Best Monument Quotes & Sayings

Obelisk?" "It's my favorite word." "Really?" "One of them, at least. Look at it." I look. "That is one straight-up, upstanding, powerful word. Unique, original, and kind of stealthy because it doesn't really sound like what it is. It's a word that surprises you and makes you think, Oh. All right then. It commands respect, but it's also modest. Not like 'monument' or 'tower.' " He shakes his head. "Pretentious bastards." I don't say anything because I used to love words. I loved them and was good at arranging them. Because of this, I felt protective of all the best ones. But now all of them, good and bad, frustrate me. — Jennifer Niven

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end. — Edward Abbey

must reason your way through the problem. Using line only, draw one simple geometric shape, such as a square, triangle or circle. Without overlapping or intersecting, draw a different shape. Now, draw another. Choose your favorite. Make the other 2 like your favorite. Enlarge one of the shapes. Reduce one of them. Make one shape touch one edge of the page. Make the other — Paper Monument

I am Providence, and Providence is myself together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak! — H.P. Lovecraft

Lord, you call me to live in the world without embracing the ways of the world. Help me to live in a way that preserves my freedom to follow you wherever and however you lead. If I should leave behind a monument, may it be a reminder to others of faith and not foolishness. — Ann Spangler

Boswell's Johnson is the word made flesh ... an extemporaneous man talking himself into the thick of every occasion (in a world ofoccasions if nothing else) and therefore no monument at all but all that can be saved of a man alive in the pages of a book. — Marvin Mudrick

Italy, despite its earthiness and charm, can never be New Jersey. Here we value evolution and change; Italy, while it warms the heart, is a monument to the past. In America we change our rooms as often as our fashions. In Italy you're likely to find throw pillows older than the Shroud of Turin. It's just a different way to live. — Adriana Trigiani

America acknowledged the greatness of Confucius through a trio of ancient lawgivers - Moses flanked by Confucius to his right and Solon on his left - on the monument to "Justice, the Guardian of Liberty" displayed on the eastern pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. — Patrick Mendis

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism. — Karen Abbott

A Sonnet is a
moment's
monument,
Memorial from the
Soul's eternity
To one dead
deathless hour. — Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious. You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them. — Samuel West

Declaring the San Gabriel Mountains a national monument will make this natural wonder more accessible. It will welcome people from all walks of life and maintain the mountains' wild character at the same time. — Frances Beinecke

Every word he wrote would be strong with that sweet purity and simplicity that was his gift alone, placing him higher than any living poet, secure on his pedestal apart from the world, like a great silent god above the little dwarfs of men tossed hither and thither in the stream of life. From the crystal clearness of his brain the images became words, and the words became magic, and the whole was transcendent of beauty, one thread touching another, alike in their perfection and their certitude of immortality. Thus it seemed to me he was not a living figure of flesh and blood, but a monument to the national pride of his country, his England, and now and then he would bow gravely from his pedestal and scatter to the people a small quantity of his thought, which they would grub for on their poor rough ground, then clasp to their hungry hearts as treasure. — Daphne Du Maurier

was far too young to be bugged, stalked, and murdered. I had never been to Bora Bora or finished In Search of Lost Time or run naked around the Washington Monument or gone skiing with Karl Lagerfeld. I had so much living to do. — Karin Tanabe

The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument may be distant from our shores, but it will help us understand how healthy marine ecosystems work and how we can revive troubled seas closer to home. — Frances Beinecke

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery. — R. Buckminster Fuller

New York City is a great monument to the power of money and greed ... a race for rent. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Not a thousand years ago, it was illegal to teach a slave to read. Not a thousand years ago, the Supreme Court decided that separate could not be equal. And today, as we sit here, no one is learning anything in this country. You see a nation which is the leader of the rest of the world, that had to pay the price of that ticket, and the price of that ticket is we're sitting in the most illiterate nation in the world. THE MOST ILLITERATE NATION IN THE WORLD. A monument to illiteracy. And if you doubt me, all you have to do is spend a day in Washington. I am serious as a heart attack. — James Baldwin

The San Gabriel monument expands our natural heritage, but there is more in need of safeguarding - extraordinary places like Utah's Greater Canyonlands. — Frances Beinecke

Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. — Thomas Pynchon

George McGovern, for all his mistakes ... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon, — Hunter S. Thompson

To avoid a future of war, crime, and bankruptcy, the individual must begin to plan his own destiny, and the best source for the necessary information comes down to us through the writings of the ancients. The greatest knowledge of all time should be available ... in a book that would be a monument, not merely a coffin. — Manly Hall

The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institution may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest purposes. — George Washington

I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have giventhemselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States. — Susan B. Anthony

Winter Liar by Liam Doyle the Incubus
What come once here will never come again,
no matter monument nor memory;
all sunwarmed green succumbs to winter's wind.
And you, my love, were also my best friend,
and had your life to live. The tragedy
was not just my youth's recklessness, although
I trusted much to impulse, whim, freedom,
a destiny excluding doom. Frankly,
youth can be our insanity. But now I'm cured
of that fever, although the price was high;
and chilly April wind can only sigh
at my regrets, yet sun will brighten wind so,
one knows that soon green stirs, and wild bees hum.
And summer once more will make winter liar,
but I won't warm. You're all I'll ever desire. — Juliet Dark

She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid. — Anne Sexton

To engage human energy, human skill, and human talent in the service of peace, for the alternative is unthinkable - war, destruction, and desolation; and to build a world community which will stand as a lasting monument to the millions of men and women, to such devoted and distinguished world citizens and fighters for peace as the late Dag Hammarskjold, who have given their lives that we may live in happiness and peace ... — Albert Lutuli

North Carolina has a monument to [Peter Francisco], and no one knows that. That's the kind of stuff that drives me. — Travis Bowman

To move forward today, you must learn to say good-bye to yesterday's hurts, tragedies and baggage. You can't build a monument to past problems and fail forward. — John C. Maxwell

But with one exception, all things pass from this world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in a world beyond this world of time and dust and forgetting. — Dean Koontz

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery. — W.B.Yeats

Your mother hollers that you're going to miss the bus. She can see it coming down the street. You don't stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don't thank her for being a good, kind, patient mother. Of course not
you vault down down the stairs and make a run for the corner.
Only if it's the last time you'll ever see your mother, you sort of start to wish you'd stopped and did those things. Maybe even missed the bus.
But the bus was barreling down our street so I ran. — Emmy Laybourne

He met her because I didn't show up that day and he went in my place. If they get married, I should be the best man. I am Invisible Cupid, so where's my monument to love? — Jarod Kintz

I will set up my name in the place where the names of famous men are written, and where no man's name is written yet I will raise a monument to the gods. — Anonymous

I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely. — Lee Siegel

Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument. — Charles Caleb Colton

Whoever uplifts civilization is rich though he die penniless, and future generations will erect his monument. — Orison Swett Marden

The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument. — Honore De Balzac

to support this privileged class as long as they kept up their end of the bargain with effective rituals. But after 650, deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion began reducing crop yields. The working classes, the farmers and monument builders, may have suffered increasing hunger and disease, even as the rulers hogged an ever-larger share of resources. The society was heading for a crisis. Diamond writes: "We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities." (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.) — Douglas Preston

There are some monuments where the land is so widespread, they just encompass as much as possible. And the integral part of the - the precious part, so to speak - I guess all land is precious, but the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil, will not be despoiled. But there are parts of the monument lands where we can explore without affecting the overall environment. — George W. Bush

Moreover, the sciences are monuments devoted to the public good; each citizen owes to them a tribute proportional to his talents. While the great men, carried to the summit of the edifice, draw and put up the higher floors, the ordinary artists scattered in the lower floors, or hidden in the obscurity of the foundations, must only seek to improve what cleverer hands have created. — Charles-Augustin De Coulomb

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.
[Letter to the Millicent (Rogers) Library, February 22, 1894] — Mark Twain

Under the dark evening sky, the skyscrapers seemed to become gigantic natural monoliths, and all the super-sized structures that so dominated the city, that so marked Coruscant as a monument to the ingenuity of the reasoning species, seemed somehow the mark of folly, of futile pride striving against the vastness and majesty beyond the grasp of any mortal. — R.A. Salvatore

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters. — Jerome Lawrence