Wreck Quotes (page 2)
I met a traveller from an antique land. Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone. Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown. And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command. Tell that its sculptor well those passions read. Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have...
Nathanael West
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates. From it's own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, not falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be. Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory
Percy Bysshe Shelley
She forgot to be shy at the moment, in honestly warning him awayfrom the sunken wreck he had a dream of raising; and looked at himwith eyes which assuredly, in association with her patient face, her fragile figure, her spare dress, and the wind and rain, did notturn him from his purpose of helping her.
Charles Dickens
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite...
Annie Dillard
With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.
How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!
Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?
Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We...
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Paracelsus At times I almost dream. I too have spent a life the sage? way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance. I perished in an arrogant self-reliance. Ages ago; and in that act a prayer. For one more chance went up so earnest, so. Instinct with better light let in by death, That life was blotted out? not so completely. But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories, as now, when once more seems. The goal in sight again.
Robert Browning
Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind....
Renata Adler
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?
Henry David Thoreau