Vestibule Quotes & Sayings

It is indubitable that Carol Mardus was the mother of the baby left in Mrs. Valdon's vestibule and that she was gravely disquieted to learn that I knew it and could demonstrate it. — Rex Stout

there is a dense crowd; outside the Betting Rooms it is like a great struggle at a theatre door - in the days of theatres; or at the vestibule of the Spurgeon temple - in the days of Spurgeon. An — Charles Dickens

The police will want particulars, since you are the divorced husband, but I'll leave that to them. One more question, a hypothetical one. If Carol Mardus had a baby by Richard Valdon, conceived in April of last year and born last January, four months after Valdon's death; and if X knew about it, helped her dispose of it, and later, moved by pique or jealousy or spite, took it and left it in Mrs. Valdon's vestibule, who is X? Of the men in Carol Mardus's orbit, which one fits the specifications? I don't ask you to accuse, merely to suggest. — Rex Stout

Spring came early that year and the sweet warm nights made her restless. She walked up and down the streets and through the park. And wherever she went, she saw a boy and a girl together; walking arm-in-arm, sitting on a park bench with their arms around each other, standing closely and in silence in a vestibule. Everyone in the world but Francie had a sweetheart or a friend. She seemed to be the only lonely one in Brooklyn. — Betty Smith

I shall be a vestibule of unhampered sanity. — Marissa Meyer

Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise. — Henry Miller

Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom. — Charles Caleb Colton

I also know , I just know , that I can survive this , and I step into the vestibule — Veronica Roth

How striking is its actuality today! Everywhere sin is increasing to an appalling degree. The pride of man leads him to discard his God and attempt to make a paradise of earth. He has so far succeeded only in making it a vestibule of Hell, where impiety, immorality, and the worst passions have free scope; wars rage that are more terrible than any yet heard of, the majority of mankind suffers poverty and slavery, and all without the comfort which faith alone can impart. — Josefa Menendez

Our lives are like a house. Some people are allowed on the lawn, some onto the porch, some get into the vestibule or the kitchen. The better friends are invited deeper into our home, into our living room.'
'And some are let into the bedroom,' said Gamache. — Louise Penny

the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like "a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers," anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely. Tolstoy famously — Gregory Benford

I'll tell you a thing that will shock you. It will certainly shock the readers of Writer's Digest. What I often do nowadays when I have to, say, describe a room, is to take a page of a dictionary, any page at all, and see if with the words suggested by that one page in the dictionary I can build up a room, build up a scene. ... I even did it in a novel I wrote called MF. There's a description of a hotel vestibule whose properties are derived from Page 167 in R.J. Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary. Nobody has noticed. ... As most things in life are arbitrary anyway, you're not doing anything naughty, you're really normally doing what nature does, you're just making an entity out of the elements. I do recommend it to young writers. — Anthony Burgess

Claire "The Elysian Fields Guest House? Why didn't he just call it the Vestibule to Hell?"
Dean "Because that would be bad for business?"
From Summon the Keeper — Tanya Huff

How do we know that?" Lucy was frowning. "By inference. She did not attach a piece of paper to a blanket with a bare pin and wrap the blanket around the baby. Mr. Goodwin found a tray half full of safety pins in her house. But he found no rubber-stamp kit and no stamp pad, and one was used for the message on the paper. The inference is not conclusive, but it is valid. I am satisfied that on May twentieth Ellen Tenzer delivered the baby to someone, either at her house or, more likely, at a rendezvous elsewhere. She may or may not have known that its destination was your vestibule. I doubt it; but she knew too much about its history, its origin, so she was killed. — Rex Stout

The most heaven-like spots I have ever visited, have been certain rooms in which Christ's disciples were awaiting the summons of death. So far from being a "house of mourning," I have often found such a house to be a vestibule of glory. — Theodore L. Cuyler

I saw Derzhavin only once in my life but shall never forget that occasion. It was in 1815 at a public examination in the Lyceum. When we boys learned Derzhavin was coming, all of us grew excited. Delvig went out on the stairs to wait for him and kiss his hand, the hand that had written 'The Waterfall.' Derzhavin arrived. Derzhavin entered the vestibule, and Delvig heard him ask the janitor: 'Where is the privy here, my good fellow?' This prosaic question disenchanted Delvig, who canceled his intent and returned to the reception hall. Delvig told me the story with wonderful bonhomie and good humor. — Alexander Pushkin

Sometimes I feel it is best to experience as little as possible. I have become so accustomed to the sight of blood that this afternoon I witnessed the execution of two soldiers for cowardice. All that occurred to me was that their severed heads went rolling about just like dice. This only goes to show what I have always held: that horrors do not sharpen but blunt the senses. An old friend once set above his vestibule door the blood-soaked cuirass in which his father was killed. He put it there, he said, as a perpetual reminder of the horror of violence. And was he reminded? The first time he passed the vestibule, yes. The second time, maybe. The third time not at all, and thereafter he grew used to it, and was later killed in an amphitheatre riot with his fingers on another man's throat. — Colin Thubron

I pledge allegiance to the frog of the United States of America and to the wee public for witches hands one Asian, under God, in the vestibule with little tea and just rice for all. — Bette Bao Lord

Even if this earth is only a vestibule, we ought undoubtedly to make such a use of its blessing that we are assisted rather than delayed in our journey. — John Calvin

Here comes Mamma Vauquerr, fair as a starrr; and strung up like a bunch of carrots. Aren't we suffocating ourselves a wee bit?' he asked, placing a hand on the top of her corset. 'A bit of a crush in the vestibule, here, Mamma! If we start crying, there'll be an explosion. Never mind, I'll be there to collect the bits
just like an antiquary.'
'Now, there's the language of true French gallantry,' murmured Madame Vauquer in an aside to Madame Couture. — Honore De Balzac

In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons - to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy.
One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place. — Henry Enfield Roscoe

Morality is but the vestibule of religion. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

White wing'd angels meet the child
On the vestibule of life. — Elizabeth Oakes Smith

Doubt is the vestibule which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom; therefore, when we are in doubt and puzzle out the truth by our own exertions, we have gained a something that will stay by us, and which will serve us again. But, if to avoid the trouble of the search we avail ourselves of the superior information of a friend, such knowledge will not remain with us; we have not bought but borrowed it. — Charles Caleb Colton

This is the bud of being, the dim dawn, The twilight of our day, the vestibule; Life's theatre as yet is shut, and death, Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar, This gross impediment of clay remove, And make us embryos of existence free. — Edward Young

Thoughtful minds make little use of this expression: the happy and the unhappy. In this world, clearly a vestibule of another, no one is happy. — Victor Hugo

At that, Marty howled great big, messy sobs, and Elanor, the little lady in the yellow suit, who organized the weddings at the church, came running with a box of tissue.
Oz appeared in the vestibule, looking alarmed. "Is everything all right? I thought someone was strangling a duck."
"Do you mind?" Marty snapped. "Me and the bride, here, we're having a moment. — Jenn McKinlay

With every detail imagined, with even envy for the pair's community of misfortune in the vestibule, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, deception. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from the outside, the inviolable secret warmth within. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The sonic world of the foyer and vestibule comes at him distorted and from a distance, as if someone's moving furniture underwater. — Dominic Smith

Wisdom is to be fostered where it is found and those who judge without discretion do so because they themselves are blinded and chained to the vestibule of ignorance. Those lacking the sight to understand the circumstance and perspective of another place primacy on the material over the spiritual and become symptomatic of the problem rather than the cure. — Gwendolyn Taunton

The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion. — Michael Cunningham

Don't leave, and try not to do anything crazy." Winter winked. "I shall be a vestibule of unhampered sanity." With — Marissa Meyer

Doubt is the vestibule of faith. — Charles Caleb Colton

I believe this earth on which we stand is but the vestibule to glorious mansions through which a moving crowd forever press. — Joanna Baillie

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement. — Michael Kaplan