Your Wall Quotes (page 2)
Thus it transpired that even Berlin could be mysterious. Within the linden's bloom the streetlight winks. A dark and honeyed hush envelops us. Across the curb one's passing shadow slinks: across a stump a sable ripples thus. The night sky melts to peach beyond that gate. There water gleams, there Venice vaguely shows. Look at that street--it runs to China straight, and yonder star above the Volga glows! Oh, swear to me to put in dreams your trust, and to believe in fantasy alone, and...
Vladimir Nabokov
The ruby at Melisandre's throat gleamed red. "It is not those foes who curse you to your face that you must fear, but those who smile when you are looking and sharpen their knives when you turn your back. You would do well to keep your wolf close beside you. Ice, I see, and daggers in the dark. Blood frozen red and hard, and naked steel. It was very cold."It is always cold on the Wall."You think so?"I know so, my lady."Then you know nothing, Jon Snow," she whispered.
George R. R. Martin
He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
Ray Bradbury
pull a string, a puppet moves ...
each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand --
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and...
Charles Bukowski
Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that...
Steven Pinker
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Cradle Song for Eleano?: Sleep, my darling, sleep; The pity of it all Is all we compass if We watch disaster fall. Put off your twenty-odd Encumbered years and creep Into the only heaven, The robber? cave of sleep. The wild grass will whisper, Lights of passing cars Will streak across your dreams And fumble at the stars; Life will tap the window Only too soon again, Life will have her answer? Do not ask her when. When the winsome bubble Shivers, when the bough Breaks, will be...
Louis MacNeice
The world of things entered your infant mind. To populate that crystal cabinet. Within its walls the strangest partners met, And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind. For, once within, corporeal fact could find. A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt. Built there your little microcosm - which yet. Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned. Dead men can live there, and converse with stars: Equator speaks with pole, and night with day; Spirit dissolves the world's material bars -A...
Julian Huxley
They're events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it's not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record.
Lester Bangs
Tie your heart at night to mine, love, and both will defeat the darknesslike twin drums beating in the forestagainst the heavy wall of wet leaves. Night crossing: black coal of dreamthat cuts the thread of earthly orbswith the punctuality of a headlong trainthat pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly. Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement, to the grip on life that beats in your breast, with the wings of a submerged swan, So that our dream might replyto the sky's questioning starswith...
Pablo Neruda
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is...
Margaret Atwood