The Walled City Quotes

It never made sense to my young mind, how a hurt from so long ago could keep a man from walking right. Stay with him for the rest of his life. But now that I am older, now that I've fought my own wars and fired my own guns, I understand. ~ Ryan Graudin

This is my world. Wide and open and waiting. ~ Ryan Graudin

Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream's logic it grew no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing. Being grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and bulk-lifter in the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies that are sleeping rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy. The ~ William Gibson

Cassiopeia? She was a queen long ago, in a different part of the world. The stories say she was very beautiful, but very proud. Too proud. She smack-talked some goddesses and got herself stuck up there for all eternity. ~ Ryan Graudin

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than it was to repeatedly try and fail. Failure-disappointment-was a poison in my blood. Despair was the antidote. ~ Norah Vincent

War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go but your own doom.
Walls.
A world completely surrounded by walls. ~ Haruki Murakami

But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don't teach that at medical school, but it's as important as your stethoscope. ~ Jack Finney

There Laura spent many happy hours, supposed to be picking fruit for jam, but for the better part of the time reading or dreaming. One corner, overhung by a Samson tree and walled in with bushes and flowers, she called her 'green study'. ~ Flora Thompson

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told
that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks. ~ Beryl Markham

Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden. He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her close. He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks. He surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation. He caused her to be filled with fears of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about it in the dark. When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource. ~ Charles Dickens

It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy.
Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday. ~ Kate Morton

It's not the drug that causes the junkie it's the laws that causes the junkie because of course the drug laws means that he can't go and get help because he is afraid of being arrested. He also can't have a normal life because the war on drugs has made drugs so expensive and has made drug contracts unenforceable which means they can only be enforced through criminal violence.

It becomes so profitable to sell drugs to addicts that the drug dealers have every incentive to get people addicted by offering free samples and to concentrate their drug to the highest possible dose to provoke the greatest amount of addiction as possible.

Overall it is a completely staggering and completely satanic human calamity. It is the new gulag and in some ways much more brutal than the soviet gulag. In the soviet gulags there was not a huge prison rape problem and in this situation your life could be destroyed through no fault of your own through sometimes, no involvement of your own and the people who end up in the drug culture are walled off and separated as a whole and thrown into this demonic, incredibly dangerous, underworld were the quality of the drugs can't be verified. Were contracts can't be enforced except through breaking peoples kneecaps and the price of drugs would often led them to a life of crime.

People say "well, I became a drug addict and I lost my house, family, and my job and all that." It's not because you became a drug addict but, because t ~ Stefan Molyneux

Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity. ~ Rebecca Traister

He built a tower to try and be closer to her and walled himself inside."
She stared at him for a moment as if waiting for something. "And?"
He glanced at her, puzzled. "And, what?"
She widened her eyes. "How does the story end? Did the sorcerer win his Moon Maiden?"
"Of course not," he said irritably. "She lived on the moon and was quite unattainable. I suppose he must've starved or pined away or fallen off the wall at some point. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

What won't work - what can't work - is to act like the last years never happened, and that the survival of the [mass media] industry will be found by hiding content behind walled gardens. Instead of sticking their finger in the dike, trying to hold back the flow of innovation, companies need to ride the rapids of progress and seize the opportunities it provides. ~ Arianna Huffington

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road. ~ Margaret Atwood

Tunnelling through the night, the trains pass
in a splendour of power, with a sound like thunder
shaking the orchards, waking
the young from a dream, scattering like glass
the old mens' sleep, laying
a black trail over the still bloom of the orchards;
the trains go north with guns.

Strange primitive piece of flesh, the heart laid quiet
hearing their cry pierce through its thin-walled cave
recalls the forgotten tiger,
and leaps awake in its old panic riot;
and how shall mind be sober,
since blood's red thread still binds us fast in history?
Tiger, you walk through all our past and future,
troubling the children's sleep'; laying
a reeking trail across our dreams of orchards.

Racing on iron errands, the trains go by,
and over the white acres of our orchards
hurl their wild summoning cry, their animal cry….
the trains go north with guns. ~ Judith A. Wright

They'd eaten every meal outdoors, hard-boiled eggs and cheese from a picnic basket, and drunk wine under the lilac tree in the walled garden. They'd disappeared inside the woods, and stolen apples from the farm next door, and floated down the stream in her little boat as one silken hour spun itself into the next. On a clear, still night, they'd dug the old bicycles out of the shed and cycled together along the dusty lane, racing, laughing, breathing in salt from the warm air as moonlight made the stones, still hot from the day, shine lustrous white. ~ Kate Morton

We can talk in here. Dodgson led him to a glass-walled superintendent's booth, in the center of the building. The glass cut down the sound of the barking. But through the windows, they could look out at the rows of animals. ~ Michael Crichton

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The FRG … was the closest thing any of them had to family, this simulacrum of friendship, women suddenly thrown together in a time of duress, with no one to depend on but each other, all of them bereft and left behind in this dry expanse of central Texas, walled in by strip malls, chain restaurants, and highways that led to better places. Most of them had gotten used to making life for themselves without a husband, finding doctors and dentists and playgrounds, filling their cell phones with numbers and their calendars with playdates, and then the husbands would return and the Army would toss them all at some other base in the middle of nowhere to begin again. ~ Siobhan Fallon

A Girl's Garden"

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, 'Why not?'

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, 'Just it.'

And he said, 'That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.'

It was not enough of a garden
Her father said, to plow;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don't mind now.

She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider-apple
In bearing there today is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
How village thi ~ Robert Frost

The Memorabilia, the abbey's small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the priceless writings from both nomads and soidisant crusaders of the schismatic Orders, founded to fight the hordes, but turned to random pillaging and sectarian strife. Neither the nomads nor the Military Order of San Pancratz would have valued the abbey's books, but the nomads would have destroyed them for the joy of destruction and the military knightsfriars would have burned many of them as "heretical" according to the theology of Vissarion, their Antipope. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting. by Primo Levi in Drowned ~ Primo Levi

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias - why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there's a primitive instinct to defend one's turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.
Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group's leader "does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion."
Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, "the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk." In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. "Terrorists are made, not born," Sunstein observed, "and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts. ~ Michiko Kakutani

In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet. ~ Arthur Koestler

Let the foundation of thy affection be virtue, then make the building as rich as glorious as thou canst; if the foundation be beauty or wealth, and the building virtue, the foundation is too weak for the building, and it will fall: happy is he, the palace of whose affection is founded upon virtue, walled with riches glazed with beauty, and roofed with honor. ~ Francis Quarles

A beautiful trust. A rare and beautiful trust. It makes me cry a little. That's all that life has to give in the way of perfection. The warm and complete understanding of two in a close-walled room with the windows blind to the world. ~ Tennessee Williams

Over To Candleford
Chapter XXVIII: Growing Pains
"This accumulated depression of months slid from her at last in a moment. She had
run out into the fields one day in a pet and was standing on a small stone bridge looking down on brown running water flecked with cream-coloured foam. It was a dull November day with grey sky and mist. The little brook was scarcely more than a trench to drain the fields; but overhanging it were thorn bushes with a lacework of leafless twigs; ivy had sent trails down the steep banks to dip in the stream, and from every thorn on the leafless twigs and from every point of the ivy leaves water hung in bright drops, like beads.

A flock of starlings had whirred up from the bushes at her approach and the clip, clop of a cart-horse's hoofs could be heard on the nearest road, but these were the only sounds. Of the hamlet, only a few hundred yards away, she could hear no sound, or see as much as a chimney-pot, walled in as she was by the mist.
Laura looked and looked again. The small scene, so commonplace and yet so lovely, delighted her."
It was so near the homes
men and yet so far removed from their thoughts. The fresh green moss, the glistening ivy, and the reddish twigs with their sparkling drops seemed to have been made for her alone and the hurrying, foam-flecked water seemed to have some message for her. She felt suddenly uplifted. The things which had troubled her troubled her no more. She did not reason. ~ Flora Thompson

That's what civilization sometimes did to threats, real or perceived. They walled them off. Us against them. Survival of the fittest. You die so I can live. ~ David Baldacci

But as the weeks passed, he began to look forward to the hour spent in the fellowship room, with its blue carpet and bay window view of the walled garden that set the church apart from the rest of the campus. He began to recognize faces and see them as individuals--sunny, serious, smart, fun--understanding that they were distinct individuals, even in their faith in God. ~ Cara Wall

Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments, and we are - increasingly, I think - seeing important decisions made by unaccountable, non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based Internet to one that's consumption-based. ~ Sue Gardner

Zero Holding

I grow to like the bare
trees and the snow, the bones and fur
of winter. Even the greyness
of the nunneries, they are so grey,
walled all around with grey stones -
and the snow piled up on ledges
of wall and sill, those grey
planes for holding snow: this is how
it will be, months now, all so still,
sunk in itself, only the cold alive,
vibrant, like a wire - and all the
busy chimneys - their ghost-breath,
a rumour of lives warmed within,
rising, rising, and blowing away. ~ Robyn Sarah

The glorified will not be pilgrims, transient visitors, or tenants at will, but settled, permanent, walled, established by title, through eternity by warrantee deed, signed, sealed, recorded, possession given. No renters, no lessees of Heaven, but all property and home owners. ~ Edward McKendree Bounds

But if we were to realize that we are, as it were, all action, all deed - the doer vanishes, and with it vanishes this sense of man as something separate, something cut off, walled away from the rest of the world by his skin. When that realization comes about; when, in other words, our own separateness disappears, we have what the Buddha called nirvana ~ Alan W. Watts