Bricks And Life Quotes & Sayings

Build your life brick upon brick,
Live a life of truth,
And you will look back on a life of truth.
Live a life of fantasy,
And you will look back on delusion. — Ming-Dao Deng

Good preservation is a life preserver thrown to us in a shipwreck. Good preservation keeps us in touch with the graces of this life. It's bricks and mortar, yes. It's arguments about true colors and authenticity and representation. But true preservation is like the hand that shelters a fire from the wind. It protects the spark of life.
Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax, Twice — Howard Mansfield

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop. — Chris Everheart

When you leave home to follow your dreams, your road will probably be riddled with potholes, not always paved in happy Technicolor bricks. You'll probably be kicked to the ground 150 million times and told you're nuts by friends and strangers alike. As you progress you may feel lonely or terrified for your physical and emotional safety. You may overestimate your own capabilities or fail to live up to them, and you'll surely fall flat on your face once in a while. — Kelly Cutrone

LEGO is universal. So many people enjoy it, from all different walks of life, all different ages, all different cultures. When I was in Africa, I had LEGO bricks with me and I met some people who had never heard of LEGO, they had never seen it before and yet as soon as I gave them a few bricks, they immediately got it. — Nathan Sawaya

Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick
and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave. — Mark Twain

Life was built from the bricks of these connections and milestones and moments where you tell your two best friends that you're about to have a child. — Christina Lauren

Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones ... It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Forty freaked me out. I didn't see it coming. My life was in a state of chaos - I was moving jobs and moving house - and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. — Graham Norton

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go. — Sarah Dessen

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco. — Nikolai Gogol

A little later Anastasia was sitting before her bedroom fire writing. It has a magic of its own - the bedroom fire. Not such a one as night by night warms hothouse bedrooms of the rich, but that which burns but once or twice a year. How the coals glow between the bars, how the red light shimmers on the black-lead bricks, how the posset steams upon the hob! Milk or tea, cocoa or coffee, poor commonplace liquids, are they not transmuted in the alembic of a bedroom fire, till they become nepenthe for a heartache or a philtre for romance? Ah, the romance of it, when youth forestalls to-morrow's conquest, when middle life forgets that yesterday is past for ever, when even querulous old age thinks it may still have its "honour and its toil"! — John Meade Falkner

I used myself, let nothing use me.
Like being on a private dole,
sometimes more like cutting bricks in Egypt.
What life there was, was mine,
now and again to lay
one hand on a warm brick
and touch the sun's ghost
with economical joy. — Adrienne Rich

Fate, they say, fate- the clay that molds the events of your life, and it was the same fate that had thrown the stone of her heart on the building of his expectations. But then wasn't it his fault that he had constructed the building of glass? Hadn't he failed to cement the bricks of his love with trust and colour them with security? There was no insurance for broken hearts, no ointment for wounded souls and there would never be one, he knew. — Faraaz Kazi

My relationship with brick-and-mortar shopping is, in general, unpleasant. I can't remember a time in my life when I could go to a physical store and find a variety of things in my size that excited me and fit my personal style. As a plus-size shopper at a typical mall, you're limited to at most five stores out of maybe 50 clothing retailers. That leaves us with very few options and, for people on a tight budget, pretty much no chance of comparison shopping. You take what you can get. — Lindy West

And the artist, Jaume Plensa's philosophy?" "No, not that." Philippe continued, his voice becoming quietly intimate. "I read an interview with him that touched me deeply. The feeling he expresses through this work is that letters are like bricks. They help us to construct our thoughts. He described his belief that our skin is permanently and invisibly tattooed with the text of our life experiences, and then someone comes along - a friend, a lover - who is able to decipher these tattoos." Biting — Patricia Sands

I heaved into being, came out of the stone, the bricks, and other elements, and took form. (Dark City Lights) — Jerrold Mundis

There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home. — Kobo Abe

The life you're meant to lead is worth fighting for. Worth crying for, even worth bleeding for. When you sing the right song, your life opens before you, and all the pain and sorrow become the bricks you build your castles with. — Heidi Cullinan

Moving on sometimes is the best way to take all the bricks that life throws at you, and building a castle to chillax — Coleen Innis

It felt like life had thrown a pie right in my face. And that pie was full of bricks. — Molly Harper

Nothing lasts forever. But there is new life; new colours, fresh words, new tunes to compose. There is now; time present, time future. We build with new bricks and hope our voices are heard, our music is sung and our love cherished for as long as it is offered. — Carol Drinkwater

In the moonlight David saw that Thoresby had become very peculiar indeed. Figs nestled among the leaves of beech-trees. Elder-trees were bowed down with pomegranates. Ivy was almost torn from walls by the weight of ripe blackberries growing upon it. Anything which had ever possessed any sort of life had sprung fruitfulness. Ancient, dried up frames had become swollen with sap and we putting out twigs, leaves, blossoms and fruit. Door-frames and doors were so distorted that bricks had been pushed out of place and some houses were in danger of collapsing altogether. The cart in the middle of the high street was a grove of silver birches. Its broken wheels put forth briar roses and nightingales sang on it. — Susanna Clarke

You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... — Kevin Brooks

Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod. — Thomas Huxley

Hospitals were to her a memento mori in bricks and mortar; an awful reminder of the inevitable end that was coming to all of us but which she felt was best ignored while one got on with the business of life. — Alexander McCall Smith

The world, with all its impossible variegation and the basic miracle of its existence, draws most mourners out of their grief and back into itself. The homosexual forsythia blooms; the young Irish dancers in Killarney dance, their arms as rigid as shovel handles; secret deals are done involving weapons or office space or crude oil or used cars or drugs; new lovers, believing they will never really have to get up, lie down together; the Large Hadron Collider smashes the Higgs boson into view; snow drapes its white stoles on the bare limbs of winter; the crack of the bat swung by a hefty Dominican pulls a crowd to its feet in Boston; bricks for the new hospital in Phnom Penh are laid in true courses; the single-engine Cessna lands safely in an Ohio alfalfa field during a storm. How can you resist? The true loss in only to the dying, and even the won't feel it when the dying's done. — Daniel Menaker

All my life's work will drain away without ever being realized. For a sculptor, working with their hands is crucial and hands must be supported by a strong and supple back. And I work with sturdy materials that need dexterity and strength to handle - metal and stone and sometimes even bricks! How do I do any of it now? — Radhika Mukherjee

I believed in Oxford, and cobblestoned squares, and old bricks thick with ivy,a nd rainy days curled up reading books. I believed in my mother's strong coffee and in the lonely, aching scent of early dawn before anyone else in my boardinghouse was awake. I believed in my favorite men's cardigan and the way the wind felt on the back of my neck. I believed in life as it lay before me, spinning out slowly, day after day of warm springs and thunderstorms and laughter. These were the things I believed in. — Simone St. James

The family home is where the deepest resentments grow, subtle, relentless as moss, the furring of surfaces organic and gradual, as though life were no longer flesh and blood but bricks and mortar, a suffocation. — Charles Lambert

If scattered and forsaken bricks are enough to build a house, a wise man will collect them and build one — Kenneth Mahuka

Old friends are the bricks and mortar of your life. — Nora Roberts

I think your life is governed not by the bricks or mortar around you, it's governed by who holds your hand and who spits in your eye. — David McCallum

No secret can remain hidden for ever. Silently and patiently, it waits in the dark. It lets you build your life, carefully stacking the bricks one by one, and then it appears. It deals its blow and everything crumbles. That's why it remains intact and incorruptible in time, waiting for its ultimate destiny to be revealed. — Stefanos Livos

There are those who say that spiritual enlightenment is achieved through the denial of oneself; you must deny yourself many things, go and live in a mountaintop, never mingle with other people, talk to the birds..but I say to you, why should you dismantle your home? Where is the meaning in removing the bricks from your walls one by one? What is the purpose in uprooting your floors? Is there any significance in only allowing yourself a tin roof and a muddy bed? Why deny your house its structure? A truly enlightened soul is strong enough, is bright enough to live and shine through, even in a beautiful house! There is no need to ransack the house in order to see an inner beauty etched against a distraught surrounding. A bright and beautiful soul can shine forth even from inside an equally beautiful surrounding. — C. JoyBell C.

Books
they come home hot in your hands and then by increments they warm your life, like heated bricks in a New England bed. — Robin R. Meyers