Quotes & Sayings About Red Brick

Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke's description of "raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet." Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified. — Ann Zwinger

Sometimes, when I'm having a sort-through or a clear-out, I find photos of my youth, and it's a shock to see everything on black and white. I think my granddaughter believes we were actually grey-skinned, with dull hair, always posing in a shadowed landscape. But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. I remember the deep blue of the sky and the dark green of the pines cutting through it, the bright red of the local brick houses and the orange carpet of pine needles under our feet. Nowadays - though I'm not sure the sky is still occasionally blue and most of the houses are still there, and the trees still drop their needles - nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph. — Emma Healey

But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn't know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not. — Hanya Yanagihara

The first theatre I ever found was in the backyard of a new suburban community in the foothills of the Poconos. My dad was a young FBI agent at his first or second posting - we're all from New York. He was posted in Scranton, Pennsylvania and he put the family in a brand new red-brick apartment. It was in a C-shape and behind it was a small hill that led up to the woods. There was a white-washed brick wall that was a perfect theatre! There were windows and all the ladies behind the windows in their apartments. I would go out there after lunch every day and sing opera. — Constantin Stanislavski

A brick could be used instead of a red light. They're both red, and I'd run both with equal fervor. — Jarod Kintz

You don't need a uniform color: We used a mixture of brick red, browns and grays, and then threw in seashells, branches and various types of rock, so our walls ended up looking like cave paintings! — Randy Bachman

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. — Henry James

A gentle breeze rustled through the leaves, bringing with it the scent of fresh-turned earth and lavender blossoms. Amanda drew to the side of the balcony, where she was completely concealed from view. As she leaned against the wall of the house, the rough texture of the red brick gently abraded her bare shoulders.
She had worn a pale blue, corded-silk gown with a low-cut back, and draperies of gauze that crossed over the bodice in an X pattern. The long sleeves of the gown were made of more transparent gauze, while her hands were encased in white gloves. The flash of her bare arms beneath the filmy blue silk made Amanda feel sophisticated and daring. — Lisa Kleypas

the following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In — Sebastian Faulks

The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred, at least. Like the sidewalks, it's red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top. No one goes through those gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even as far as the Wall, from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible. Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men's Salvaging early this morning. I didn't hear the bells. Perhaps I've become used to them. We — Margaret Atwood

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion. — Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Leave a cavity behind the [wall] facings, and on the inside build walls two feet thick, made of red dimension stone or burnt brick or lava in courses, and then bind them to the fronts by means of iron clamps and lead ... the beds and builds, all settling equally and bonded at the joints, will not let the work bulge out, nor allow the fall of the face walls which have been tightly fastened together. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Why didn't you say something?"
Flushing beet red, I replied, "Your inheritance was unexpected. I wanted to live there again, thought that it may have been . . . mine."
"And so it is!" he crowed. "Every brick, every weapon, every bloody blade of grass is as much yours as I am, darling, supposing you'll give me a pallet in the stables and a crust from time to time. Are you quite mad?"
"I don't want you to live on a pallet." My tears spilled, and he painted his fingertips over my jaw. "I want you to live in my bones. — Lyndsay Faye

A red brick Presbyterian church ... captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net. — Barbara Ascher

He describes it as a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions. — Charles Dickens

From space, the earth appears predominantly blue; the clouds are brilliant white. Surprisingly, you don't see much green, although Ireland looks green, and so do Scandinavia and New Zealand. The deserts are brick red and really stand out. — Helen Sharman

The earl narrowed his eyes as he hopped off his bay gelding and surveyed the deep green expanse of lawn surrounding the ancestral home. The graceful house, built atop and around an ancient abbey, wore its centuries of accretion with aplomb, as if it had always perched atop this
gentle slope. In the slanting late afternoon sun, the fading red-brick walls glowed. "My God, I hate the country," he said. — Jenny Holiday

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Dancing Towards Bethlehem
If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the 20th century for one last dance
I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,
say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.
My palm would press into the small of your back
as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile
of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,
just as the floor of the 19th century gave way
and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.
There will be no time to order another drink
or worry about what was never said,
not with the orchestra sliding into the sea
and all our attention devoted to humming
whatever it was they were playing. — Billy Collins

Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements. — Walter Dean Myers

He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it. — Rachel Joyce

This place was not like the Victorian Prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state;no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking. — Adrian McKinty

I thought about the cast of The Wizard of Oz on the yellow brick road and wondered which character I was. Perhaps the Tin Man, in search of a red, pulsating heart. Or at least someone to give it to. — Kate Rockland

In the morning this light breasts your windowpane and, having pried your eye open like a shell, runs ahead of you, strumming its lengthy rays - like a hot-footed schoolboy running his stick along the iron grate of the park or garden - along arcades, colonnades, red-brick chimneys, saints and lions. "Depict! Depict!" it cries to you, either mistaking you for some Canaletto or Carpaccio or Guardi, or because it doesn't trust your retina's ability to retain what it makes available, not to mention your brain's capacity to absorb it. Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations. At any rate, you obey the command and grab your camera, supplementing both your brain cells and your pupil. Should this city ever be short of cash, it can go straight to Kodak for assistance - or else tax its products savagely. By the same token, as long as this place exists, as long as winter light shines upon it, Kodak shares are the best investment. — Joseph Brodsky

The sky doesn't set so much as break apart. The horizon is brick-coloured. The rest of the sky is streaked with shock-red tendrils. — Lauren Oliver

Thus when a barber and a collier fight, The barber beats the luckless collier-white; The dusty collier heaves his ponderous sack, And big with vengeance beats the barber-black. In comes the brick-dust man, with grime o'erspread, And beats the collier and the barber-red: Black, red, and white in various clouds are tost, And in the dust they raise the combatants are lost. — Christopher Smart

There is a certain shade of red brick
a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue
that is my childhood in St.Louis. Not the real childhood, but the false one that extends from the dawning of consciousness until the day that one leaves home for college. That one shade of red brick and green foliage is St. Louis in the summer (the winter is just a gray sky and a crowded school bus and the wet footprints on the brown linoleum floor at school), and that brick and a pale sky is spring. It's also loneliness and the queer, self-pitying wonder that children whose families are having catastrophes feel. — Harold Brodkey

Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn't feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory. — Stephen King

On that day, in jungle hamlets and mountain villages, in cacophonous slums and sprawling refugee camps, on worn concrete floors and under roofs thatched of rice straw and banana leaves, in clay brick homes, on rutted, red dirt roads, and on scorching swaths of sand, children cried and screamed and sang and giggled and toddled and ran and fell and got back up and climbed on their mothers' laps and pulled their siblings' hair and gazed out in wonder at the big, bright world that swirled around them. Millions of boys and girls whose lives were reclaimed whose stories were allowed to continue, who were not mourned or grieved or buried, but instead were loved and held and fretted over and scolded and prepared for the challenges of living, of surviving, all because of a man they had never met and whose name they would likely never know. — Adam Fifield

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it's been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night. I'm — Ben Aaronovitch

Belfastas uncivilised as ever
savage black mothers in houses of dark red brick, friendly manufacturers too drunk to entertain you when you arrive. It amuses me till I get tired. — E. M. Forster

Shaft was standing next to a newstsand about thirty yards from the Con Ed crew when Kelly came out of the red-brick highrise, the glossy haven of the spade who's made it. It rose like an insult to all the failure around it, a fifteen-story middle finger that said up yours to the old neighborhood. — Ernest Tidyman

A long suburb of red brick houses -some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace.
On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies.
Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. — Charles Dickens

The bungalow was a hideous red-brick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who'd been aiming at art deco and hit Tracy Emin instead. — Ben Aaronovitch

Like most Istanbul Turks I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with the Hagia Sophia and the red brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away. — Orhan Pamuk

We stood up on two legs
And raised our heads above golden grass
He was there

We sharpened stone and steel
Used tools to harvest grass, beast and brother
He was there

We clustered together
In brick and mud swarming with rats and plague
He was there

We built nations and mistrust
Our fingers hovered over the red button
He smiled

Still we build
To rise above the golden grass
Away from the reach of his scythe

When he will harvest no more — Tim Seeley

I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are. — Red Smith

He'd chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen. — Marcus Sakey

The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose red. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly agains the wire cyclone fence. There were little brown birds occasionally on the fence: when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away. — Ken Kesey

We do not propose any rules; we offer observations. "No right on red" is a rule. "Driving at high speed toward a brick wall usually ends badly" is an observation. — Howard Mittelmark

Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick. — Red Smith

The townhouse was in a community called Waterview, a pretty green place with a common that had a gazebo and a fountain. The homes were red-brick colonial and beautiful. The townhouse Paxton had loved from the moment Kirsty showed it to her last year was in a cup-de-sac. Wisteria vines grew around the door, and Paxton remembered thinking how wonderful it would be to walk in and out in the springtime, when the wisteria would be in full bloom. It would be like walking through a wedding arch every day. — Sarah Addison Allen

A feeble orange light was flickering in the allotments, low down near the ground. Laura looked hopefully towards it. It was a huge pumpkin, its flesh brick-red, its mouth cut into a crude gash, candle- flame dancing through slits for eyes. There was no sign of Autumn. — Sanjida Kay

Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire. — Cathleen Schine

Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.' — Leigh Brackett

Past the projects, the land opened up and water came into view. The breeze carried rain and salt. Jetties and barrier walls supported the shore, which was stacked with crumbling brick warehouses. Out in the channel, the Statue of Liberty stood alone on her little island, her corroding flame held high in the air as the sun set over the industrial shoreline and skyways of New Jersey. Across the narrows, the bluffs of Staten Island wavered in the smoky light of dusk that turned the Verrazano into bronze. Faint light burnished water into busy with freighters and tug boats. A lone sail boat flitted in the distance. On the near shore, on a slip of water between a jetty and the land, a blood red barge bobbed on the tide. — Andrew Cotto