Ruins Book Quotes & Sayings

The carping and bickering of political factions in the nation's capital reminds me of two pelicans quarreling over a dead fish. — William Tecumseh Sherman

Read comics. All comics. And then cut them open to steal their power. — Warren Ellis

Basically the message is: Steal It! Art, music, culture, the odd book and the slab of cheese ... the new will be built upon the ruins of the old. — Buenaventura Durruti

Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it. — Michael Savage

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book. — Junot Diaz

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from. — Peter Drucker

Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God' - 'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry - but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt. — John D. Caputo

With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded. — John Milton

Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ruins of old Baghdad. That was in 1604, and he's visiting the same street that I write about in the book, named after Abu Nuwas, though it wasn't called that back then. — Annia Ciezadlo

I just hate the whole idea of labeling anything as a comedy. If you tell me something's funny, I'll want to rebel against it. When I go to a bookstore and see books categorized as humor, I get furious. Don't tell me that a book is funny. Let me decide if it's funny. It's the same with sitcoms. You call something a sitcom and people expect it to be funny. And that ruins everything. — Amy Sedaris

If your dreams are so simple and easy to attain, why don't you walk straight to them and take them? — Wisdom Primus

My mother's perpetual now, tempting me with possibility. Weren't we silly, she might say? What was the matter with us? Let's be close again. My doomed and complicated longing surged, and I had to hang up. The two of us had no now. Our furious fires had burned everything to the ground. As I'd grown, each time I brought my mother in, called for her, or let her advise my course, I was ruptured. — Susanna Sonnenberg

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! — Marquis De Sade

I invited a few people to help celebrate your birthday," Cameron said sheepishly. She threw up her hands. "Surprise."
"We sort of come with the package," Collin explained. "Think of it as a collective gift from all of us to you: five bona fide annoying and overly intrusive new best friends."
"It's the gift that keeps on giving," Wilkins said.
Jack grinned. "I'm touched. Really. And since it appears I'm going to be moving in, let me be the first to say that all of you are always welcome at my and Cameron's house. Subject to a minimum of forty-eight hours prior notification. — Julie James

It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. What happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans fled twice from the ghetto ... My life's dream has come true. Defense in the ghetto has become a fact. Armed Jewish resistance and revenge are actually happening. I have witnessed the glorious and heroic combat of the Jewish fighters. — Mordechai Anielewicz

The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion ... Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them ... In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city's librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books. — M T Anderson

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it. — Louise Erdrich

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

Not one piece of evidence has ever been found to support the Book of Mormon-not a trace of the large cities it names, no ruins, no coins, no letters or documents or monuments, nothing in writing. Not even one of the rivers or mountains or any of the topography it mentions has ever been identified. — Dave Hunt

Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn't a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man's anguished soul. — Fernando Pessoa

Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, "I, too, am here." However, — Thomas Ligotti

His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks.
"Required reading," I say.
"It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books. — Victoria Schwab

As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives. — Brendan Jack

When you start positively changing your mind ... you will start positively changing your life. — Timothy Pina

Having a think about whether you can afford 'this' or 'that' is a good discipline to have, to maximise what you can achieve to the highest standard. — Cameron Mackintosh

To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it beats down. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, I too am here. — Thomas Ligotti

My country is in ruins. So I'm a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I'm mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books. — Kurt Vonnegut

One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night-terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers... — Georges Bataille

We English majors ... need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror. How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one ... Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense? — Garrison Keillor

The way Smith sees it, this kind of approach denotes a certain category of writer: the Micro Manager. Authors fall into one of two primary camps, she explained in her 2009 book of essays, Changing My Mind.691 Macro Planners work out the structure of their novels and then write within that structure. Micro Managers, on the other hand, don't rely on an overarching configuration (don't even conceive of one), but rather home in on each sentence, one by one, and each sentence, as they come to it, becomes the only thing that exists. If there is a spectrum starting with Macro Planners on one end and Micro Managers on the other, Smith would be somewhere to the right of the page. Smith's writing is entirely incremental and cumulative. The grand plan is that there is no grand plan; working things out ahead of time ruins everything, "feels disastrous."She prefers the writing of a novel as a process of discovery. "The thinking goes on on the page," not beforehand. — Sarah Stodola