Quotes & Sayings About Building Scaffolding

The truth that writers secretly harbor is that all books are failures. We try to do something that can't be done. Words. Is that all we rely on? Smudgy ink marks on a page? Pallid wisps and blotches? Text as scaffolding trying to hold up worlds? Actually, no, it's not all we rely on. What's worse is our reliance on the reader. A writer is forever locked in an interdependent relationship. It's like building a bridge from opposite sides of a river - our flimsy words and their frail, overreaching imaginations. The bridge will never meet in the middle. It's not possible. Sometimes you haven't even decided on the same river. The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis missed in the middle by a matter of inches the first time around. They tried again and made it. Writers know we never will. — Julianna Baggott

Part of our skittishness about Christian perfection is linguistic confusion. The English word "perfect" has absorbed the Greek notion of "teleos". When the Greeks looked at a building's blueprint, they pictured the building whole and complete. They envisioned the blueprint finished down to the bathroom tile and announced, "Ah, this is perfect." The problem is that "teleos" suggests that perfection is something we can build or achieve. The Hebrews looked at the same blueprint more practically. They envisioned the process of building from hard hats to hammers, from scaffolding to skylights. "Ah," the Hebrews said. "This is perfect." The Hebrews and the early Christians understood perfection as a process, not a product. Our identity as Christians depends upon life lived in relationship with God, not upon the quality of our achievements. — Kenda Creasy Dean

The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building. — Benito Mussolini

To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion. — Arthur Honegger

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body. — Leo Tolstoy

The sky has stopped
offering you reasons to live and your heart is the rock
you threw through each window
of what's deserted you, so you turn
to the burnt out building inside you: the scaffolding
overhead, the fallen beams,
the unsound framework;


according to the blue that's printed on the inside of your arms
you have no plans, no plans
uncovered, or uncovering: the offing is emptying,


the horizon empty


now that your sanity is
a tarp or a bedsheet
in the rough hands of the wind,


now that everything is hooded
in drop cloth.


It didn't happen
overnight. Or maybe it did:


your heart, the rock;
your soul, the Gothic barn. — Olena Kalytiak Davis

My concentration span is truly that of a gnat. Some people have this ladder, and that's all there is - the ladder. I have the ladder, too, but there's a building around it with scaffolding, and lots of windows for me to peek into. Then suddenly I'll remember, 'Oh, there's the ladder. I should be concentrating on that.' — Natascha McElhone

I wouldn't mind a bit seeing all civilization crumble like a mason's scaffolding before the building was finished
— Gustave Flaubert

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it's said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow. — Valeria Luiselli

Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed. — Frederick Douglass

Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe