Quotes About Abbey

Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

'Upstairs Downstairs' and 'Downton Abbey' appeal to people because they're about our history, they look so beautiful, are written by amazing writers and have high production values.

transept leading to the old cloister. The cloister itself, save for part of the old scriptorium and the boundary walls, had fallen to ruin centuries ago after the dissolution of the abbeys, leaving only a few moss-covered stumps of arches to bear witness to Henry VIII's devastation.

There were so many they packed the small field where the abbey held its yearly market, then spilled around the corner onto the coopers' lane, which followed the eastern edge of the holy house's walled compound. If some of the folk wore the ragged motley of the abbey's usual coterie of beggars, a far greater number dressed in the humble attire of the city's day laborers. Johanna,

St. Galgano was a 12th-century saint who renounced his past as a knight to become a hermit. Lacking a cross to display, he created his own by miraculously burying his sword up to its hilt in a stone, à la King Arthur, but in reverse. After his death, a large Cistercian monastery complex grew. Today, all you'll see is the roofless, ruined abbey and, on a nearby hill, the Chapel of San Galgano with its fascinating dome and sword in the stone.

As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression.

On a very gloomy dismal day, just such a one as it ought to be, I went to see Westminster Abbey.

I mean, you can't walk down the aisle in Westminster Abbey in a strapless dress, it just won't happen - it has to suit the grandeur of that aisle, it's enormous.

Monks from the Grottaferra Abbey near Rome, charged with restoring one of the Vatican's obscure Leonardo da Vinci notebooks in the late zg6os, unwittingly revealed a blockbuster scribble that had been, according to Marinoni, locked away for several hundred years.

The abbey had dominated Whitby for centuries and waves of invisible force flowed down from it. The ruin was a guardian, watching and waiting, caring for the little town that huddled beneath the cliff. It was a worshipful thing.

Maggie Smith is an amazing woman, and not as serious in real life.

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government ' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.

Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.

Wilderness, wilderness...We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.

If I should object to force I will be arrested. If I object to arrest I will be clubbed. If I defend myself against clubbing I will be shot. These procedures are known as The Rule of Law.

As to the charge that I am a cranky old man, I plead guilty.

R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

Regrettably I have found it unavoidable to write some harsh words about my seasonal employer the National Park Service

Or Bakunin: "There are times when creation can be achieved only through destruction. The urge to destroy is then a creative urge.")

For years we've had all the big-hitting HBO box-set dramas, all these brilliant, witty, clever shows, and in return the only thing we've had to offer is big period dramas like 'Downton Abbey'.

There are two words that send romance authors into spasms of rapture: 'Downton Abbey.'