Monumental Quotes

1. "I have a problem,' said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. ‘I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers' collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?' ‘Yes, of course.' ‘Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists?"
Author: Adam Roberts

2. "Because Great Britain has self-confidence, it doesn't need a monumental Olympics."
Author: Ai Weiwei

3. "I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true."
Author: Andy Rooney

4. "'Really,' thought I, 'we call Baltimore the 'Monumental City' for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner!'"
Author: Bayard Taylor

5. "Because I was conceived and born and I grew up. I'm breathing and my heart is beating and as much as it hurts ? as much searing, monumental pain it causes me ? I have to exist."
Author: Brenna Yovanoff

6. "On the plane leaving Tokyo I'm sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing "Over the Rainbow" straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don't even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon."
Author: Bret Easton Ellis

7. "Thingschanging, failing apart, fading, another year, a few moremoves, a hard person who doesn't give a fuck, a boredom somonumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made bypeople you don't even know that it requires you to lose anysense of reality you might have once acquired, expectationsso unreasonable you become superstitious about evermatching them."
Author: Bret Easton Ellis

8. "Monumental achievements by humanity should be done by major organizations as much together as possible."
Author: Buzz Aldrin

9. "The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one...that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger."
Author: Caroline Knapp

10. "Well?""Well, what?" I waved a hand at the room."Start genuflecting. Let's see some knee action.""You're serious." I lifted my brows. He responded in kind, but finally nodded his head, then walked between the couches. He dropped to one knee, then held out his hands."I'm monumentally sorry for the pain and humiliation that I caused you and your—""Both knees." "Pardon?" "I'd prefer to see both knees on the ground. I mean, if you're going to grovel, be the best groveler you can, right?"
Author: Chloe Neill

11. "It appears to be monumental only because it's art."
Author: Christo

12. "Helplessness is such a rotten feeling. There's nothing you can do about it. Being helpless is like being paralyzed. It's sickness. The cure calls for a monumental effort to stand up and start walking somewhere, anywhere. But that takes some doing."
Author: Chuck Barris

13. "The elk that you glimpse in the summer, those at the forest edge, are survivors of winter, only the strongest. You see one just before dusk that summer, standing at the perimeter of the meadow so it can step back to the forest and vanish. You can't help imagining the still, frozen nights behind it, so cold that the slightest motion is monumental. I have found their bodies, half drifted over in snow, no sign of animal attack or injury. Just toppled over one night with ice working into their lungs. You wouldn't want to stand outside for more than a few minutes in that kind of weather. If you lived through only one of those winters the way this elk has, you would write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed. That elk from the winter stands there on the summer evening, watching from beside the forest. It keeps its story to itself."
Author: Craig Childs

14. "As we did every New Year's Eve we made ridiculous resolutions that no one would keep, and quietly we all wondered what the coming year would hold, each of us praying for our own private miracles. Good health. Better health. A marriage for this child, a good job for another. This hopefulness was something hardwired into our psyches, that a new year might mean some monumental something wonderful could happen to bring us happiness at a level we had never known. A new year was a chance to start over. Maybe even, just maybe, there would be peace on earth for one entire day."
Author: Dorothea Benton Frank

15. "Of all my children, you were always the hardest on yourself. You were always looking for the right way to behave, so concerned you might make a mistake. But, darling, there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes, our actions, and the consequences that follow both. There are only events, how we cope with them, and what we learn from the coping.""That's too easy," he said."On the contrary. It's monumentally difficult."
Author: Elizabeth George

16. "Emerson abandoned irony for blunt and passionate speech.'This war has been a monumental blunder from the start! Britain is not solely responsible, but by God, gentlemen, she must share the blame, and she will pay a heavy price: the best of her young men, future scholars and scientists and statesmen, and ordinary, decent men who might have led ordinary, decent lives. And how will it end, when you tire of your game of soldiers? A few boundaries redrawn, a few transitory political advantages, in exchange for an entire continent laid waste and a million graves! What I do may be of minor importance in the total accumulation of knowledge, but at least I don't have blood on my hands."
Author: Elizabeth Peters

17. "Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones."
Author: Ernest Hemingway

18. "To all who have discerning eyes, it is apparent that the republican form of government established by our noble forefathers cannot long endure once fundamental principles are abandoned. Momentum is gathering for another conflict-a repetition of of the crisis two hundred years ago. This collision of ideas is worldwide. Another monumental moment is soon to be born. The issue is the same that precipitated the great premortal conflict-will men be free to determine their own course of action or must they be coerced?"
Author: Ezra Taft Benson

19. "Tupo navikavanje, onošto je maleno i nisko, ispunjavajuci sve kutove sveta, kao težak zemni vazduh dimeci se oko svega što je veliko, ometajuci, obmanjujuci, ublažavajuci, gušeci, otežava put kojim ono što je veliko ima da ide ka besmrtnosti. Taj put, medutim, vodi kroz ljudske mozgove! Kroz mozgove zastrašenih i kratkovecnih životinja koje se stalno iznova pojavljuju radi istih nevolja i s naporom neznatno vreme odbijaju od sebe propast. Jer, one u prvom redu hoce samo jedno: da žive po svaku cenu. Ko bi kod njih naslutio onu tešku trku luconoša monumentalne istorije zahvaljujuci kojoj ono što je veliko dalje živi!"
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

20. "To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale."
Author: Greg Lynn

21. "The Hercules' was a monumental undertaking. It is the largest aircraft ever built... I put the sweat of my life into this thing."
Author: Howard Hughes

22. "I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies."
Author: J. Jack Halberstam

23. "A complete stranger has the capacity to alter the life of another irrevocably. This domino effect has the capacity to change the course of an entire world. That is what life is; a chain reaction of individuals colliding with others and influencing their lives without realizing it. A decision that seems miniscule to you, may be monumental to the fate of the world."
Author: J.D. Stroube

24. "I prefer sinners and madmen, who can learn, who can change, who can teach-or people like myself, if I may say so, who are not afraid to eat a lobster alone as they take on their shoulders the monumental weight of thirty years"
Author: James Baldwin

25. "It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed."
Author: James Baldwin

26. "Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf 's birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature."
Author: Jane Goldman

27. "Was this what the human reproductive urge was like, a pointless and powerful desire to replicate wonderful, irreplaceable me, even when the me in question was a monster who truly had no right to live among humans? That would certainly explain how a great many of the monumentally unpleasant cretins I encountered every day came to be."
Author: Jeff Lindsay

28. "But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan."
Author: Jeff VanderMeer

29. "True and lasting motivation can't, unfortunately, come from outside. It must arise from a very deep place within us. This life-changing motivation verily forces its way out of us, demanding that we take action. That is the motivation that propels people to monumental acts of courage, willpower, perseverance, and, ultimately, change."
Author: Jim Taylor

30. "No respect for beauty - that was characteristic of today's society. The work of the great masters were at most employed as ironic references or in advertising. Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam " where you see a pair of jeans in place of the spark. The whole point of the picture at least as he saw it was that these two monumental bodies each came to an end in two index fingers that almost but not quite touched. There was a space between them a millimeter or so wide. And in this space: life. The sculptural enormity and richness of detail of this picture was simply a frame a backdrop to emphasize the crucial void in the center. The point of emptiness that contained everything.And in its place someone had superimposed a pair of jeans."
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist

31. "Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants."
Author: John W. Gardner

32. "There was this other apocalypse this one time. And, well, I took off. But this time, I don't... I don't know." "Well, what's different?" "Well, I guess I was kinda new to being around humans before. And now I've seen a lot more, gotten to know people, seen what they're capable of and I guess I just realize how amazingly... screwed up they all are. I mean, really, really screwed up in a monumental fashion." "Oh." "And they have no purpose that unites them, so they just drift around, blundering through life until they die. Which they-they know is coming, yet every single one of them is surprised when it happens to them. They're incapable of thinking about what they want beyond the moment. They kill each other, which is clearly insane, and yet, here's the thing. When it's something that really matters, they fight. I mean, they're lame morons for fighting. But they do. They never... They never quit. And so I guess I will keep fighting, too."
Author: Joss Whedon

33. "He didn't want to puff her up. Puffed-up women are one of the original sources of trouble in the world. If anyone knew that, it was he. He counted it as one of his duties to mankind to keep women from puffing themselves up, though it had been a most monumental duty in his own marriage. A job requiring a hero. It was one of those things that God, being male, questioned you about before you were let into heaven, and he was proud to say that he hadn't neglected it."
Author: Judith Merkle Riley

34. "It feels like he's marking me. Like he's preparing me for something monumental. That could both change and ruin my life."
Author: Katy Evans

35. "I paused for a moment, debating whether to turn and look what was happening. My senses told me Obo's presence was still at my side, and turning my face into the barrel of a gun seemed like an ill-advised way to cap off this day of monumentally stupid decisions."
Author: M.A. George

36. "I guess I'm just stuck on the idea that there's this monumental machine, and we're all part of it. Most of the time, we don't even stop to think about how it works. We just go about our business, doing our part, trusting that everyone else will do their part, and the machine will keep functioning. But all it takes is for someone to come along who isn't thinking straight, some who's not paying attention, or worse, hell-bent on self-destruction and everything turns to shit."
Author: Michelle Richmond

37. "Why are we so monumentally slow?"
Author: Naomi Shihab Nye

38. "After what seemed like a monumental effort she reached the door and exited into the night air, leaving the rest of her"
Author: Paul Pilkington

39. "A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration."
Author: Richard Schickel

40. "I've seen 'Babel' four times. And each time I realize anew what a monumental project that had been for me."
Author: Rinko Kikuchi

41. "Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising."
Author: Robert Smithson

42. "In reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man?"
Author: Ryszard Kapuściński

43. "I think if it's not monumental, there's no point."
Author: Stephan Jenkins

44. "Too bad Einstein's dead. I'm sure he would have appreciated my latest discoverywithin the space-time continuum.The closer you are to experiencing a monumental event, the longer timestretches out. It makes you feel alone"
Author: Susane Colasanti

45. "Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is."
Author: Sylvia Plath

46. "Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do."
Author: Tiffany Madison

47. "My Father Still Sleeping After SurgeryIn spite of himself,my father loved me. In spiteof the hands that beat me, in spiteof the mouth that kept silent, in spiteof the face that turned cruelas a gold Chinese king,he could not control the lovethat came out of him.The body is monumental, a colossusthrough which he breathes.His hands crawl over his stomachjerkily as sand crabs on five legs;he makes a fistlike the fist of a newborn."
Author: Toi Derricotte

48. "It was the worst period of my life. I had all this gigantic acceptance as a kid, and all of a sudden there was this monumental rejection."
Author: Tommy Rettig

49. "I remember to this day how easily I could grasp what he called his tentative ideas when he talked about the architectural style of the capitalist era, a subject which he said had fascinated him since his own student days, speaking in particular of the compulsive sense of order and the tendency towards monumentalism evident in law courts and penal institutions, railway stations and stock exchanges, opera houses and lunatic asylums, and the dwelling built to rectangular grid patterns for the labor force."
Author: W.G. Sebald

50. "Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."
Author: William James

Monumental Quotes Pictures