Quotes About Reconstruction

We have withdrawn into ourselves not out of horror, but out of a need to reconstruct the patterns we have called truth. In the very fabric of the realm, its settlement, history, tales, war, poetry, its riddles - if there is an answer there, a shape of truth that holds itself, we will find it.

Memory is fiction . . . All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. . . The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction. [Armitstead, Claire. "Damon Galgut talks about his novel In a Strange Room." The Guardian. 10 September 2010.]

Every time you said it, you really said it. It wasn't like a sequel where Hollywood just lines up the same actors and hopes it works again. It was like a remake with a new director and crew trying something else and starting from scratch.

And when we finally gathered ourselves together again among the ruins, we were changed.

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.

You can always see an ancient city better when it's been bombed.

1948 President Truman signs legislation establishing the Marshall Plan.

I once took over a State which was faced by complete ruin, thanks to its trust in the promises of the rest of the world and to the bad regime of democratic governments… I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production… developed traffic, caused mighty roads to be built and canals to be dug, called into being gigantic new factories and at the same time endeavored to further the education and culture of our people. I

Things are breaking down inside of her. She waits to see if she can build new, satisfying shapes from them.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart,

Francoism constitutes the most significant and enduring "Western" example of how European polities, societies and "nations" of the mid twentieth century came to be reconstructed through violence – through the large-scale execution and mass imprisonment of compatriots.

Forced labourers undertook the construction and also the reconstruction of war-damaged roads, railways, dams, towns and other public infrastructure, as well as the building of Franco's own mausoleum

I can't, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don't make a story.

Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war. And

But then you're put back together again, in a wholly different order . . ." "And it hurts so much you don't know if the new order will work." "It'll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don't you think?" He

The terrible suffering among the freed slaves during Reconstruction has been overshadowed, in popular literature and film, by the fall of the white planters, exemplified by the figure of Scarlett O'Hara.

The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature.

During these two and a half years that have followed the war, the most urgent problem we have encountered was: to activate the public enterprises, to bring them up to the level that international markets demand and we are just now getting them prepared for privatization.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

My house is actually two houses that were deconstructed. They were Connecticut Valley houses built in 1771 and 1781. I took them down piece by piece and reconstructed them about 50 miles to the west on the New York/Connecticut border.

We should use our old moral values and our love of peace as the foundation of national reconstruction and look forward to the day when we shall become leaders in world reconstruction upon lines of international justice and good will.

What seems so solid and certain is really part of the ceaseless pull-it-down-build-it-again pattern of history, where the turbulence of the past is recast as landmark, as icon, as tradition, as what we defend, what we uphold--until it's time to call in the wrecking ball.