Ruined City Quotes & Sayings

Of 76,000 buildings in Hiroshima 70,000 were damaged or destroyed, 48,000 totally. "It is no exaggeration to say," reports the Japanese study, "that the whole city was ruined instantaneously."2679 Material losses alone equaled the annual incomes of more than 1.1 million people. "In Hiroshima many major facilities - prefectural office, city hall, fire departments, police stations, national railroad stations, post offices, telegram and telephone offices, broadcasting station, and schools - were totally demolished or burned. Streetcars, roads, and electricity, gas, water, and sewage facilities were ruined beyond use. — Richard Rhodes

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins. — Lauren DeStefano

San Francisco, America's B-movie imitation of Paris. San Francisco, the city that ruined punk rock. San Francisco, the most intolerant place in the country. — Jim Goad

Over everything - up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks - was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them. — John Hersey

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight. — Daphne Merkin

I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you. — Colson Whitehead

I spur my horse past the ruined city;
the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts:
ancient battlements, high and low;
old grave mounds, great and small.
Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed trembles
and the voice of the great trees clings forever,
I sigh over all these common bones
No roll of the immortals bears their names. — Han-shan

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue ...
And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that look like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. — Salman Rushdie

I think it's very important for someone going to buy a book, taking a class or listening to a lecturer to ask, "Is this the right thing for me to do now? If it isn't, guide me to what I need." — Echo Bodine

I'm just an actor. It's the way the script is written, and it's easy. I don't have think about it. When you receive the script, you know pretty well how to play it, apart from little technicalities like the accent. — Anthony Hopkins

I think there is an instinct out there to rid us of our masters. — Gore Vidal

I look at the others, simpering courtiers and visiting dignitaries, all unsuspecting of what is to come. A merciful man should spare them, but I had mercy cut out of me at a young age. — A.F. Stewart

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

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is-like a corpse-buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted."
New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land-do not hope-
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.2 — Constantine P. Cavafy

Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart and rebuild a weakened will. — Eric Greitens

Let every man, every corporation, and especially let every village, town, and city, every county and State, get out of debt and keep out of debt. It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times. — Rutherford B. Hayes

We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, outwitted crocodiles, and eventually emerged battered and in rags with a book of adventures and 1,000 feet of film. — Rosita Forbes

Tis like the dripping of some stagnant rain
From the housetops of a ruined city
Upon the flagstones. Not one petal clings
Upon the stalk of life or memory. Stain
Not one pale thought with blushes ; my soul's dead
As a corpse flung out of the tideway on
The stinking flats of London mud. — Aleister Crowley

Why couldn't Sam really be a boy my age, with no more experience than I had? No past lives, past loves.
Why couldn't he be only for me? — Jodi Meadows

Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters, who are like so many Jakes, Privies, Houses of Office, Ordures, Excrements, Easments and piles of Sir-reverence: the whores of Ratcliffe High-way smell of Tarpaulin and stinking Cod from their continuall Traffick with seamen's Breeches. There are other such wretched Objects about these ruined Lanes, all of them lamentable Instances of Vengeance. And it is not strange (as some think) how they will haunt the same Districts and will not leave off their Crimes until they are apprehended, for these Streets are their Theatre. Theft, Whoredom and Homicide peep out of the very Windows of their Souls; Lying, Perjury, Fraud, Impudence and Misery are stamped upon their very Countenances as now they walk within the Shaddowe of my Church. — Peter Ackroyd

99% of failures comes from those who have a habit of making up excuses. — George Washington Carver

No religion can be built on force. — George Sand

Puddleglum,' they've said, 'You're altogether too full of bobance and bounce and high spirits. You've got to learn that life isn't all fricasseed frogs and ell pie. You want something to sober you down a bit. We're only saying it for your own good, Puddleglum.' That's what they say. Now a job like this
a journey up north just as winter's beginning looking for a prince that probably isn't there, by way of ruined city nobody's ever seen
will be just the thing. If that doesn't steady a chap, I don't know what will. — C.S. Lewis

Monday is great if I can spend it in bed. I'm a man of simple pleasures, really. — Arthur Darvill

We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we'll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything. — Clive Barker

on the Street of Dreams it was dream eat dream. — Margaret Atwood

I really wish she had a different way of viewing things I think the city that we're from just kinda ruined things — Drake

Alone for a few precious seconds, he drew in a deep breath. He stood on a ruined street in a ruined city. Destruction stretched for kilometers in every direction, all caused by a single man for whom vengeance had devolved into madness. — G.S. Jennsen

Once through this ruined city did I pass
I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked
'What knowest thou of this wilderness?'
It replied: 'I can sum it up in two words:
'Alas, Alas! — Khushwant Singh

I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost. — Jack Gilbert

You needn't worry about me. I know enough to do what every man ought to do in wartime when he's watched and threatened by bullies. I conceal my feelings; lie whenever necessary; pretend to admire the rascals who've ruined our city and our country; cheer dolts, bullies and knaves and damn all wise temperate men! — Kenneth Roberts