Building Quotes (page 31)
Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It’s fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher than the other, that the set of the lid of your left...
Louis de Bernieres
All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
W. H. Auden
Laura had warned him not to expect much. It was a good thing. "Have you and Kate been smoking grass in here?"That's all she ever does on her lunch hour. We really have to get her into a program." Thrilled with herself, Margo spread her arms. "So, what do you think?"Uh-huh. It's a building, all right."Josh."Give me a minute." He walked past her into the adjoining room, came back, looked into the bath, gazed up the pretty, and potentially lethal, staircase. He wiggled the banister, winced....
Nora Roberts
Depression is a lot like that: slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearale. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getter older, about turning eight or about turning twelve or turning fifteeen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
The office was large, with many women and men at desks, and she learned their names, and presented to them an amiability she assumed upon entering the building. Often she felt that her smiles, and her feigned interest in people's anecdotes about commuting and complaints about colds, were an implicit and draining part of her job. A decade later she would know that spending time with people and being unable either to speak from her heart or to listen with it was an imperceptible bleeding of her...
Andre Dubus
Malcolm: A karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is why you think that to build a place like this is simple. Hammond: It was simple. Malcolm: Then why did it go wrong?
Michael Crichton
To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.
Michel de Montaigne
At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one... not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place... in addition, zero (0) planes were flown into buildings. All this was accomplished so surreptitiosly, it attracted little public notice.
George Saunders