Behind The Curtains Quotes & Sayings

Where thinking is isolated without free exchange with other minds and can no longer expand, delusion may follow. Whenever ideas are compartmentalized, behind and between curtains, the process of continual alert confrontation of facts and reality is hampered. The system freezes, becomes rigid, and dies of delusion. — Joost A.M. Meerloo

We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all. — Rene Magritte

I remember asking one of the [cyber experts], I said, "Knowing what you know, and you exist behind the curtains so to speak, and you see behind the curtain, do you look at the world differently? Do you feel you have an upper hand?" He just started laughing and said, "Man, people have no idea how exposed they are, how vulnerable, and what's possible." — Chris Hemsworth

Those same people, when they leave the theater, when they look behind the curtains they are curious about their neighbors, they can guess if their neighbors are siblings or a couple, how old they are, what their occupation is. They are curious about each other and they can understand each other without being fed information. Why should it be different in cinema? — Abbas Kiarostami

Better, Josef, far better, to have the courage to change your convictions. Duty and faithfulness are shams, curtains to hide behind. Self-liberation means a sacred no, even to duty. — Irvin D. Yalom

It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act. — Victor Hugo

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice ... incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. — Robertson Davies

I had this vision of the two of us holding hands or getting into some light petting behind shower curtains or up in the fencing aisle or some shit. — Susan Juby

Brannagh Maloney had lived with disappearances all her life. They were as familiar to her as the changing of the Fundy tides. People who disappeared left cast-off shadows of themselves, murky tremblings that slunk out of corners on drizzly autumn afternoons. They lurked offstage, silent or sighing or reaching out to run a finger across her arm. They were the curtains fluttering in the window on a breezeless morning, the musty scent that arose when opening an abandoned cellar door.
LET THE SHADOWS FALL BEHIND YOU (Kunati Books) — Kathy-Diane Leveille

Outside, the Air was Alert and Bright and Hot ... She could see the pattern of the cross-stitch flowers from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on Ammu's cheek. She could hear the blue cross-stitch afternoon.
The slow ceiling fan.
The sun behind the curtains.
The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in a dangerous dzzzzzzzzzzzz.
A disbelieving lizard's blink.
High-stepping chickens in the yard.
The sound of the sun crinkling the washing.Crisping white bed-sheets. Stiffened starched saris. Off white and gold.
Red ants on yellow stones.
A hot cow feeling hot. Ahmoo in the distance. — Arundhati Roy

The last lingering shadow of the Jesuit, gliding behind curtains and concealing himself in cupboards, faded from my young life about the time when I first caught a distant glimpse of the late Father Bernard Vaughan. He was the only Jesuit I ever knew in those days; and as you could generally hear him half a mile away, he seemed to be ill-selected for the duties of a curtain-glider. — G.K. Chesterton

The people who lived behind those clean lace curtains in row after row of identical boxes were newspaper readers, and every word in at any rate my newspaper must be clear and comprehensible to them, must be interesting to them, must encourage them to break away from littleness, stimulate their ambition, help them to want to build a better land. — Arthur Christiansen

If the Greeks had left no tragedies behind for us, the highest reach of their power would be unknown. The three poets who were able to sound the depths of human agony were able also to recognize and reveal it as tragedy. The mystery of evil, they said, curtains that of which "every man whose soul is not a clod hath visions." Pain could exalt and in tragedy for a moment men could have sight of a meaning beyond their grasp. "Yet had God not turned us in his hand and cast to earth our greatness," Euripides makes the old Trojan queen say in her extremity, "we would have passed away giving nothing to men. They would have found no theme for song in us nor made great poems from our sorrows." Why is the death of the ordinary man — Edith Hamilton

Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest's holes, or in the cupboard behind his mother's bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and smelt horribly of starling's dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in another, and on his knee a roll of paper. — Virginia Woolf

M. He has waited so long-and we all know what torture waiting can be! His whole life is waiting-waiting for the next walk in the open, a waiting that begins as soon as he is rested from the last one. Even his night consists of waiting; for his sleep is distributed throughout the whole
twenty-four hours of the day, with many a little nap on the grass in the garden, the sun shining down warm on his coat, or behind the curtains of his kennel, to break up and shorten the empty spaces of the day. — Thomas Mann

Only a fool will deny that an abundance of flowers can quicken a woman's blood, and that continuing sun can burn years off a man's back. The poverty of life here augments the power of those influences. We lose our vision, and move like wooden toys: one year we wash the curtains, the next we plant a row of cabbages behind the house; and then comes a summer like that one, with grass soft as rabbit fur, and flowers. — Joe Ashby Porter

The intruder took a step forward, and Moody's voice asked, "Severus Snape?" Then the dust figure rose from the end of the hall and rushed him, raising its dead hand.
"It was not I who killed you, Albus," said a quiet voice.
The jinx broke: The dust-figure exploded again, and it was impossible to make out the newcomer through the dense gray cloud it left behind.
Harry pointed his wand into the middle of it.
"Don't move!"
He had forgotten the portrait of Mrs. Black: At the sound of his yell, the curtains hiding her flew open and she began to scream, "Mudbloods and filth dishonoring my house--"
Ron and Hermione came crashing down the stairs behind Harry, wants pointing, like his, at the unknown man now standing with his arms raised in the hall below.
"Hold your fire, it's me, Remus!"
"Oh, thank goodness," said Hermione weakly, pointing her wand at Mrs. Black instead; with a bang, the curtains swished shut again and silence fell. — J.K. Rowling

Well, when I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten year old. That was all the ambience I got at ten years old ... I think! And I always wanted to be a certain, a bit similar to that. But I didn't want to sell pizza. — Robert Plant

When you're in prison, there's no hiding. These women are not hiding behind towels and shower curtains. They go to the bathroom with no doors on the stalls. It would actually look weird, if these women were hiding. — Laura Prepon

Nothing will serve you better than a strong work ethic. Nothing. And it's something that you can't teach. You have to be thrown into it, where you're going to sink or swim. It's amazing how self-correcting and how clarifying a good, hard, shitty job can be. Because at the end of the day, any profession I've seen anybody in, when you peer behind the curtains of Oh, wouldn't that be a great job? Wow, what an amazing thing, a philanthropic endeavor! it really just comes down to It's a f**king grind. — Robert Downey Jr.

Good night. What? Those ladies behind those windows? Dream, monsieur, cheap dream, a trip to the Indies! Those persons perfume themselves with spices. You go in, they draw the curtains, and the navigation begins. The gods come down onto the naked bodies and the islands are set adrift, lost souls crowned with the tousled hair of palm trees in the wind. Try it. — Albert Camus

So imagine a fire going
wood snapping the way it does when it's a little green - the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains
and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys
and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare. — Steven Millhauser

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice. And what was the source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smoke screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the difference between life and death, were the curtains drawing down between the world and me? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

An increasing cackle of complaints, orders, and jests, and what to a European would have been bad language, came from behind the curtains. Here was evidently a woman used to command. — Rudyard Kipling

It used to happen in villages and towns in China that they would have - I guess you'd call them beauty contests - where all of the women of a particular village or town would be seated behind these screens or curtains with only their feet showing. — Lisa See

The Witch's Life
When I was a child
there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.
All day she peered from her second story
window
from behind the wrinkled curtains
and sometimes she would open the window
and yell: Get out of my life!
She had hair like kelp
and a voice like a boulder.
I think of her sometimes now
and wonder if I am becoming her. — Anne Sexton

The young man who closes the door behind him, who draws the curtains, and there in silence pleads with God for help, should first pour out his soul in gratitude for health, for friends, for loved ones, for the gospel, for the manifestations of God's existence. He should first count his many blessings and name them one by one. — David O. McKay

I always feel that there is a curtain, you know, that if I could just peek behind the curtain I'd see how the world really works. And since I haven't had it I have to write about it instead. — Charles De Lint

Half happy. We wander among Mayflowers, among the lonely paths in the woods. We hover over gatherings of people, over the scene of accidents, gardens, festivals. We cower in chimneys of dwelling places and behind the bed curtains. Give me your hand. We don't associate with each other, but we see and hear everything that is going on in the world. We know that everything is stupidity, everything that men do and contend for, and we laugh at it. — Frank Wedekind

I put complains aside and replace each of them with trials and to my surprise, some things I see as difficult were not so before! I conclude that "Success resides behind the curtains of complains; tear those pieces of complains away and you will see the stage of your dreams clearly"! — Israelmore Ayivor

Today, we could only look and try to believe the sight of our eyes. We pulled the heavy curtains from the windows and we saw that the rooms were small, and we thought that not more than twelve men could have lived here. We thought it strange that men had been permitted to build a house for only twelve.
Never had we seen rooms so full of light. The sunrays danced upon colors, colors, more colors than we thought possible, we who had seen no houses save the white ones, the brown ones and the grey. There were great pieces of glass on the walls, but it was not glass, for when we looked upon it we saw our own bodies and all the things behind us, as on the face of a lake. There were strange things which we had never seen and the use of which we do not know. — Ayn Rand

It is all around us, hidden in plain sight. It is walking our streets, supplying shops and supermarkets, working in fields, factories or nail bars, trapped in brothels or cowering behind the curtains in an ordinary street: slavery. — Theresa May

Someone once said that there's nothing more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman, but I think that's only true until the women get revenge. And I'm done with spending my days hidden away behind heavy curtains and wrought-iron gates. I want to burst forth into the sun and unfold and blossom there, like a waterfall cutting through rock. No more beautiful dead girls. No more sculptures made of women's bones. Never again. — Kayla Bashe

There is someone who looks after us
from behind the curtain.
In truth we are not here, this is our shadow. — Rumi

It costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in ... and if he [the sun] is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided. — Henry David Thoreau

Echo and Shadow

A room
and a room. And between them

she leans in the doorway
to say something,

lintel bright above her face,
threshold dark beneath her feet,

her hands behind her head gathering
her hair to tie and tuck at the nape.

A world and a world.

Dying and not dying.
And between them
the curtains blowing
and the shadows they make on her body,

a shadow of birds, a single flock,
a myriad body of wings and cries
turning and diving in complex unison.
Shadow of bells,

or the shadow of the sound
they make in the air, mornings, evenings,
everywhere I wait for her,

as even now her voice
seems a lasting echo
of my heart's calling me home, its story
an ocean beyond my human beginning,

each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging. — Li-Young Lee

They leave things behind sometimes, the guests. A bottle of scent. A crumpled handkerchief. A pearl button that fell off a dress and rolled under a bed. And sometimes they leave other sorts of things. Things you can't see. A sigh trapped in a corner. Memories tangled in the curtains. A sob fluttering against the windowpane like a bird that flew in and can't get back out. I can feel these things. They dart and crouch and whisper. — Jennifer Donnelly

I am the Wizard of Oz of housewives (in that I am both "Great and Terrible" and because I sometimes hide behind the curtains — Jenny Lawson

I've lost the TARDIS as well.'
I [Amy] was outraged. Considering my husband was dying and we were stranded in the past, the Doctor seemed fairly calm about things. 'Someone's nicked it!'
'Not so much, no.' The Doctor looked awkward. 'There's a mechanism ... thingy. If the TARDIS senses a threat it removes itself from the scene. First sign of danger, it goes and hides behind the curtains.'
'Whose genius idea was that?'
The Doctor swallowed, embarrassed. He claims to be the last of the most advanced race in the universe. Sometimes, I'm just not convinced. — James Goss

Haunted trees
covered behind the curtains of their own leaves
stare at the dark
from the fringe of streets. — Suman Pokhrel

The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person's company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one's existence - for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings. Hands — Lionel Shriver

I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin ... — Shirley Jackson

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains. — Bruce Chatwin

A latent warmth flickers behind those golden, burning rings. The Cold struggles to squelch it, shrouding it with the frigid Night. It almost smothers it entirely.
Almost.
But I know it is still there. It is like the heat of an unassuming coal beneath a blanket of graying ash. It is hidden, but not extinguished.
I can feel it. I can feel its gentle breath against my skin, like distant sunlight during newborn spring.
I can hear it. I can hear it reaching to divide the curtains of shadow on his face, like the whispers of blossoms unfolding.
I can see it. I can see it behind his fiery eyes, flickering like a starlight-dappled pool, dancing in and out of view.
It is buried. Buried, but burning nonetheless. Buried but burning, like one last hope in my heart. One last Ember in the dark.
-The Penitent God — S.G. Night