Reliquary Quotes & Sayings

We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge (...) Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there. — Rachel Cusk

reliquary of time — Roberto Pinchas

At such moments Gilberte's plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their constructed tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, even infinitely minute, what celestial herbary would I not have given as a reliquary. But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have their photograph, how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers traced by Vinci's pencil! To acquire one of these, I stooped - with friends of the Swanns, and even with photographers - to servilities which did not procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely tiresome people. — Marcel Proust

All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them. — William J. Clinton

Bugle"

Black beetles know where the most recent bones
bake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone,
bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --
drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--
they will lead you to a barren gulch
surrounded by sages and nettles, dirt
burnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunch
above the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare
locust tree a telling reliquary
of dust to dust, all so brutally hot.
You must pull ribs from that rotting body,
words that matter: love me, love me not. — Tod Marshall

This is the reason the whole 'keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel, use the hands-free handset' idea is a silly thing," Simons said. "Having your eyes on the road doesn't do any good unless your attention is on the road too. — Tom Vanderbilt

He let out a long sorry sigh and I love that look on his face, that disappointment. I understand now why girls resist,just for that sweet look of regret ... — Kathryn Stockett

It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones. — Catherynne M Valente

He laughed in exultation as he came upon the house, the rush of his full power better than any human drug, the joy of its unfettered release expanding his heart with every beat, gorging his lungs with every breath. — D.B. Reynolds

What is government if word's have no meaning. — Jared Lee Loughner

I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: 'All is vanity.' I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. — Victor Hugo

I'm so personally attached to all the characters I met and photographed over the years ... the anthology is like a photographic reliquary that could potentially preserve their grace, fierce joy, and restlessness. — Hedi Slimane

Pick any other Republican in the country. He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama. — Rick Santorum

Architecture is an applied art, founded not on theories but on practice. — Witold Rybczynski