The Glass Essay Quotes

Where does unbelief begin? / When I was young // there were degrees of certainty. / I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. / Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands / occasionally disappear– ~ Anne Carson

A city with one newspaper, or with a morning and an evening paper under one ownership, is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass. ~ A.J. Liebling

Before she can vocalize her surprise, his lips close over hers and she is lost in wordless bliss.
Marco kisses her as though they are the only two people in the world.
The air swirls in a tempest around them, blowing open the glass doors to the garden with a tangle of billowing curtains.
Every eye in the crowded ballroom turns in their direction.
And then he releases her and walks away. ~ Erin Morgenstern

He crowded right up into her space, pressed his body against hers - trapping her against the glass of the door behind her, plunged his hands into her hair until he was cupping the nape of her neck, and devoured her lips with his. ~ Laura Kaye

We are strong and proud and beautiful and there are not enough stars in the night sky to measure our worth.
I will honor my mother and take care of my family.
Yes, I think. I am just a woman. ~ Kristen Simmons

We were green: we ripened and grew golden.
The Sea terrified us: we learned how to drown.
Squat and earthbound, we unfolded huge wings.
We started sober: are love's startled drunkards.
You hide me in your cloak of nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles. ~ Rumi

All architecture, which does not express serenity, fails in its spiritual mission. Thus, it has been a mistake to abandon the shelter of walls for the inclemency of large areas of glass. ~ Luis Barragan

There's smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It's a Western,
Henry. It's a downright shoot-em-up. We've made a graveyard
out of the bone white afternoon.
It's another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it Henry,
keep saying until we get it right … but we always win and we never quit.
See, we've won again,
here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say Please,
for just one night, will you lie down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,
we can stay all buttoned up …
But we both know how it goes - I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open
with a knife. ~ Richard Siken

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story. ~ Ira Glass

I have never met a successful person who talked about failing. The glass is always half full. I don't even like being around negative talkers. ~ Sir Mix-a-Lot

Lord St. Vincent sees to it that his wife is dressed like a queen. I'll tell thee summat: if she wanted the moon for her looking glass, he'd find a way to pull it down for her. ~ Lisa Kleypas

A Book of Glass
On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to
elisions.

The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and
thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things

To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials.

And I see a book in glass - the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be
incomplete, after all.
But I will make the book of glass. ~ David Shapiro

I spent the rest of my day picturing how I'd kill Amy. It was all I could think of: finding a way to end her. Me smashing in Amy's busy, busy brain. I had to give Amy her due: I may have been dozing the past few years, but I was fucking wide awake now. I was electric again, like I had been in the early days of our marriage...
Andie had screwed me over, Marybeth had turned against me, Go had lost a crucial measure of faith. Boney had trapped me. Amy had destroyed me. I poured a drink. I took a slug, tightened my fingers around the curves of the tumbler, then hurled it at the wall, watched the glass burst into fireworks, heard the tremendous shatter, smelled the cloud of bourbon. Rage in all five senses. Those fucking bitches. ~ Gillian Flynn

With his revelation, ... I shattered into a million shards. I felt each piece as it splintered and separated from the whole like a glass I had broken the day before. Debris flew everywhere. It left me without any option but to pick each broken piece up, analyze it, and find out where it belonged. I had to find out where I belonged.
Allison La Crosse - Warriors of the Cross ~ T.R. Graves

The fragility of crystal is not a weakness but a fineness. My parents understood that fine crystal glass had to be cared for or may be shattered. But when it came to my brother, they didn't seem to know or care that their course of their secret action brought the kind of devastation that could cut them. Their fraudulent marriage and our father's denial of his other son was for Chris a murder of every day's truth. He felt his whole life turned like a river suddenly reversing the direction of its flow. Suddenly running uphill. These revelations struck at the core of Chris's sense of identity. They made his entire childhood seem like fiction. Chris never told them he knew and made me promise silence as well. ~ Jon Krakauer

Nobody wants to hear that any aspect of my awesome life is bad. I get that. But there are days, maybe two or three times a year, when I get completely overwhelmed by my job and go to my office, lie on the floor, and cry for ten minutes. Then I think: Mindy, you have literally the best life in the world besides that hot lawyer who married George Clooney. This is what you dreamed about when you were a weird, determined little ten-year-old. There are more than a thousand people in one square mile of this studio who would kill to have this job. Get your ass up off the floor and go back into that writers' room, you weakling. Then I get up, pour myself a generous glass of whiskey and club soda, think about the sustained grit of my parents, and go back to work. ~ Mindy Kaling

Alas! this is not what I thought life was.
I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
Untouched by suffering, through the rugged glen.
In mine own heart I saw as in a glass
The hearts of others ... And when
I went among my kind, with triple brass
Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woeful mass! ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

When she (Miss Betsey - M. Zh.)reached the house she gave another proof of her identity. My father had often hinted that she seldom conducted herself like any ordinary Christian; and now, instead of ringing the bell, she came and looked in at that identical window, pressing the end of her nose against the glass to that extent that my poor dear mother used to say it became perfectly flat and white in a moment.
She gave my mother such a turn, that I have always been convinced I am indebted to Miss Betsey for having been born on a Friday. (Chapter I) ~ Charles Dickens

If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass. ~ Charlie Brooker

The Asparagus is not, technically, an asparagus spear, nor is it derived from asparagus parts. It is just a sculpture that bears an uncanny resemblance to a thirty-foot-tall piece of asparagus - although I've also heard it likened to: 1. A green-glass beanstalk 2. An abstract representation of a tree 3. A greener, glassier, uglier Washington Monument 4. The Jolly Green Giant's gigantic jolly green phallus At any rate, it certainly does not look like a Tower of Light, which is the actual name of the sculpture. ~ John Green

And you have to remember that I came to America as an immigrant. You know, on a ship, through the Statue of Liberty. And I saw that skyline, not just as a representation of steel and concrete and glass, but as really the substance of the American Dream. ~ Daniel Libeskind

That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper's images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as "our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness" ...
Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs. ~ Olivia Laing

It surprises me, though it shouldn't, how short the memories of these politicians are. They forget the brutal lengths women have gone to in order to terminate pregnancies when abortion was illegal or when abortion is unaffordable. Women have thrown themselves down stairs and otherwise tried to physically harm themselves to force a miscarriage. Dr. Waldo Fielding noted in the New York Times, "Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion - darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off." Women have tried to use soap and bleach, catheters, natural remedies. Women have historically resorted to any means necessary. Women will do this again if we are backed into that terrible corner. This is the responsibility our society has forced on women for hundreds of years. ~ Roxane Gay

The glass ceiling will go away when women help other women break through that ceiling. ~ Indra Nooyi

As I raised the glass and said, "South Bend is back," the roar of the crowd at once reflected, certified, and caused it to be so. ~ Pete Buttigieg

Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality. ~ Gerhard Richter

A shard of glass cut my belly as I slid into the battered SUV, but I managed to keep the family jewels intact. I'd be counting every small victory tonight. ~ Lisa Kessler

Are you willing?"

Through the shadows, he found her gleaming eyes, her slightly curved mouth. "No, it's too reckless. Too irresponsible."

"You're sounding like a father. Or a constable, Constable."

"I'm both, Miss Connor."

He watched her lips tilt and flow into a glorious smile. "Rory's in bed, safe and sound. Most of the town is in bed, safe and sound. And you're here, with a pragmatic woman who can take care of herself. Two adults and one magnificent challenge."

"More like a dare," he said and drained his glass.

She took a step closer, until her skirt brushed his knee. "Call it a dare if you like."

"No." His resolve slipped a notch when she crouched before him, the pleasing angles of her face flooding into view. She was much, much too tempting.

"I'll do it all. You don't have to participate. That should be enough to prove my case."

"I wasn't serious when I said that. I'm sure you're not, hell, frigid."

She leaned in, her hands sliding along the arms of the chair, her face fading out of view as it closed in on his.

A scent, provocative and earthy, stole in with his stuttered breath. "You see, Constable, I'm always serious." He watched her moisten her lips, so near he could almost taste her. "Close your eyes. I've heard that's the way it's done. ~ Tracy Sumner

I don't believe in angels but the moon is now dead for me. The last glass of wine is gone before the thirst I'm suffering from. The blue grass lost its way running away from your sails. ~ Roque Dalton

¨You ask me, how was it to come to pass that I, despite the detachment I have achieved from the web of life, could be transformed overnight into a sexual murderer? I will tell you. Human beings are like glass tubes, through which many colored balls may roll. Most men are restricted to one color only. Should the ball be red, the man is branded as ¨bad¨; if yellow, then he is ¨good.¨ Should two balls pursue their passage through the same tube, one yellow and one red, then the man has an ¨unstable character.¨ But we, who have been ¨bitten by the Serpent of the Kingdom of the spirit,¨ compress into one life the experiences of a whole race within an age: colored balls rush wildly after one another on their way through the glass tube, and when it ends, then we are prophets, and the very mirror of God himself. -- Gustave Meyrink, Der Golem ~ Gustav Meyrink

Chaol had been right. She'd missed the target by six inches to the left, ~ Sarah J. Maas

A valise without straps. A hole without a key. She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass. Cunt international. When the flag waved it was red all the way back to the throat. You entered on the Boulevard Jules-Ferry and came out at the Porte de la Villette. You dropped
your sweetbreads into the tumbrils – red tumbrils with two wheels, naturally. At the confluence of the Ourcq and Marne, where the water sluices through the dikes and lies like glass under the
bridges. ~ Henry Miller

My life is like shattered glass." said the visitor. "My soul is tainted with evil. Is there any hope for me? "Yes," said the Master. "There is something whereby each broken thing is bound again and every stain made clean." "What?" "Forgiveness" "Whom do I forgive?" "Everyone: Life, God, your neighbor especially yourself." "How is that done?" "By understanding that no one is to blame," said the Master. "NO ONE. ~ Anthony De Mello

There was a time - the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of sandstone and railings of painted iron and two-family brickfront houses whose siding imitates gray rocks, excited Rabbit with the magic of his own existence. These mundane surfaces had given witness to his life; this cup had held his blood; here the universe had centered, each downtwirling maple seed of more account than galaxies. No more. Jackson Road seems an ordinary street anywhere. Millions of such American streets hold millions of lives, and let them sift through, and neither notice nor mourn, and fall into decay, and do not even mourn their own passing but instead grimace at the wrecking ball with the same gaunt facades that have outweathered all their winters. However steadily Mom communes with these maples - the branches' misty snake-shapes as inflexibly fixed in these two windows as the leading of stained glass - they will not hold back her fate by the space of a breath; nor, if they are cut down tomorrow to widen Jackson Road at last, will her staring, that planted them within herself, halt their vanishing. And the wash of new light will extinguish even her memory of them. Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. How stupid, it has taken him thirty-six years to begin to believe that. ~ John Updike

Even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modelled to rival St Mark's Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood. 7. ~ Alain De Botton

Unlike Bec and I, Hayden didn't yell anything angry, but the speed at which his ball hit the glass made me think that maybe he did have a few demons. ~ Kasie West

Through the bars he had laid eyes on a face like glass, somebody who could not lie without it being obvious. And he had seen a way of using that very fact to tell the greatest of lies. ~ Frances Hardinge

Creu Gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen Creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration ~ Gwyneth Lewis

This was the type of man who looked at a picture on the wall and instead of admiring the photo, looked at his own reflection in the glass. I ~ Ruta Sepetys

A good quote is the nectar of a gallon of wisdom squeezed into an eight ounce glass. Johnny Flora ~ Johnny Flora

I used to listen to it all the time when I was little and thinking about grown-up things. I would go to my bedroom window and stare at my reflection in the glass and the trees behind it and just listen to the song for hours. I decided then that when I met someone I thought was as beautiful as the song, I should give it to that person. And I didn't mean beautiful on the outside. I meant beautiful in all ways. ~ Stephen Chbosky

The whiskey looks like transparent wood in my glass. ~ Katherine Dunn

Glass spotted another dog by the creek, and this one he did not spare. Soon he had a fire burning in the center of the hut. Part of the dog he roasted on a spit over the fire and part he boiled in the kettle. He threw corn into the pot with the dog meat and continued his search through the village. ~ Michael Punke