Tower Of Babylon Quotes

Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed. ~ Ted Chiang

Then there are the words that the Song of Solomon provides a man. The enchanting words of courtship."
She closed her eyes and, lips parted, began to chant. "How beautiful you are, my love, your eyes are doves.... Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate.... Your neck is like the tower of David.... Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies. ~ Talia Carner

For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics. ~ Isa Kamari

Westray sat down near the door, and was so engrossed in the study of the building and in the strange play of the shafts of sunlight across the massive stonework, that half an hour passed before he rose to walk up the church.

A solid stone screen separates the choir from the nave, making, as it were, two churches out of one; but as Westray opened the doors between them, he heard four voices calling to him, and, looking up, saw above his head the four tower arches. "The arch never sleeps," cried one. "They have bound on us a burden too heavy to be borne," answered another. "We never sleep," said the third; and the fourth returned to the old refrain, "The arch never sleeps, never sleeps."

As he considered them in the daylight, he wondered still more at their breadth and slenderness, and was still more surprised that his Chief had made so light of the settlement and of the ominous crack in the south wall. ~ John Meade Falkner

The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of the future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all these miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef and the birds and the sky, it glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now. ~ M.T. Anderson

After almost two hours, the phone rang. I could guess who it was.
"Hello, Blix," I said before he could say anything. "Adding kidnapping to your long list of felonies?"
"We prefer to think of it as 'vacationing at the specific invitation of His Majesty," replied Blix. "Open the top drawer of the bureau."
I did so, and found a contract for Kazam to concede the competition, with all the details that Blix had already outlined. The document had been prepared by a law firm in Financia and registered with the Ununited Kingdoms Supreme Court, so even if King Snodd had wanted to reverse the deal, he couldn't.
"It's all there," said Blix. "I knew my or the King's word wouldn't be good enough, so I made it official. Sign it and your vacation in the North Tower is over."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you'll stay there until six Mondays from now, and we'll have Kazam for nothing."
"Blix?"
"Yes?"
"Are you in the castle watching the top of the North Tower at the moment?"
"I might be."
I ripped the phone from the wall and tossed it out the open window. The telephone took almost five seconds to hit the ground. It was a pointless gesture, but very satisfying. ~ Jasper Fforde

To live on as we have is to leave behind joy, and love, and companionship, because we know it to be transitory, of the moment. We know it will turn to ash. Only those whose lives are brief can imagine that love is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion. It may be the greatest gift your race has ever received. ~ Lorien - Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski

Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone's story. This whole world
~ Stephen King

The Tower is not a sacred monument, and no taboo can forbid a commonplace life to develop there, but there can be no question, nonetheless, of a trivial phenomenon here; the installation of a restaurant on the Tower, for instance ... The Eiffel Tower is a comfortable object, and moreover, it is in this that it its an object wither very old (analogous, for instance, to the Circus) or very modern (analogous to certain American institutions such as the drive-in movie, in which one can simultaneously enjoy the film, the car, the food, and the freshness of the night air). Further, by affording its visitor a whole polyphony of pleasures, from technological wonder to haute cuisine, including the panorama, the Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy; the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there, as on an ocean liner (another mythic object that sets children dreaming), one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world. ~ Roland Barthes

The Night's Watch is thousands of years old," he said, "but I'll wager Lord Snow's the first brother ever honored for burning down the Lord Commander's Tower. ~ George R R Martin

The Church has ever proved indestructible. Her persecutors have failed to destroy her; in fact, it was during times of persecution that the Church grew more and more; while the persecutors themselves, and those whom the Church would destroy, are the very ones who came to nothing. ... Again, errors have assailed her; but in fact, the greater the number of errors that have arisen, the more has the truth been made manifest ... Nor has the Church failed before the assaults of demons: for she is like a tower of refuge to all who fight against the Devil. ~ Thomas Aquinas

I have used the theologians and their treatment of apocalypse as a model of what we might expect to find not only in more literary treatments of the same radical fiction, but in the literary treatment of radical fictions in general. The assumptions I have made in doing so I shall try to examine next time. Meanwhile it may be useful to have some kind of summary account of what I've been saying. The main object: is the critical business of making sense of some of the radical ways of making sense of the world. Apocalypse and the related themes are strikingly long-lived; and that is the first thing to say tbout them, although the second is that they change. The Johannine acquires the characteristics of the Sibylline Apocalypse, and develops other subsidiary fictions which, in the course of time, change the laws we prescribe to nature, and specifically to time. Men of all kinds act, as well as reflect, as if this apparently random collocation of opinion and predictions were true. When it appears that it cannot be so, they act as if it were true in a different sense. Had it been otherwise, Virgil could not have been altissimo poeta in a Christian tradition; the Knight Faithful and True could not have appeared in the opening stanzas of "The Faerie Queene". And what is far more puzzling, the City of Apocalypse could not have appeared as a modern Babylon, together with the 'shipmen and merchants who were made rich by her' and by the 'inexplicable splendour' of her 'fine linen, and pur ~ Frank Kermode

Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other ... ~ Jean-Christophe Valtat

You haven't finished the key, but not because you are afraid to finish. You're afraid of finding you can't finish. You're afraid to go down to where the stones stand, but not because you're afraid of what may come once you enter the circle. You're afraid of what may not come. You're not afraid of the great world, Eddie, but of the small one inside yourself. ~ Stephen King

The Brown Coast"
"Not long after the affair had run its course, Bob and his wife were driving to town when Vicky looked up and saw the phantom outline of a woman's footprint on the windshield over the glove box. She slipped her sandal off, saw that the print did not match her own, and told Bob that he was no longer welcome in their home. ~ Wells Tower

My father was always anxious to give pleasure to his children. Accordingly, he took me one day, as a special treat, to the top of the grand old tower, to see the chimes played. ~ James Nasmyth

The wheels rolled on, and rolled down by the Monument, and by the Tower; and by the Docks; down by Ratcliffe, and by Rotherhithe; down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage, and to be pausing until its own weight forced it over the bank and sunk it in the river. ~ Charles Dickens

Eiffel Tower"
To Robert Delaunay

Eiffel Tower
Guitar of the sky

Your wireless telegraphy
Attracts words
As a rosebush the bees

During the night
The Seine no longer flows

Telescope or bugle

EIFFEL TOWER

And it's a hive of words
Or an inkwell of honey

At the bottom of dawn
A spider with barbed-wire legs
Was making its web of clouds

My little boy
To climb the Eiffel Tower
You climb on a song

Do
re
mi
fa
sol
la
ti
do

We are up on top

A bird sings
in the telegraph
antennae

It's the wind
Of Europe
The electric wind

Over there

The hats fly away
They have wings but they don't sing

Jacqueline
Daughter of France
What do you see up there

The Seine is asleep
Under the shadow of its bridges

I see the Earth turning
And I blow my bugle
Toward all the seas

On the path
Of your perfume
All the bees and the words go their way

On the four horizons
Who has not heard this song

I AM THE QUEEN OF THE DAWN OF THE POLES
I AM THE COMPASS THE ROSE OF THE WINDS THAT FADES
EVERY FALL
AND ALL FULL OF SNOW
I DIE FROM THE DEATH OF THAT ROSE
IN MY HEAD A BIRD SINGS ALL YEAR LONG
Vicente Huidobro

"Bolshoi Babylon" is the work of filmmakers Mark Franchetti and Nicholas Read. Franchetti has been a Moscow-based journalist for 18 years. He won a British Press Award for his coverage of the 2002 Moscow theater siege in which 130 hostages were killed. He's covered Russian politics and the war in Ukraine. ~ Elizabeth Blair Lee

The irony was that my real enemy had been there all along right in front of me. Smiling crookedly and convincing me we were friends. Trying to seduce me for the thrill of the chase. Chastising me for not trusting him that first year in the tower stairs at the Academy… Telling me he loved me. And then tossing me aside the second I jeopardized his dreams. I wasn't what he had wanted all these years. I'd merely been a diversion in his pursuit of the crown.
I never should have trusted a prince. ~ Rachel E. Carter

If one who looked from a tower for a new star, watching for years the same part of the sky, suddenly saw it (quite by chance while thinking of other things), and knew it for the star for which he had hoped, how many millions of men would never care? ~ Lord Dunsany

Jacob looks like a totally normal young man. He's clearly intelligent. But having his day disrupted probably makes him feel the same way I would if I was suddenly told to bungee off the top of the Sears Tower. ~ Jodi Picoult

He grasped the knob. It was engraved with a wild rose
wound around a revolver, one of those great old guns from his
father and now lost forever.
Yet it will be yours again, whispered the voice of the Tower
and the voice of the roses - these voices were now one.
What do you mean ?
To this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath
his hand, and perhaps that was an answer. Roland opened the
door at the top of the Dark Tower.
He saw and understood at once, the knowledge falling
upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that
was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he
climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved
back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might
have been changed and time's curse lifted), but to that moment
in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his
thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed? How
many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip
that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan?
How many times would he travel it?
"Oh, no!" he screamed. "Please, not again! Have pity! Have
mercy!"
The hands pulled him forward regardless. The hands of the
Tower knew no mercy.
They were the hands of Gan, the hands of ka, and they
knew no mercy. ~ Stephen King

Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary. ~ Oscar Wilde

It is unanimously agreed that statistics depends somehow on probability. But, as to what probability is and how it is connected with statistics, there has seldom been such complete disagreement and breakdown of communication since the Tower of Babel. Doubtless, much of the disagreement is merely terminological and would disappear under sufficiently sharp analysis. ~ Leonard J. Savage

There is an attraction and a charm inherent in the colossal that is not subject to ordinary theories of art ... The tower will be the tallest edifice ever raised by man. Will it therefore be imposing in its own way? ~ Gustave Eiffel

Trees have from time immemorial been closely associated with magic. These stout members of the vegetable kingdom may stand for as long as a thousand years, and tower far above our mortal heads. As such they are symbols and keepers of unlimited power, longevity, and timelessness. An untouched forest, studded with trees of all ages, sizes and types, is more than a mysterious, magical place - it is one of the energy reservoirs of nature. Within its boundaries stand ancient and new sentinels, guardians of the universal force which has manifested on the the Earth ... ~ Scott Cunningham

My blood was in a ferment within me, my heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly; I was all expectancy and wonder; I was tremulous and waiting; my fancy fluttered and circled about the same images like martins round a bell-tower at dawn; I dreamed and was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling, of young and surging life. ~ Ivan Turgenev

Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.
Brown nodded. "I think this is it. ~ Stephen King

Pandora's Box
Longing has a language
that is all her own.
The language of skin,
the language of flowers.
I am a body of longing,
a vessel of language.
For you, I am calamity
in a locked box
where the key is still turning.
For you, I am a mistress
in her ivory tower humming.
For you, I am a songbird
preening her feathers.
For you, for you,
I am a bed of roses,
blooming. ~ Lang Leav

A close associate of his gave an interview in which the book was described as quotes 'fiction from being to end'. I suffered trial by tabloid for a couple of weeks, lots of insults in the press, in the columns - this man should be put in the tower and so on. ~ Anthony Holden

She looked, and a scarlet butterfly flew away from her, away down the length of the tower, and then another, another, an unraveling scarf of butterflies like winged blood. ~ Tanith Lee

when they first met. It was just past the end of the third month of training, the midpoint, before they were interrupted again. Spring should have come, but this far north, and in the Low Lands in particular, the only indication of this was a sprinkle of rain mixing with the snow occasionally. Such a storm was passing through toward the end of the daily training session in the tower when a commotion could be heard in the main room down stairs. The sound alone was enough to put Myn on guard. ~ Joseph R. Lallo

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on the top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. ~ Raymond Chandler