Walled City Quotes & Sayings

Now that I know, I can't unsee her girlness. The turned curve of her nose, the slant of her cheeks. How her eyelashes curl up just so. It would be a mistake to think that any of these things mean she's fragile. The very fact that she's sitting here, eight days after being stabbed, is testament to that. — Ryan Graudin

Prophesies are dark and don't need a flashlight to illuminate. I'm a bring my own lighthouse kind of lover. — Jarod Kintz

The braid is always stronger than the strand. — Ryan Graudin

In hard times, hang on hope. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than it was to repeatedly try and fail. Failure-disappointment-was a poison in my blood. Despair was the antidote. — Norah Vincent

The sound of the universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there is a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of the night dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. Every morning around sunrise there is a tropical bird song competition, and it is always a ten way tie for the championship. When the sun comes out the butterflies get to work. The whole house is covered with vines; I feel like any day it will disappear into the foliage complete and I will disappear with it and become a jungle flower myself. The rent is less than what I use to pay in New York City for taxi fare every month. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally a walled garden. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Kids with roofs and hot food have better things to do than play survival of the thuggiest. — Ryan Graudin

The problem is not in the food ... The problem lies in the mind. It lies in our lack of awareness of the messages coming in from our body ... Mindful eating helps us learn to hear what our body is telling us about hunger and satisfaction. It helps us become aware of who in the body/heart/ mind complex is hungry, and how and what is best to nourish it. — Jan Chozen Bays

I love you because you help me love everything else. — Jeannine Allison

The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic. — Robert Graves

A faint rattling pulled me from sleep, which was a relief because I'd been caught in yet another nightmare. After what Rick, my now-former foster father, had done to me, one would think he'd be the one haunting my dreams. And he had something to do with it - he'd revived me the night I tried to kill myself. In the moments before he had, I was certain I'd been standing at the gates of hell, about to be sucked in. Unfortunately, when Rick revived me, I'd brought a piece of hell back with me. That was what I dreamed about. Every night. A dark, walled city. Wandering, lost, trapped. A voice whispering to me, You're perfect. Come back.
Stay. — Sarah Fine

But I remember the way Jin Ling made her wishes. How she said I wish we could be together forever with the bite of a tigress. Nothing would be impossible enough to keep her wishes from being fulfilled. Not even the walled City. — Ryan Graudin

Ancient indeed. Joppa was a walled city with a stone barricade curving like a quarter moon around the natural port. Along its length, seven watchtowers rose like pillars holding up the sky. The ancient port had long since outgrown its former boundaries, however. More people lived outside the city walls than within. — Davis Bunn

Yes, well, how was I to know you would be so dramatic? Really, Francine, I don't know where you get it from." Then she primly grabbed the fowling gun before departing from the room. — Jade Lee

A book is a living breathing piece of art and you are just the person it chose to channel its story. Be humble. — Lori Lesko

It never made sense to my young mind, how a hurt from so long ago could keep a man from walking right. Stay with him for the rest of his life. But now that I am older, now that I've fought my own wars and fired my own guns, I understand. — Ryan Graudin

There were two views of how a polis was formed. The first was military: a scattered group of people came to live in one city behind a set of protective walls. The other was political: a group of people agreed to live under one authority, with or whithout the protection of a walled city. Synoikismos, or 'Living together', embraces both. Any political entity implies a population that recognizes a common authority, but the first 'city-states' were not always based on a city. Sparta makes the point. We think of Sparta as a city, but the Spartans were proud of the fact that they lived in villages without protective walls: their army was their wall and 'every man a brick. — Alan Ryan

This is my world. Wide and open and waiting. — Ryan Graudin

This, I finally realized, was how Mom was able to focus when I was not. It was how she was able to be present with me, present with the people at a benefit or the hospital. She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done. I had to learn this lesson while she was still there to teach me. — Will Schwalbe

She felt everything deeply,
soaking up the world like a sponge.
While slowly squeezing out her soul, leaving her drained. — Tina J. Richardson

He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown. Could one but rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past - a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy. — Daphne Du Maurier

Our current system of food production simply does not make sense. More than a third of the world's grain is fed to livestock, which return to us only a fraction of those nutrients. A large amount of land is needed to produce the grains needed to feed the livestock, and this land is often obtained by burning down rainforests and other ecosystem-dense land. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream's logic it grew no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing. Being grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and bulk-lifter in the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies that are sleeping rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy. The — William Gibson

Cassiopeia? She was a queen long ago, in a different part of the world. The stories say she was very beautiful, but very proud. Too proud. She smack-talked some goddesses and got herself stuck up there for all eternity. — Ryan Graudin

Dreadful is the mysterious power of fate; there is no deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by walled city or dark, seabeaten ships. — Sophocles

The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a time warp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his dead cart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just such wise that he's invited in — Cormac McCarthy

War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture. — Marshall McLuhan

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. — F Scott Fitzgerald

An army environment is very protected, a walled city kind of environment, where everybody has the same income, you have the same birthday parties, you are given return gifts - everything is the same. Everybody is moving up at the same pace. — Nimrat Kaur

The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence. — Salman Rushdie

WARRIOR LIGHT

Jafar, Muhammad's cousin, was a warrior of concentrated light. When he rode up

to a walled city, it was no more to him than a gulp of water in his dry mouth. This

happened at Mutah. No one went out to fight him. "What's to be done?" the king asked

his clairvoyant minister. "If you strap on your sword with this one," replied

the advisor, "also wrap your shroud around you!" "But he's only one man!"

"Ignore the singularity. Look with your wisdom. He gathers multitudes, as stars

dissolve in sunlight." Human beings can embody a collective, a majesty

of spirit, which is not like having a name or a body. A herd of onagers may display

a thousand antler points; then a lion comes to the edge of their field: they scatter. — Jalaluddin Rumi

There are moments you wait for. And then there are moments you wait for. Moments you spend every other moment preparing for. Points of your life that click and turn. Push you in a completely new direction. — Ryan Graudin

Kabul is a walled city, which sounds romantic except the walls are pre-cast reinforced concrete blast barriers, 10 feet tall and 15 feet long and moved into place with cranes. The walls are topped with sandbags, and the sandbags are topped with guard posts from which gun barrels protrude. — P. J. O'Rourke