Many Castles Quotes & Sayings

By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated. — John Dewey

Life is the bad
with all the good.
The deadly sharks
with the beautiful sea stars.
The gigantic waves
with the sand castles.
The licorice
with the lemon and lime.
The loud lyrics
with the rhythm of the music.
The liver disease
with the love of a father and son.
It's life.
Sweet, beautiful,
wind on your face,
air in your lungs,
kisses on your lips.
life. — Lisa Schroeder

ON PROBLEMS
Our choicest plans
have fallen through,
our airiest castles
tumbled over,
because of lines
we neatly drew
and later neatly
stumbled over. — Piet Hein

She had been with her share of schemers and men who were forever building castles in the sky. All of those dreams made out of clouds; when it rained - and it always did - they were left with nothing but the soggy shirts on their backs. — Ayana Mathis

Do you ever feel that we are only building sand castles? Why do so many things happen to us? I am afraid the little we have left will be swept away, too. Why bother? — Sook Nyul Choi

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different. — Ben Hecht

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I'll build a castle. — Fernando Pessoa

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. — Susan Hill

Then again, the world had ended. So maybe it was time for adults to talk about building castles again. — Nick Cole

As castles went, this one looked as though it could be taken by a small squad of not very efficient soldiers. For defence, putting a blanket over your head might be marginally safer. — Terry Pratchett

She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet. — Jim Shepard

When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all. — Mark Lawrence

What it 't to us, if taxes rise or fall,
Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all.
Let muckworms who in dirty acres deal,
Lament those hardships which we cannot feel,
His grace who smarts, may bellow if he please,
But must I bellow too, who sit at ease?
By custom safe, the poets' numbers flow,
Free as the light and air some years ago.
No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains
To tax our labours, and excise our brains.
Burthens like these with earthly buildings bear,
No tributes laid on castles in the air. — Charles Churchill

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

- Anne Hathaway — Carol Ann Duffy

Wealth from trade was the mainspring of Western material advance; the visible agents of change were great guns. These came of age in Europe in the 15th century. On land their potency in reducing castle walls favoured central over local power, since in general only monarchs could afford siege-trains; so nation-states were consolidated and extended into great territorial empires. At sea, guns transformed sailing ships into mobile castles virtually impregnable to opponents who lacked equally powerful ordnance. With the ocean-going gunned warship, western Europe began to extend around the globe. — Peter Padfield

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them. — Rita Rudner

But mostly they were lies I told; it wasn't my fault, I couldn't remember, because it was as though I'd been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder. — Truman Capote

I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach. — Chelsea Cain

Temptations are enemies outside the castle seeking entrance. If there be no false retainer within who holds treacherous parley, there can scarcely be even an offer. — Henry Ward Beecher

On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles. — H.P. Lovecraft

So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing. — Chris Roberson

When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to fill. But when the water flooded the path I created for it with such violence that it destroyed everything in its way: my castles made of pebbles, my dikes of sand. It swept away everything, destroying it all, then disappeared, leaving me with a heavy heart, yet not daring to ask for pity, since the sea had only responded to my call. It's the same with love. You call out for it, you plan its course. The wave crashes into your heart, but it's so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy. — Irene Nemirovsky

The Wikks are regular kids given a Galactic size challenge. Readers will follow Oliver, Tiffany, and twins, Mason and Austin as they trek through eerie catacombs, mysterious ruins, and creepy castles that defy imagination. One part Indiana Jones, a handful of Swiss Family Robinson, and some Intergalactic excitement, the Quest for Truth is a riveting tale of just how far mankind will go for the ultimate prize. — Wayne Thomas Batson

Castles are Forrests of stones. — George Herbert

The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, "We got there first!" It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them. — Karl Kraus

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And order'd their estate. — Cecil Frances Alexander

Mathilde returned and strolled past the drawing-room windows; she saw him busily engaged in describing to Madame de Fervaques the old ruined castles that crown the steep banks of the Rhine and give them so distinctive a character. He was beginning to acquit himself none too badly in the use of the sentimental and picturesque language which is called wit in certain drawing-rooms. — Stendhal

Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets. — Shana Alexander

Soul's Castle fell at one blast of temptation, But many a worm had pierced the foundation. — William Allingham

For so many years I lived in constant terror of myself. Doubt had married my fear and moved into my mind, where it built castles and ruled kingdoms and reigned over me, bowing my will to its whispers until I was little more than an acquiescing peon, too terrified to disobey, too terrified to disagree. I had been shackled, a prisoner in my own mind.
But finally, finally, I have learned to break free. — Tahereh Mafi

How many may a man of diffusive conversation count among his acquaintances, whose lives have been signalized by numberless escapes; who never cross the river but in a storm, or take a journey into the country without more adventures than befel the knights-errant of ancient times in pathless forests or enchanted castles! How many must he know, to whom portents and prodigies are of daily occurrence; and for whom nature is hourly working wonders invisible to every other eye, only to supply them with subjects of conversation? — Samuel Johnson

How many years will you crawl through this castle, so satisfied and still wanting more? — Roger McGuinn

The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the scene. — Mary Shelley

But I'd like to see the castles in the towns where they live, the boy explained. — Paulo Coelho

It had been an attack, of sorts, and people did fight who lived in castles like these. Not with fists and feet and claws, but with words and whispers and influence. Isabel couldn't remember having been here before, but she knew. It was a fight, or rather a game, with many players and many rules and many strategies.
She smiled suddenly, feeling her blood pump through her veins. She didn't know how, and she didn't know why, but she was suddenly sure it was a game she knew how to play. — Leah Cypess

Sorry, I don't do castles. I hate those winding turret stairs. — Laurie Graham

Many Castles
On
My
Travels
i have been
A guest in
Many castles
Yet the
Monument
Which i
Find
Divine
Is the oasis
Where the heart
And the silence
Intertwine. — Silent Lotus

Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When you travel and go sight seeing you imagine seeing castles, lakes etc but you would not normally have a cemetery at the top of your to see list! Cimitero Monumentale is an old cemetery and, in a way, can also be considered a museum. Many people think of it as one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, because of its monumental mausoleums, impressing sculptures and tombs. — Blether Travel Guides

It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. — Robert Louis Stevenson

They would also need to talk sense to her. The almost-existing children, the husky-voiced daughter, a museum curator perhaps, and the gifted, less settled son, good at too many things, who failed to complete his university course, but a far better pianist than she. Both always affectionate, brilliant at Christmases and summer-holiday castles and entertaining their youngest relations. — Ian McEwan

... a tiny room, furnished in early MFI, of which every surface was covered in china ornaments and plaster knick-knacks whose only virtue was that they were small, and therefore of limited individual horribleness. Cumulatively, they were like an infestation. Little vases, ashtrays, animals, shepherdesses, tramps, boots, tobys, ruined castles, civic shields of seaside towns, thimbles, bambis, pink goggle-eyed puppies sitting up and begging, scooped-out swans plainly meant to double as soap dishes, donkeys with empry panniers which ought to have held pin-cushions or perhaps bunches of violets -- all jostled together in a sad visual cacophony of bad taste and birthday presents and fading holiday memories, too many to be loved, justifying themselves by their sheer weight of numbers as 'collections' do. — Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Ah, in how many rooms, upon how many studio couches, among how many books, had they found their own love, their marriage, their life together, a life which, in spite of its many disasters, its total calamity indeed
and in spite too of any slight element of falsehood in its inception on her side, her marriage partly into the past, into her Anglo-Scottish ancestry, into the visioned empty ghost-whistling castles in Sutherland, into an emanation of gaunt lowland uncles chumbling shortbread at six o'clock in the morning
had not been without triumph. (p.210) — Malcolm Lowry

I have built little. But, I have built many castles in the air. — Frei Otto

I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood. — Richard Matheson

If you don't build castles in the air you won't build anything on the ground. — Victor Hugo

Doubt had married my fear and moved into my mind, where it built castles and ruled kingdoms and reigned over me, bowing my will to its whispers until I was little more than an acquiescing peon, too terrified to disobey, too terrified to disagree. — Tahereh Mafi

You dwell in whitened castles
with deep and poisoned moats
and cannot hear the curses
which fill your children's throats. — Maya Angelou

How often are the beauties of nature unheeded by man, who, musing on past ills, brooding over the possible calamities of the future, building castles in the air, or wrapped up in his own self-love and self-importance, forgets to look abroad, or looks with a vacant stare. — Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps

Some build their castles 'mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence. — Richelle E. Goodrich

She flapped her hands, anxious energy coursing through her. "How can you be so calm?"
He got to his feet, unfolding with an easy grace. He held out a hand, his dark eyes focused solemnly on hers. "Come with me."
"For what?"
"That's part of the lesson." Was it her imagination, or did a twinkle of humor stir in those eyes? "Center yourself, and grab onto the here and now."
That made no sense - what was he now, Sir Medieval Zen Master? But she slipped her hand into his strong, calloused one. He hauled her up until she bumped into his chest. With a finger under her chin, he tilted her face until she looked in his eyes.
"Listen to the world around you. Hear the birds? Hear the small animals scurrying? You are in this moment, this moment only, and sometimes that's all you can do, all you can be." His finger pulled away, brushing against her skin, and he tapped her nose, stepping away. — Angela Quarles

Beneath the haunted castle lies the dungeon keep: the womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged, the tomb to which it knows it must return at last. Beneath the crumbling shell or paternal authority, lies the maternal blackness, imagined by the Gothic writer as a prison, as a torture chamber- from which the cries of the kidnapped anima cannot even be heard. The upper and the lower levels of the ruined castle or abbey represent the contradictory fears at the heart of Gothic terror: dread of the superego, whose splendid battlements have been battered but not quite cast down- and of the id, whose buried darkness abounds in dark visions no stormer of the castle had ever touched. — Leslie A. Fiedler

The Seventh Sense
Women
who build nations
learn
to love
men
who build nations
learn
to love
children
building sand castles
by the rising sea — Audre Lorde

The crew and cast at Castle becomes more of a reality than the people I've known all my life — Stana Katic

That's the hell of sand castles. They are always doomed. That's part of their beauty - their impermanence. — Pamela Moore

To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air. — Richard Whately

To eat one's fill, eat until the exhaustion of the appetite, was the principal pleasure that the peasants dangled before their imagination, and one that they rarely realized in their lives.
They [the peasants] also imagined other dreams coming true, including the standard run of castles and princesses. But their wishes usually remained fixed on common objects in the everyday world. One hero gets "a cow and some chickens"; another, an armoire full of linens. A third settles for light work, regular meals, and a pipe full of tobacco. And when gold rains into the fireplace of a fourth, he uses it to buy "food, clothes, a horse, land." In most of the tales, wish fulfillment turns into a program for survival, not a fantasy of escape. — Robert Darnton

I'm just saying it's not all sand castles and ninjas. — Libba Bray

Anne Hathaway
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed. — Carol Ann Duffy

You build a thousand castles, a thousand sanctuaries, you are nothing; you build a library, you are everything! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Gareth's eyes slipped open. "You make me nervous when you do that."
"Do what?"
"Brood. Your brooding is rather loud."
"Oh please. I was hardly - "
His eyebrow rose.
"Fine. I was brooding. It's not like you don't."
"Mine is inherent to my romantic nature. Cloaks and castles."
Adele threw up her hands. "That's it. You are forbidden to look at any more cheap books about yourself. — Clay Griffith

I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff. — Oliver Sykes

Apparently being princess wasn't all about beautiful palaces, fantastic castles, shopping, archery lessons, wearing awesome crowns and kickass underwear and being married to a hot guy who named his ship after you. Apparently there were drawbacks — Kristen Ashley

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5) — Rabih Alameddine

He made plans to keep himself sane, built castles of hope in the dark. — George R R Martin

We began to build our castles in the air, hoping sooner or later they'd carry us off. New days came like clockwork without becoming tomorrows. We slept less and less, dipped in darkness through the daytime and heated by burning light in the endless evening. And only when we finally got up, threw on our clothes and walked away, did we realize that we had all been gone for years already. — Kristopher Jansma

Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

You don't need planning permission to build castles in the sky — Banksy

A philosopher might have deplored this lack of mental ambition, but only if he was really certain about where his next meal was coming from.
In fact Lancre's position and climate bred a hard-headed and straightforward people who often excelled in the world down below. it had supplied the planins with many of their greatest wizards and witches and, once again, the philospher might have marveled that such a four-square people could give the world so many successful magical practitioners, being quite unaware that only those with their feet on rock can build castles in the air. — Terry Pratchett

Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now. — Pete Seeger