Quotes & Sayings About Cloisters

I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day. — Bell Hooks

Have you ever observed a tiger? A true breed like the ones in the Chrysanthemum? Not those kittenish sorts like those in our cloisters. They're all muscle and sinew, with jaws powerful enough to break the strongest man, yet if you see them stalk prey, if you see them hunt- the sheer strength gives them more grace than the most refined of delicate creatures. That's Nemesis. — S.J. Kincaid

Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one's stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me. — Malcolm Lowry

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of environment, and the dullness of tutors and professors matters very little when one can loiter in the grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute-like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in the green meadow, among the strange snakespotted fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gateway of Laud's building in the College of St. John. — Oscar Wilde

For I was reared in the great city, pent with cloisters dim,and saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shall thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and al things in himselfGreat universal teacher! He shall moldThy spirit and by giving , make it ask. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I love rhymes; I love to write a poem about New York and rhyme 'oysters' with 'The Cloisters.' And 'The lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful.' I just feel a sort of small triumph. — Garrison Keillor

There's an extra storey between the second and third floors of the Cloisters. (Penny calls it "bonus content.") — Rainbow Rowell

Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider. — Sinclair Lewis

Intercourse is after all man's best teacher. "Know thyself" is an excellent maxim; but even self-knowledge cannot be perfected in closets and cloisters
nor amid lake scenery, and on the sunny side of the mountains. Men who seldom mix with their fellow-creatures are almost sure to be one-sided
the victims of fixed ideas, that sometimes lead to insanity. — William Matthews

The scientific community having made a rapid ascent from deep poverty to great affluence, from academe's cloisters to Washington's high councils, still tends to be a bit excitable - not unlike a nouveau riche in a fluctuating market. — Daniel S. Greenberg

Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters. — David Byrne

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step. — Honore De Balzac

But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight; Casting a dim religious light. — John Milton

despite a conducive environment and comforting faith, there is unease among the rooms' inhabitants, a rising tide of something close to fear. They know that a terrible ghost is abroad in the cloisters of Microsoft. The — Glyn Moody

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough. — Lauren F. Winner

She was beginning to stir questions in me that I'd spent all my life refusing to ask, since the day I had looked down from the window at the broken body of the schoolboy on the flagstones a long way below, while a master hurried from the cloisters with his black gown flapping in the winter wind, to see what had happened: the day when I was suddenly old enough to understand that I had a choice. I could either do what that other boy had done, or I could spend the rest of my life outside society, where it was safe — Adam Hall

Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone. — Alan Bennett

Sweet are the oases in Sahara; charming the isle-groves of August prairies; delectable pure faith amidst a thousand perfidies; but sweeter, still more charming, most delectable, the dreamy Paradise of Bachelors, found in the stony heart of stunning London.
In mild meditation pace the cloisters; take your pleasure, sip your leisure, in the garden waterward; go linger in the ancient library; go worship in the scultured chapel; but little have you seen, just nothing do you know, not the sweet kernel have you tasted, till you dine among the banded Bachelors, and see their convivial eyes and glasses sparkle. Not dine in bustling commons, during term time, in the hall; but tranquilly, by private hint, at a private table; some fine Templar's hospitably invited guest. — Herman Melville

Farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters - where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives, as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness. — Erik Erikson

When he thought about how he had been slighted, condescended to, manipulated and deceived, he became angry. Obedience was a monastic virtue, but outside the cloisters it had its drawbacks, he thought bitterly. The world of power and property demanded that a man be suspicious, demanding, and insistent. — Ken Follett

Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth. — Louis L'Amour

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The search for myself is ended. I am buried in the world, I knew I would find my place there one day, the old world cloisters me, victorious. I am happy, I knew I would be happy one day. But I am not wise. For the wise thing now would be to let go, at this instant of happiness. And what do I do? I go back again to the light, to the fields I so longed to love, to the sky all astir with little white clouds as white and light as snowflakes, to the life I could never manage, through my own fault perhaps, through pride, or pettiness, but I don't think so. — Samuel Beckett