Quotes About Marble

that we are the sum of all we've seen and all we've appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you'd read.

This was that lucid and dangerous state with drinking, when everything began to shimmer; when there was meaning in the grain of the marble; when one could make the most offensive speeches.

Slowly, I managed to rise from this cold and handsome grave which I had fashioned for myself, and I did at last, after great effort, sit on the cold marble floor, seeing the glint of golden walls through a bit of light that seeped into the chamber around the edges of the upper door.

She has the sort of body you go to see in marble. She has golden hair. Quickly, deftly, she reaches with both hands behind her back and unclasps her top. Setting it on her lap, she swivels ninety degrees to face the towboat square. Shoulders back, cheeks high, she holds her pose without retreat. In her ample presentation there is defiance of gravity. There is no angle of repose. She is a siren and these are her songs.

This cathedral! After all, the elaborate grace of the Pisan cathedral is one thing, and the massive grandeur of this of Florence is another and better thing; it struck me with a sense of the sublime in architecture. At Pisa we say, 'How beautiful!' here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe. The mountainous marble masses overcome as we look up — we feel the weight of them on the soul.

Kit caught the glitter of flirelight on marble, heard the slow drip of water spattering against stone.

Jane stood from a plush chair beside tall arched windows and smoothed her skirt over her thighs, her tailored navy skirt contrasting with Carel's flowing velvet as if it had been chosen to do so. Carel strode toward her, soft brown boots scuffing on her marble floor, and settled on her heels a measured four feet away.

A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty.

Who was, who could be, more broken, exiled, and despairing than Maytera Marble?

But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon, said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardor, character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

few areas were gated off, like the one they were approaching, the area with some of the casts of human bodies. Protected by iron gates, the figures sat mixed in with other finds in an open-air storage facility. Intermingled with fountains, slabs of marble, and endless rows of pots, were the plaster figures that the first archeologists made as they excavated

Marble is always a shock," she said. "It never feels like you think it's going to. I suppose a lifesize statue looks enough like a real person to make you expect to feel skin.

But though it was to be an economical crossing, one step up from steerage, in the Canadian Pacific offices off Trafalgar Square—more cathedral than bureau, all teak, marble, and hush, and with scale models of famous ocean liners from the old days illuminated in the windows—even this most modest of transactions was handled with dignity and circumstance.

Marble statues, engraved with public inscriptions, by which the life and soul return after death to noble leaders.

Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself.

We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears

One suspects he disdained the traditional preparations of drawing and modeling in favor of cutting straight into the marble containing the captive soul yearning for release. The result is a kind of metaphor perhaps unconscious for the struggle of artistic creation. The only way Michelangelo could show us this was to leave the figure half-embedded in the rock.

Mamo, the Italian word for marble, comes from the Greek marmairein, meaning "to shine". Geologically speaking, marble is limestone transformed by the heat and pressure of the earth's crust into a medium-hard, crystalline rock. Cold to the touch, marble yields willingly to the sculptor's chisel. Over time, white statuary acquires an ivory patina remarkably evocative of the warmth of human flesh.

As a building stone, marble was first used extensively by Pericles in the construction of the Parthenon in Athens in about 438 B.C.

The Roman emperor, Augustus famously boasted that he had inherited a city of brick and was leaving one of marble.

Marble that was still attached to the mountain vein, or freshly quarried, was considered alive because porous stone retains moisture absorbed from the ground. Quarry sap makes the marble soft, sparkling, and easy to work. After exposure to the air, this calcium-soaked water evaporates, and the stone becomes drier and harder-cotto, Michelangelo calls it in his contract.

All the buildings lining rue de Conservatoire are constructed of cream marble or limestone. When I went outside today, the sky was pale and fierce, on the very cusp of rain. From the top of the church and the conservatory, the contrast was almost imperceptible, as if marble and air danced cheek to cheek.

They stared at her together for a moment. Sun beams played over marble, making the pink alabaster glow as if rosy blood danced just under the surface of Aphrodite's skin.