Walls Of Benin Quotes

Emotional intensity seemed to meet and mingle with an air of indifference, even of cruelty within these ancient walls. Youth and Time here had made, as it were, some compromise. ~ Anthony Powell

Some of the most vivid writing in America is on the walls of restrooms. The men's room in the Albany, N.Y. railroad station, for instance, should be preserved as a national shrine: there is more wit there than in any Broadway hit! ~ Truman Capote

Not stones, nor wood, nor the art of artisans make a state; but where men are who know how to take care of themselves, these are cities and walls. ~ John Quincy Adams

We came to the house, and it is an old house, full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls. ~ Charles Dickens

As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face ... As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Cooper leaned forward and caressed my cheek. "You have a million walls up, baby. When I saw them the first time you walked into Spanish class, I told myself you were too much effort, but I was a fool. You're worth every ounce of trouble you give me."
"Oh, and I give you trouble as part of my devious plan?"
"No doubt about that. There's your finger. Here's me wrapped around it. ~ Bijou Hunter

In Charly Cruz's garage there was a mural painted on one of the cement walls. The mural was six feet tall and maybe ten feet long and showed the Virgin of Guadalupe in the middle of a lush landscape of rivers and forests and gold mines and silver mines and oil rigs and giant cornfields and wheat fields and vast meadows where cattle grazed. The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin's eyes was open and the other eye was closed. ~ Roberto Bolano

Emptying Town"

I want to erase your footprints
from my walls. Each pillow
is thick with your reasons. Omens

fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman
in a party hat, clinging
to a tin-foil balloon. Shadows

creep slowly across the tar, someone yells, "Stop!"
and I close my eyes. I can't watch

as this town slowly empties, leaving me
strung between bon-voyages, like so many clothes
on a line, the white handkerchief

stuck in my throat. You know the way Jesus

rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny,
the way he points to it. I'm afraid

the way I'll miss you will be this obvious.

I have a friend who everyone warns me
is dangerous, he hides
bloody images of Jesus
around my house, for me to find

when I come home; Jesus
behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked

into the mirror. He wants to save me
but we disagree from what. My version of hell
is someone ripping open his shirt

and saying, Look what I did for you. ~ Nick Flynn

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever. ~ Julian Barnes

Words present us with little pictures, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people
and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people
an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets. ~ Marcel Proust

Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor. ~ Anthony Marra

Some hangovers are so horrific that it seems the whole world rocks and sways around you, the very walls creaking with the motion. Others are relatively mild and it just turns out that in your drunkenness a collection of Vikings have thrown you onto a heap of coiled ropes in their longship and set to sea.
"Oh, you bastards." I cracked open an eye to see a broad sail flapping overhead and gulls wheeling far above me beneath a mackerel sky. ~ Mark Lawrence

Creosote made Mandy think of the thrill of rushing through a garden sprinkler as a kid, of playing washer toss in the backyard, of spending nights in the neighbors' huge in-ground swimming pool when she was twelve, throwing glow sticks in the turquoise water during Canada Day block parties. She thought of Jud for a moment, how he'd loved doing all those things when he was a kid, but how, as he got older, it was all about popularity, sports, a life of illusion… and without warning, a totally different kind of memory filled her mind – the dull feeling of her head hitting the concrete walls near the wood shop at her old high school, the sounds of kids laughing, the sharp smell of sawdust, the buzzing of electric sanders nearby, the sound of Jud laughing while he beat her up… without realizing it, she'd started crying noiselessly. ~ Rebecca McNutt

If ghosts had heads, my walls would be covered with mounted ghost heads. Okay, that sounds pretty scary and kind of gross, but anyway, I could handle a little late-night fright by myself. I ~ J.L. Bryan

... opened the door, and stepped into a memaid's grotto, into a drowned girl's sanctuary. The walls were tiled in glittering blue and silver, like scales, arching together to form the high, pointed dome of the roof. It was a flower frozen in the moment before it could open; it was a teardrop turned to crystal before it could fall. Little nooks were set into the walls, filled with candles, which cast a dancing light over everything they touched. ~ Seanan McGuire

I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me? ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Through other people's bodies she felt neither love nor hate distinctly. Most consciously she felt - she had drunk sweet wine at luncheon - a desire for water. "A beaker of cold water, a beaker of cold water," she repeated, and saw water surrounded by walls of shining glass. ~ Virginia Woolf

Our answer, our opportunity, our chance to change the world has to come from the poetry that is already written on the walls of the soul. ~ Michael Meade

For the first time since we had crossed the border, I felt like I was back. After all these years, I was home again, standing on the soil of my ancestors. I sat against one of the house's clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land ... it surprised me. I'd been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I handn't. And, under the bony glow of a half-moon, I sensed [the land] humming under my feet. Maybe [it] hand't forgotten me either. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Across the river were two clouds in your eyes; and my kisses floated ascend from the heights of the sacred mountain -
there in the valley, where uncrowned hope of green fields and saffron came from flowers - delicate reverberations of rock walls we listened to our words of love. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

He was almost at his door when Vik's earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. "Vik?"
He reached Vik's doorway as Vik was backing out of it. "Tom," he breathed, "it's an abomination."
Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too.
Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik's bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt's solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW?
Tom began to laugh.
"She didn't do it to the bunk," Vik insisted. "She must've done something to our processors."
That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved.
He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik's more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that t ~ S.J. Kincaid

In the building of walls to protect ourselves - we have managed to keep ourselves from the best in this life. And so the line is drawn whether to live and to be broken and unbroken or to breathe but not live at all. Perhaps there is no such thing as brokenness, afterall. Perhaps it is all just called living. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat ... giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

She didn't know how to react to his non-sexualisation of her, and as she stared at his silent face, she recognized a familiar pain, a sense of not being there. ~ Laura Gentile

Architecture is the "magic of four walls," he writes, referring to its power to fundamentally transform how certain crimes are judged and how their perpetrators can be sentenced. He ~ Geoff Manaugh

Love one another, fathers," the elder taught (as far as Alyosha could recall afterwards). "Love God's people. For we are not holier than those in the world because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, but, on the contrary, anyone who comes here, by the very fact that he has come, already knows himself to be worse than all those who are in the world, worse than all on earth...And the longer a monk lives within his walls, the more keenly he must be aware of it. For otherwise he had no reason to come here. But when he knows that he is not only worse than all those in the world, but is also guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all, for all human sins, the world's and each person's, only then will the goal of our unity be achieved. For you must know, my dear ones, that each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth. This knowledge is the crown of the monk's path, and of every man's path on earth. For monks are not a different sort of men, but only such as all men on earth ought also to be. Only then will our hearts be moved to a love that is infinite, universal, and that knows no satiety. Then each of us will be able to gain the whole world by love and wash away the world's sins with his tears...Let each of you keep close company with his heart, let each of you confess to himself untiringly. D ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I had read another book, called Chromophobia, by David Batchelor, around this time, and he described how the modernist design aesthetic - the white kitchen, white floors, white walls - is a denial of our humanity. The reason bathrooms are white, too, is not only so you know that they are clean, but also so you know that they are not what's inside of us. ~ Emily Spivack

The gospel is preached in the ears of all men; it only comes with power to some. The power that is in the gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher otherwise men would be converters of souls. Nor does it lie in the preacher's learning; otherwise it could consists of the wisdom of men. We might preach till our tongues rotted, till we should exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless there were mysterious power going with it – the Holy Ghost changing the will of man. O Sirs! We might as well preach to stone walls as preach to humanity unless the Holy Ghost be with the word, to give it power to convert the soul. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Temptation, if it is not to conquer, must not fall like a bomb against another bomb of instantaneous moral explosions, but against the strong walls of an impregnable fortress strongly built up, stone by stone, beginning at that distant day when the foundations were first laid. ~ Maria Montessori

On bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him, like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream. Sometimes they receded of their own accord, and the room he lay in grew impossibly large, terrorizing him with the specter of his own insignificance. That too made him cry out. ~ Arundhati Roy

People", Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, "by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It make us feel as if we're in control. Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man's influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person's influence. ~ Brandon Sanderson

It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia and my mother and Prim, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the times to run away tho the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam the hammers make the coffin. But I'm held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often I've seen them, ringed around our kitchen table and I thought, Why don't they leave? Why do they stay to watch?
And now I know. It's because you have no choice. ~ Suzanne Collins

Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more. ~ Jeannette Walls

Cordelia – "Why so rough?"
Aral – "It's very poor. It was the town center during the time Isolation. And it hasn't been touched by renovation, minimal water, no electricity choked with refuse."
"Mostly human," added Peoter tartly.
"Poor?" Asked Cordelia bewildered. "No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?"
"It's not of course," answered Vorkosigan.
"Then how can anyone get their schooling?" Cordelia
"They don't."
Cordelia stared. "I don't understand, how do they get their jobs?"
"A few escape to the service, the rest prey on each other mostly." Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. "Have you no poverty on Beta colony?"
"Poverty? Well some people have more money than others, but no comm consuls…?"
Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. "Is not owning a comm consul the lowest standard of living you can imagine?" He said in wonder.
"It's the first article in the constitution! 'Access to information shall not be abridged.'"
"Cordelia, these people barely have access to food, clothing and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots and squat in buildings that aren't economical to repair or tear down yet with the wind whistling through the walls."
"No air conditioning?"
"No heat in the winter is a bigger problem here."
"I suppose so. You people don't really have summer. How do they call for help when they are sick or hurt?"
"What help?" Vorkosigan was growing grim. "If they're s ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn't shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn't stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive. ~ Louise Erdrich

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us. ~ Jeannette Walls

Lord Peter's library was one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London. Its scheme was black and primrose; its walls were lined with rare editions, and its chairs and Chesterfield sofa suggested the embraces of the houris. In one corner stood a black baby grand, a wood fire leaped on a wide old-fashioned hearth, and the Sèvres vases on the chimneypiece were filled with ruddy and gold chrysanthemums. To the eyes of the young man who was ushered in from the raw November fog it seemed not only rare and unattainable, but friendly and familiar, like a colourful and gilded paradise in a mediaeval painting ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Sometimes critics decry spirituality as individualism, but they miss the point. Spirituality is personal, yes. To experience God's spirit, to be lost in wonder, is something profound that we can all know directly and inwardly. That is not a problem. The real problem is that, in the last two centuries, religion has actually allowed itself to become privatized. In the same way that our political and economic concerns contracted from "we" to "me," so has our sense of God and faith. In many quarters, religion abandoned a prophetic and creative vision for humanity's common life in favor of an individual quest to get one's sorry ass to heaven. And, in the process, community became isolated behind the walls of buildings where worship experiences corresponded to members' tastes and preferences and confirmed their political views. ~ Diana Butler Bass

If you want to speak to someone you cannot touch, see, or hear, the voice of love will transmit with or without a phone. It crosses all borders and travels through time and walls. ~ Julieanne O'Connor

I'm susceptible to that sort of thing - to walls and flowers. You can probably get something more from a wall than a person sometimes. It's just put somewhere. ~ Ray Davies

I'm in love with his brother." Saying this out loud to Bea felt like jumping out of an airplane - thrilling and irreversible. In that instant Livia knew her love for Blake was as real as the church walls around her. ~ Debra Anastasia

Why are corporations so fleeting? ... Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies. ~ Jonah Lehrer

I've learned of life this bitter truth
Hope not between the crumbling walls Of mankind's gratitude to find repose,
But rather,
Build within thy own soul
Fortresses! ~ Georgia Douglas Johnson

But I, alas, do not know how to see sheep through the walls of boxes. Perhaps I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery