, as our South African cousins used to call them. We needed a few stout hearts to do the pioneering. Without those men and women who trekked ahead of the rest of the crowd and either found new grazing fields or died in the attempt, no one of us would ever have gotten very far. We would have been obliged to stick to the swampy coastal regions, where we had lived and died until then, since the beginning of time, and we would never have known what lay hidden beyond the distant mountain ranges. ~ Hendrik Willem Van Loon

When you choose, you divide. Then you say, "This is good, that is wrong." And life is a unity. Existence remains undivided, existence remains in a deep unison. It is oneness. If you say, "This is beautiful and that is ugly," mind has entered, because life is both together. And the beautiful becomes ugly, and the ugly goes on becoming beautiful. There is no boundary; no watertight compartments are there. Life goes on flowing from this to that.

Mind has fixed compartments. Fixedness is the nature of mind and fluidity is the nature of life. That's why mind is obsession; it is always fixed, it has a solidness about it. And life is not solid; it is fluid, flexible, goes on moving to the opposite.

Something is alive this moment, next moment is dead. Someone was young this moment, next moment he has become old. The eyes were so beautiful, now they are no more there – just ruins. The face was so rose-like, now nothing is there – not even a ghost of the past. Beautiful becomes ugly, life becomes death, and death goes on taking new birth.

What to do with life? You cannot choose. If you want to be WITH life, with the whole, you have to be choiceless. ~ Osho

When a builder builds he clears the ground for his new foundations. Then he sees that the basic structure will support the whole. Should we not also clear the mind - at least that part of it that we can reach - of the ruins of past thinking, before building our palace of dharma which will one day reach the sky. ~ Christmas Humphreys

The old music industry is dead. We're standing in the ruins of a business built on private jets, Cristal, $18 CDs and million-dollar recording budgets. We're in the midst of the greatest music industry disruption of the past 100 years. A fundamental shift has occurred - a shift that Millennials are driving. For the first time, record sales aren't enough to make an artist's career, and they certainly aren't enough to ensure success. The old music industry clung desperately to sales to survive, but that model is long gone.2 - Honeyman ~ Larry Wacholtz

Sri Lanka is a beautiful little island nation parked perilously close to India; a little too hot, a little too humid, and perhaps too expensive, but to its credit are fantastic beaches, strangely melancholy hills, and the ruins of kingdoms past. ~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. ~ Cormac McCarthy

From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution ... It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently ... it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation. ~ Bertrand Russell

Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpant, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic strain of burnt orange, to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room and the squares of coral sunset on the floor-boards - an antique light, self-absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings on the radar screens. The operators call them 'angels. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force. ~ Bayard Taylor

The past is but an untraceable footfall
It appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,
In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.
It's often dark and ruthless.
It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.
By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectations
And our shattered dreams
It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.
It wrecks our present and ruins our future
And thus should be left where it is meant to be
It should be left behind ... ~ Chirag Tulsiani

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face.The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.
The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hours I would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been, could I have lived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden in summer, and the birds that sang at dawn.Tea under the chestnut tree, and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns below.
I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved.They were memories that cannot hurt. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Today I know I was right. The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia. My Sunday columns were there, life an archeological relic among the ruins of the past, and they realized they were not only for the old but also for the young who were not afraid of aging. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre-Mycenaean tribes did to the Greeks, ready, at a word, each of us now, to flit piping through groves ungrown, our women ready to haunt as laminoe the rose-red ruins of Chicago and Indianapolis when they are little more than earthen mounds, when the heads of the trees are higher than the hundred-and-twenty-fifth floor - it seemed to me that I found myself in bed again, the old house swaying in silence as though it were moored to the universe by only the thread of smoke from the stove. ~ Gene Wolfe

If all music did was bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can't rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life. ~ Rob Sheffield

A thousand happy moments succumbed to history. It was the happiest hour of the year, worst time of our lives. I can still smell the ruins from that cold dark brute stormy October night. ~ Parul Wadhwa

Rachel's voice is fierce. The Commander will send out scouts. We should-"
"Oh, he sent out scouts," Willow says. "Five of them. And they were doing a good job of searching the city. Unfortunately for them, all they managed to find was me."
"You killed them?" Ian asks.
"No. I invited them over for dinner." She smacks his shoulder. "the sun is almost down. By the time the Commander realizes his scouts aren't coming back, it will be too dark to send more. He can't risk us seeing torchlight, and they can't search these ruins without light."
"You scare me a little," Ian says, but his voice is full of admiration.
Adam steps closer to Willow. "She's good at everything she does."
Quinn clears his throat." Maybe we should get back to the problem?"
"We can't travel at night," I say. "We need light as well. But we can leave at dawn, and-"
"They'll leave at dawn, too," Adam says. "And if they're that close already, there's no way we can outrun them. Not with children and elderly and the wagons."
"Which is why we're going to create a barrier between us," I say. "Something they can't cross."
Rachel meets my eyes, and her smile is cold and bright. "Fire."
I match her smile with one of my own. "Fire. And when the army finally gets past the blaze, we won't be where they expect, because we're leaving the main road behind."
"What are we waiting for?" Willow asks. "Let's go burn something down. ~ C.J. Redwine

This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time. ~ Svetlana Boym

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London's organic power – somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

History is replete with the seeds of apocalypse. In particular, the 19th/early 20th Century in France was a time of country-shattering events, whether it was the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte (the creation and brutal upending of a whole new social order, within scarcely more than a decade), or the Great War (which devastated the country to a degree that is hard to believe today, wiping out an entire generation in the trenches). It was no great stretch to imagine a magical war engulfing Europe in 1914, and leaving Paris as a field of ruins filled with magical booby traps–the familiar monuments destroyed, the Seine overflowing with the residue of spells.

It's no secret that I'm fascinated by the narrative of war, and of recovery after war: how people struggle to rebuild lives and go on in the wake of world-shattering devastation; how the past can still cast a long, terrible shadow over everything; how the years before the war become a golden thing, regardless of how many injustices and hardships might have been happening then. I'm equally fascinated by history–the narratives that get preserved and enshrined, the stories that are passed down; and the speed with which some things get forgotten while others endure for generations. For me, the vocabulary and tropes of post-apocalypse were a great way to tackle those subjects, and to imagine what would happen in a city that had such a traumatic event in its past. ~ Aliette De Bodard

I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history…Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat? ~ Albert Camus

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [ ... ]
My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. ~ Wallace Stegner

When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. ~ Ian McEwan

His house of cards had collapsed, and he lay among the ruins - but he was free. He felt euphoric, weightless, years younger. The only thing he missed was Indiana, but she too belonged to the past; she too had been carried off by the wind. ~ Isabel Allende

Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me, and far from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Ionia. ~ Samuel Johnson

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. ~ Rose Macaulay

The ruins often amaze us because we are so arrogant that it is difficult for us to accept the talents of the people of the past! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. ~ M.J. Rose

This then is Borgia Rome: a city where a traveler entering the gates must still cross acres of country before he reaches the center, where animals still outnumber citizens, goats and cattle grazing the imperial ruins, their insistent teeth pulling weeds - and mortar - from between the stones of history. A city still struggling with a chasm of hardship between rich and poor, still ripped apart by gross family violence. But also a place of growing magnificence and confidence where, for the first time in centuries, the future no longer looks bleaker than the past, and where the new Pope has chosen for himself a name designed to foster a belief in magnificence again. Alexander ~ Sarah Dunant

The windblast sent people to the ground. A thunderhead of smoke and ash came moving toward them. The light drained dead away, bright day gone. They ran and fell and tried to get up, men with toweled heads, a woman blinded by debris, a woman calling someone's name. The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air above.

He took one step and then the next, smoke blowing over him. He felt rubble underfoot and there was motion everywhere, people running, things flying past. He walked by the Easy Park sign, the Breakfast Special and Three Suits Cheap, and they went running past, losing shoes and money. He saw a woman with her hand in the air, like running to catch a bus.

He went past a line of fire trucks and they stood empty now, headlights flashing. He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran by with a stretcher, someone facedown, smoke seeping out of his hair and clothes. He watched them move into the stunned distance. That's where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name.

Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life. ~ Don DeLillo

He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it. ~ Brian Francis Slattery

Today, ferries and sailboats--modern descendants of ancient sailing ships and fishing vessels--shuttle visitors from port to port throughout this vast chain of sun-soaked islands. Stepping ashore, the visitor is instantly enveloped by a way of life that is both utterly contemporary and ageless. The timeless tang of the sea, the calls of fishermen and market women, the deep, complex fragrance of wild rosemary form a seamless whole with the sheep that graze in the shadow of windmills and fortresses, and the enduring ruins of ancient temples and baths: past and present are one. ~ Laura Brooks

When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves. ~ Orhan Pamuk

What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion. ~ William Shakespeare

What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to a near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin. There was a place for Rose so deeply within myself that it was another country, another world, with its own light and time and its own language. A lost world. Yet its foundations and edges were permanent-the ruins of Pompeii, the glorious remnants or the Forum. A world that endured, even as it retreated into the past. A world visited, imagined, ever waiting, yet asleep ~ Deb Caletti

We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism. ~ Rigoberta Menchu

The past ruins the present to destroy the future. Take charge of the NOW.-RVM ~ R.v.m.

You are young. No hungry generations tread you down. The past does not mock you with the ruins of a beauty the secret of whose creation you have lost ~ Oscar Wilde

Archaeology, I found, comprehended all manner of excitement and achievement. Adventure is coupled with bookish toil. Romantic excursions go hand in hand with scholarly self-discipline and moderation. Explorations among the ruins of the remote past have carried curious men all over the face of the earth ... Yet in truth, no science is more adventurous than archaeology, if adventure is thought of as a mixture of spirit and deed. ~ C. W. Ceram

It was a mansion of ghosts and monsters, with ghouls in the shadows and demons scuttling behind the wainscotting. ~ Alastair Reynolds

His fingers brushed the outline of the bronze disc hanging beneath his tunic. Haydn jerked his
hand away, gritting his teeth as he tried to block the memories. The clashing of steel. The screams and cries of battle. They fled, replaced by flames. Shadows. Pleading and tears. ~ Hope Ann

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. ~ Susan Hill

Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything ... no touch, no contact! ~ D.H. Lawrence

Deep in the shadows, a hot ember from a lit cigarette glows. For a brief second, the light illumines the face of the famous chimp, Bosco, champion bicyclist. He stares back, emotionless, unimpressed. His relentless gaze makes me uncomfortable, self-conscious, intimidated. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe