Ruins Quotes

1. "A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain."
Author: Anatole France

2. "Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning."
Author: Anselm Kiefer

3. "To sleep around is absolutely wrong for a woman; it's degrading and it completely ruins her personality. Sooner or later it will destroy all that is feminine and beautiful and idealistic in her."
Author: Barbara Cartland

4. "It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins."
Author: Buenaventura Durruti

5. "My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to notice more and more how fine and straight his shelves remained, despite great structural stress. That sort of moral fortitude is rare in this day and age. By and by, my siblings and I were born and romped on the balconies, raced up and down the splintered ladders, and pored over many encyclopedias and exciting novels. I know just everything about everything—so long as it beings with A through L."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

6. "Growing old is natural," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control."
Author: Charles Stross

7. "If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

8. "I don't know if she has a boyfriend. You should ask her.''If I ask her, she'll say yes. It's better not to know. That way you're always in with a chance. Even if they're with their husbands, and you've just watched them take their vows, never ask them if they're married. Totally ruins your chances."
Author: Danny Wallace

9. "Skulduggery stood among the ruins of what had once been a sofa. Valkyrie raised an eyebrow.'I was trying to make up the sofa bed so you could get some rest,' he explained, and pointed to the second sofa across the room. 'Unfortunately, it would appear that that is the sofa bed, and this, apparently, is just a sofa."
Author: Derek Landy

10. "I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit."
Author: Dick Francis

11. "The spectacular landscape circling the fortress supplies an essential backdrop, inspiring dreamers to wander its ruins for the sake of it; North American tourists, bound down by their practical world view, are able to place those members of the disintegrating tribes they may have seen in their travels among these once-living walls, unaware of the moral distance separating them, since only the semi-indigenous spirit of the South American can grasp the subtle differences."
Author: Ernesto Guevara

12. "He found a glimmer of hope in the ruins of disaster"
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

13. "My beautiful proof lies all in ruins."
Author: Georg Cantor

14. "He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua."
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

15. "Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am."
Author: Henry Miller

16. "You'll lose.""What makes you so sure?""You have no discipline. All you do is tear down shit down. My father is a bastard, but at least he builds things. You turn cities into smoking ruins and blunder about like some hyper child, smashing anything you see. And then you sit here and wonder, 'Why did all of my children turn out to be violet idiots? It's a mystery of nature,'."
Author: Ilona Andrews

17. "Destiny is as it is. Nothing can change it. Accept it before it ruins you."
Author: J.L. Sheppard

18. "The three of us ate a fine supper of grilled trout with sorrel cream sauce, and red potatoes out of Britney's old garden behind the ruins of the Watling place, and watercress sautéed in butter for hardly a moment with a dash of vinegar, and cream custard with wild blackberries for dessert."
Author: James Howard Kunstler

19. "What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."
Author: James Madison

20. "Perhaps everyone finds him or herself a time or two sifting through the rubble and ruins of a devastated life, wondering whether or not it's worth rebuilding or even salvageable."
Author: Jim Palmer

21. "I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don't know what's going to rise from the ruins."
Author: Joan Baez

22. "One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins everywhere."
Author: John Fiske

23. "It's hard as hell to hold onto your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist."
Author: John Green

24. "Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

25. "Fine, princess." Ash and Puck followed me up the stairs into the ruins above. "But if I get sick, I expect you to wait on me hand and foot.""If you get sick, I'll just have Ash put you out of your misery.""I'm touched that you care."
Author: Julie Kagawa

26. "Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it."
Author: King Hussein I

27. "HELLO. Hello hello hello hello hello hello.Hello?Damn, now I've gone and done it. I've made hello go all abstract and weird. It looks like an alien rune now, something an astronaut would find engraved on a moon rock and go, A strange moon word! I must bring this back to Earth as a gift for my deaf son! And which would then--of course--hatch flying space piranhas and wipe out humanity in less than three days, SOMEHOW sparing the astronaut just so he could be in the final shot, weeping on his knees in the ruins of civilization and crying out to the heavens, It was just helloooooooo!Oh. Huh. It's totally back to normal now. No more alien doom. Astronaut, I just kept you from destroying Earth,YOU'RE WELCOME."
Author: Laini Taylor

28. "Too much brightness blinds the eyes. Too much sound deafens the ears. Too much flavour ruins the tongue. Chasing desires to excess turns your mind towards madness, and valuing precious things impairs good judgment."
Author: Lao Tzu

29. "The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play."
Author: Lev Grossman

30. "Each of us hides our own private Delaware lost in the gray jungle-tangle of our brains. No one else can know its depths and byways. No one else can know the height of its towers, the secrets of its tides and pools. There will always be lost lagoons to find there, and ruins almost hidden by the sand. There will always be monsters of great beauty and good men with ugly frowns. The forests are dark but lights bob among the branches. You are at home there, more at home than anyplace else, and yet you will never go there in your life. Their legends are yours. The pirates sale around the cape, a crew of skeletons in the rigging. Milkmaids run down mountain passes, dragging kites behind them. Wizards crack their backs after long days of chalk and incantation while above the crowded bazaars, over the golden temples, against the setting sun, around the ruddy minarets, the pterodactyls call out a long farewell."
Author: M.T. Anderson

31. "I watched Gretzky, I watched Lemieux. Maybe it's the time when you're playing, but for a kid coming into the league, you play the Boston Bruins and you just watched Bobby Orr."
Author: Marcel Dionne

32. "I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. "Wretch!" I said, "it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings; and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power."
Author: Mary Shelley

33. "Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn't now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see."
Author: Mason West

34. "To write out the precepts again, we contend with them, and keep them; we build our humanity, and keep our humanity alive... Thay has named the precepts 'wonderful'... Wonderful because they can protect us, and show us how to live a joyous life, an interesting, adventurous, deep, large life, and how to be with one another, and with animals, plants, and all the Earth and universe. Wonderful because when we practice the precepts, we existentially become humane, we embody loving kindness... Standing in the midst of burning ruins, I was glad that I knew the precepts. Though I kept their tenets imperfectly, even in aspiration I created some invisible good that could not be destroyed... The Five Wonderful Precepts give clear and simple directions to finding that life. In devastation, I have blueprints for making home anew (90-92).--For a Future to Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts"
Author: Maxine Hong Kingston

35. "Pouring breakfast cereal into a bowl, he saw his life crashing down in smoking ruins."
Author: Meg Rosoff

36. "I'm going to college. I don't care if it ruins my career. I'd rather be smart than a movie star."
Author: Natalie Portman

37. "I suppose because we have no ruins and no curiosities," said Virginia satirically."
Author: Oscar Wilde

38. "Politics ruins the character"
Author: Otto Von Bismarck

39. "She asks if I left a girlfriend behind when we moved. I say no, and she smiles, which just about ruins me."
Author: Pittacus Lore

40. "False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports."
Author: Richard Burton

41. "I cud feal some thing growing in me it wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWERThe ruins of Canterbury Castle"
Author: Russell Hoban

42. "One can simply never take back the words he spoke.And when you know you unintentionally did hurt someone, instead of letting it go or keeping a distance from that person, you can actually do something to mend the broken. That's the least we can do, when circumstances never are on our side; we can stick to our words and promises even if people change and fate ruins.."
Author: Sanhita Baruah

43. "... I see the green earth covered with the works of man or with the ruins of men's work. The pyramids weigh down the earth, the tower of Babel has pierced the sky, the lovely temples and the gray castles have fallen into ruins. But of all those things which hands have built, what hasn't fallen nor ever will fall? Dear friends, throw away the trowel and mortarboard! Throw your masons' aprons over your heads and lie down to build dreams! What are temples of stone and clay to the soul? Learn to build eternal mansions of dreams and visions!"
Author: Selma Lagerlöf

44. "The economy is in ruins! Bottom line? Good management will defeat a bad economy."
Author: Stan Slap

45. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
Author: T.S. Eliot

46. "...I can't possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I do, in which case that is nobody's business and I'll never regret it for a moment unless it ruins my life."
Author: Tina Fey

47. "Every hour you spend on your rear end ... saps your energy and ruins your health."
Author: Tom Rath

48. "Southern novelist Walker Percy writes in Love in the Ruins, "We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away."6"
Author: Tullian Tchividjian

49. "We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...]My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings."
Author: Wallace Stegner

50. "Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?"
Author: Wilkie Collins

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