Quotes & Sayings About Statues

When I drew Captain America in 'The Ultimates,' I hated my Cap, even though some people are like, 'Man, your Cap's cool!' and they made statues out of it. — Joe Madureira

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. — Jacqueline E. Smith

We passed through glowering statues of monsters and gods whom I'd fought in person- the vulture Nekhbet, who'd once possessed my Gran (Long story); the crocodile Sobek, who'd tried to kill my cat (longer story); and the lion goddess Sekhmet, whom we'd once vanished with hot sauce (don't even ask) — Rick Riordan

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to — Edwidge Danticat

In my experience, committees can criticize, but they cannot create. 'Search the parks in all your cities You'll find no statues of committees. — David Ogilvy

We followed him through the wealthy splendor of the house. Hardwood floors. Custom carved woodworking. Statues. Fountains. Suits of armor. Original painting, one of them a van Gogh. Stained-glass windows. Household staff in formal uniform. I kept expecting to come across a flock of peacocks roaming the halls, or maybe a pet cheetah in a diamond-studded collar. — Jim Butcher

Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magicians, etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death, the necessity and purpose of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made ... living men, immortals. — Vincent Van Gogh

Ginny Weasley, who sat next to Colin Creevey in Charms, was distraught, but Harry felt that Fred and George were going the wrong way about cheering her up. They were taking turns covering themselves with fur or boils and jumping out at her from behind statues. — J.K. Rowling

For the images of the gods are much easier to misuse for human purposes than the gods themselves. Images have no will and no desires. Statues stand for nothing but the goals of the rulers. ... The word of a god is, in truth, only the word of the one who erected his statue. — Kai Meyer

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Maybe there was something to be said for creepy statues after all. — Jennifer Estep

I remember once visiting an outdoor exhibition of sculpture in Arnhem, the Netherlands. One of the artists had placed this notice at the base of a majestic beech: "Statues are hewn by fools like me: only God could make this tree." The Taoists looked at the inside of the tree. They saw God present, not as the super-sculptor, but as the primal force from which the tree drew its being and its specific form. Becoming aware of this divine origin was for them "great knowledge," to be distinguished from the "small knowledge" of our petty, every-day existence. — John Wijngaards

In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education. — Caleb Crain

I didn't believe you when you said there was a red statue that read "LOVE," with the LO stacked on top of the VE. LO VE It sounded like something out of one of the old fairy tales you used to tell me when I was a little girl. I thought you were kidding when you said people in the past believed in love so much that they made statues to celebrate it, so they wouldn't forget to LOVE ... well, that seemed kind of ridiculous - but when we dove down and you shined the thermal lantern, and it turned out to be true, I felt like there were so many possibilities in the world - like I'm only beginning to discover what's achievable. Maybe I will find a pure love - like what you and Mom have. — Matthew Quick

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. — Kurt Vonnegut

Now at the breakfast table, watching him eat my toast, "Don't take no for an answer" seemed like the attitude of a privileged guy who didn't care who got hurt, so long as his wife had the cute statues she wanted to display in her summer house. — E. Lockhart

Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I've seen statues of him on people's pianos. — Victor Borge

Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky. They are people who say: This is my community, and it's my responsibility to make it better. — Tom McCall

That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who "make a desolation and call it peace") at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn't Philip of Macedon's first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn't Alexander's last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,10 and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying. — Thomas Cahill

Edilio is in hiding," Astrid snapped. "Edilio has to worry about being kicked out of the country. Our Edilio."
"He's got a volunteer lawyer - "
But Astrid wasn't done. "They should be putting up statues to Edilio. They should be naming schools after that boy - no, no, I'm not going to call him a boy. If he's not a man, then I'll never meet one."
Lana nodded approvingly, obviously enjoying and sharing in Astrid's outrage. — Michael Grant

The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here. Yet she stepped out all the same. — George R R Martin

I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios ... — Leonard Cohen

Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,
To our bower at the lily root.
Overhead the old umbrellas of summer Wither like pithless hands.
There is little shelter.
Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank
Dominion. The stars are no nearer. Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink The liquor of indolence, and all thing sink Into a soft caul of forgetfulness. The fugitive colors die. Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,
The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.
Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppetmaster
Wear masks of horn to bed. This is not death, it is something safer. The wingy myths won't tug at us anymore: The molts are tongueless that sang from above the water Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,
And how a god flimsy as a baby's finger
Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. — Sylvia Plath

The faint hints of color in her complexion, her tawny blond hair, her extraordinary thinness, all spoke of that unearthly grace modern poets find in the medieval statues. Had she been happy, she'd have been ravishing: happiness constitutes pure poetry, for women. — Honore De Balzac

Christ is more of an artist than the artists; he works in the living spirit and the living flesh, he makes men instead of statues. — Vincent Van Gogh

You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,
while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,
collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:
because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,
galloping water, incessant sand,
we make the only permanent tenderness. — Pablo Neruda

We are not on this earth to just stand still & look pretty. The museums already have enough statues. — Mandy Hale

Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens, the hemlock on one day, and statues on the next. — James Madison

The moonlight covered the tombstones with an ethereal glow, and the statues
above the tombs stood like silent guards waiting for something to happen. — Alan Kinross

When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billions of dollars. So it's like a city built on entertainment, and art in a way. — Fred Armisen

It looked like our gods, to me
not literally, no the way they are depicted in statues, but the vibrant space between them, where Necessity is Chance and Chance flows into Necessity. The world is as it must be, and as it happens to be, and those are the same thing, connected and right, and you understand and love all of it, because you are all of it and all of it is you. — Rachel Hartman

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them. — Denis Diderot

I'm envious of the pigeon. It doesn't have a care in the world beyond eating, sleeping, and defecating on park statues. That's the life. — C.J. Roberts

We all know that men in moderate circumstances can have just as comfortable houses as the richest, just as comfortable clothing, just as good food. They can see just as fine paintings, just as marvelous statues, and they can hear just as good music. They can attend the same theaters and the same operas. They can enjoy the same sunshine, and above all, can love and be loved just as well as kings and millionaires. — Robert Green Ingersoll

No statues, please. School or statue? Hospital or statue? No need to explain further. — Chetan Bhagat

Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. Skip the bowls of fruit and statues. Let the page flick your thumbs. This is His spoken word. — N.D. Wilson

You're pretty smug, Lord Ares, for a guy who runs from Cupid statues. — Rick Riordan

I think the Statue of David is pretty sexy. I'd do him. — Deena Nicole Cortese

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books. — Marguerite Yourcenar

There are even more statues of Robert Burns than of any other figure in world literature. Indeed if we discount figures of religion, then only Christopher Columbus has more statues than he worldwide. — Len G. Murray

Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life. — Don DeLillo

Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty. — Thomas Friedman

She looked at me then everything emptied out of her eyes and they looked like the eyes in statues blank and unseeing and serene put — William Faulkner

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture. — Chris Marker

Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce - to which in fact he was once taken.
Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne - who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues. — David Markson

For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if-like the statues made by Daedalus or the tripods of Hephaestus, of which the poet says that "self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods" - shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves. — Aristotle.

I especially treasured my glimpses of Mother, Queen Cleopatra VII. She sat on a golden throne, looking as resplendent as one of the giant marble statues guarding the tombs of the Old Ones. Diamonds twinkled in a jungle of black braids on her ceremonial wig. She wore a diadem with three rearing snakes and a golden broad collar, shining with lapis lazuli, carnelian, and emeralds, over her golden, form-fitting pleated gown. In one hand, she held a golden ankh of life, while the other clasped the striped crook and flail of her divine rulership. Her stillness radiated power, like a lioness pausing before the pounce. It left me breathless with awe. — Vicky Alvear Shecter

The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies. — Geoffrey Blainey

Many have lived on a pedestal who will never have a statue when dead. — Pierre-Jean De Beranger

You cannot simply take a mala from someone else and start using it. When you buy a mala you have to make sure that it accords with the advice we have just discussed, and then before you use a mala - whether it is old or new - you should bless it. How do we bless the mala? There are different methods for blessing a mala, and some are more elaborate than others. In Buddhism there are two types of conduct: elaborate and simple. Elaborate conduct, for example, involves having many thangkas, statues, and lots of offerings, such as flowers and so forth. However, Buddhism is also very practical, and so there are more simple forms of practice where you utilize visualization. However, you should not use unelaborated versions of practice simply out of laziness. Making offerings are an important part of practice since these actions accumulate merit, and it is merit that brings about our happiness. People often refer to luck and fortune, but really — Zurmang Gharwang Rinpoche

From my experience, not one in twenty marries the first love; we build statues of snow and weep to see them melt. — Walter Scott

Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which made her pose remarkable. She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea's mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow - the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and despondency. — George Eliot

I did not find Liverpool ugly. Her stately public buildings, broad streets, public squares, and noble statues redeem her from the charge. — M. E. W. Sherwood

Holy hotness. He is beautiful. I mean truly beu-ti-ful. Like the kind of beautiful they build statues to worship. ~ Sara — Rebecca Donovan

Into the statue that breathes, the soul of the sculptor is bidden. — Richard Realf

What was once considered impossible is now quite easily achieved. Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works. — Terry Pratchett

It is well known that a loose and easy dress contributes much to give to both sexes those fine proportions of body that are observable in the Grecian statues, and which serve as models to our present artists. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking, instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. — Ayn Rand

Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them. — Philibert Joseph Roux

When my journal appears, many statues must come down. — Arthur Wellesley

Sculpture is more divine, and more like Nature, That fashions all her works in high relief, And that is Sculpture. This vast ball, the Earth, Was moulded out of clay, and baked in fire; Men, women, and all animals that breathe Are statues, and not paintings. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The idea of beauty which man creates for himself imprints itself on his whole attire, crumples or stiffens his dress, rounds off or squares his gesture, and in the long run even ends by subtly penetrating the very features of his face. Man ends by looking like his ideal self. These engravings can be translated either into beauty or ugliness; in one direction, they become caricatures, in the other, antique statues. — Charles Baudelaire

To me the statues of Buddha and Mahavira in the East, sitting in a lotus posture under a tree, do not mean anything historical. They mean something far more significant. These are the people who have stopped running. These are the people who have stepped out of the road on which the whole procession of humanity is going. They are real dropouts, not the California type which within a few years drops in again. — Osho

Light inspires me. I'm drawn to architecture, often graves, statues, trees - things usually that are quite still. I've been taking pictures continuously since 1995 until the end of Polaroid film. I'm taking very few pictures nowadays because I have very little film left, most of it expired. — Patti Smith

People who look at Greek statues never say it's a shame because they're not complete. — Giles Duley

Ramesses II shows up in almost all of his statues articulating his authority (i.e., parallel authority) through using Uraeus only as a head ornament while excluding Nekhbet from the headdress. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time ... — Terry Pratchett

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria. — Malcolm Gladwell

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt. — Walter Scott

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history. — Lew Wallace

Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone? — Ray Bradbury

Benefit performances, bad paintings and statues, philanthropic societies, Gypsies, schools, subscription dinners, carousing, the Masons, churches, books - no one and nothing met with refusal, — Leo Tolstoy

In a notable family called Stein
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein. — Bennett Cerf

Please tell me we don't have to find it," Percy said. "I've had enough giant magic statues for one trip. — Rick Riordan

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. — Henri Rabaud

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side ... — Italo Calvino

As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did. — Bruno Schulz

Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, And are but slightly impressed by kindness, Which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed upon easy going masters, but the tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues. It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because having lost his power he resumes his place among the feeble who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to a crowd will always have the semblance of a Caesar, His insignia attract them, His authority overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear. — Gustave Le Bon

If the plural for marble, marbles, is slang for sanity, then what does it mean to get lost in a room of marble statues? — Bridgette Bates

Our friends have left us
Perhaps we never saw them, perhaps
we encountered them when sleep
still brought us very close to the breathing wave
perhaps we search for them because we search for the other life,
beyond the statues. — Giorgos Seferis

Lookin up at the huge baboons, I wondered if Khufu had some sort of secret baboon code that would get us in. But instead he barked at the statues and cowered heroically behind my legs. — Rick Riordan

I am weary seeing our laboring classes so wretchedly housed, fed, and clothed, while thousands of dollars are wasted every year over unsightly statues. If these great man must have outdoor memorials, let them be in the form of handsome blocks of buildings for the poor — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I just think perfection and lasting through the ages is for Greek statues, not us mere humans. — Mary E. Pearson

I think statues are great; they show what great people would look like if a bird sh*t all over them. — Demetri Martin

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. — Geoff Dyer

I am very attracted by the mysterious landscape of Easter Island. Not only because it is a piece of land that is further away from another, but also because of the beautiful statues of Moai that are there. To do a beautiful walk there, I would have to involve the Moai, and the Rapa Nui people who live on the island. — Philippe Petit

We stood there, locked and lovely as statues in a garden. — Paula McLain

It was mossed and lichened with antiquity; and there was a hint of beginning dilapidation in the time-worn stone of the walls. The formal garden had gone a little wild from neglect; the trimmed hedges and trees had taken on fantastic sprawling shapes; and evil, poisonous weeds had invaded the flower-beds. There were statues of cracked marble and verdigris-eaten bronze amid the shrubbery; there were fountains that had long ceased to flow; and dials on which the foliage-intercepted sun no longer fell. — Clark Ashton Smith

Come, Spirits she murmured; and was instantly fortified by a sense of the presence of the things that aren't there. There were the beautiful drowned statues, there were the glens and hills of an undiscovered country; there were divine musical notes, which, struck high up in the air, made one's heart beat with delight at the assurance that the world of things that aren't there was splendidly vigorous and far more real than the other. She felt that one never spoke of the things that mattered, but carried them about, until a note of music, or a sentence or a sight, joined hands with them. — Virginia Woolf

See how exciting Anthropology is? He's a leading expert in ancient Greece. Now you should all change your majors so that you can ogle men like him all day long. Or better yet, uncover naked male statues. (Tory) Was that necessary? (Acheron) Hey, I live to recruit students for the department. If I can make you good for something, then by golly I'm going to do it. (Tory) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains. — Hippolyte Taine

A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.
But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.
pp. 492-493 — Ivan Goncharov

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. — Carl Sagan

If Parts Unknown and its many imitators have taught us anything, it's that we're living in the Golden Age of Gastrotourism. The same people who once traveled to Rome to stare at statues now go to twirl bucatini on their forks and filter balls of burrata onto their Instagram accounts. — Matt Goulding

The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets-anything that might throw light upon the past had been systemically altered. — George Orwell

On its rocky tip, dominating the scenery for miles around, stood he Villa dell'Ossevatore. Breathtakingly beautiful, it comprised three individual buildings and a single watchtower, roofed in terracotta tile and connected by stone bridges and loggias. Its lush gardens and lawns encircled the peninsula in steadily descending terraces, and a wide stone-built staircase hugged the rock all the way down to the waterline, terminating at a landing stage edged with balustrades. Higher up the hillside she saw the pergolas straining under the branches of ancient wisteria, and huge displays of azaleas and camellias. Ivy clung to the west-facing sides of the buildings and curled among its statues. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

the thing we call French culture may be due to the fact that French children can play, surrounded by the things of the past, palaces of bygone kings, statues, remembrances of history. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Men and statues that are admired ire an elevated situation have a very different effect upon us when we approach them; the first appear less than we imagined them, the last bigger. — Sir Fulke Greville

I also remember being struck by de Sade's will, in which he asked that his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I'd like to be able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live forgetfulness, I've always said - the only dignity I see is in oblivion. — Luis Bunuel

Here's the thing - I mean, I don't act for statues. I really don't. The great thing about winning an award is that it creates opportunities. — Kevin Bacon