Old Structures Quotes

1. "It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time."
Author: Bill Bryson

2. "When you've been really beaten, you realize that you are just an envelope of skin, an easily penetrated envelope that holds together a lot of fluids and some rigid structures, which in their turn can simply be broken and invaded."
Author: Charlaine Harris

3. "People who've never read fairy tales, the professor said, have a harder time coping in life than the people who have. They don't have access to all the lessons that can be learned from the journeys through the dark woods and the kindness of strangers treated decently, the knowledge that can be gained from the company and example of Donkeyskins and cats wearing boots and steadfast tin soldiers. I'm not talking about in-your-face lessons, but more subtle ones. The kind that seep up from your sub¬conscious and give you moral and humane structures for your life. That teach you how to prevail, and trust. And maybe even love."
Author: Charles De Lint

4. "Client companies and advertising agencies are old-world-order places. The systems and processes and structures come from a time when you shot the TV commercial, then you did the print ads, then you did everything else - including the website. Everything has changed, but the systems haven't."
Author: Cindy Gallop

5. "What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process? Equality, then, would simply be a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems—since problems there will always be—a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse or fade away."
Author: David Graeber

6. "And saying it--the first time we say it and mean it-- we cross over into that other world that has so far been no more than a suspicion or a dream. Saying it, we enter the golden realm where the old structures of doubt and the agony of incompleteness disappear, and the utterance itself is the first bright rung on the ladder of new possibility. What a relief! What a joyous relief from the distinctive weight of your own soul, to be able to look unguardedly into the eyes of another and say it, meaning it and heady with knowing you mean it: "I love you." If the wind had blown through me at that moment, my body would have sung like a chime."
Author: Glen Duncan

7. "Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system."
Author: Grant Morrison

8. "The knowledge feels grotesque in my mind but I grasp it and hold it tight, etching it deep into my memory. Why am I doing this? Why do I want to know the names and functions of all the beautiful structures I've spent my years violating? Because I don't deserve to keep them anonymous. I want the pain of knowing them and by extension myself: who and what I really am."
Author: Isaac Marion

9. "Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. And however undramatic the pursuit of peace, the pursuit must go on."
Author: John F. Kennedy

10. "Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore. So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

11. "I've been cut down, destroyed, and demolished. Someone once told me that the human mind is like a temple. A sound structure. Compiled by bricks, cement, and straw.Built by sweating slaves after hours and hours of back-breaking labor.But I disagree… I disagree because even the most sound and well-built structures can crumble.I've had days where I felt like my mind was crumbling in the palms of my hands and I was frantic, with fear and desperate with trembling fingers to put the pieces back together.I felt like that until my husband saved me.I want to cherish the way I feel about Elijah forever."
Author: Lauren Hammond

12. "[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret."
Author: Michael Chabon

13. "The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on"
Author: Tucker Max

14. "Change is happening and old structures are falling in the form of a "Death of a Thousand Cuts." In other words one grand act is not occuring but a multitude of small expressions on the part of individuals, both slowly and swiftly taking the place of heirarchy and history."
Author: William Gibson

Old Structures Quotes Pictures