Quotes About Place

There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.

man is only an extension of the spirit of place.

He would wake to see the towers and minarets printed on the exhausted, dust-powdered sky, and see as if en montage on them the giant footprints of the historical memory which lies behind the recollections of individual personality, its mentor and guide: indeed its inventor, since man is only an extension of the spirit of place.

The ending has to fit. The ending has to matter, and make sense. I could care less about whether it's happy or sad or atomic. The ending is the place where you go, "Aha. Of course. That's right."

In LA, I mean, here's this place full of desperate and sad people who take their only pleasure from destroying others for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement.

Man's Place in Nature.

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

It's degrading being routinely subjected to a battery of medical tests to ensure I continue to deserve a place in this new world.

Architecture is the very mirror of life.You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

I don't think I've ever seen so many brown robes together in one place. It's like a showroom for the world's dullest textile factory. - Ben Skywalker

But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing.

It is not in space but in time, he writes, that we find God's likeness. In the Bible, no thing or place is holy by itself; not even the Promised Land is called holy.

My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides.

Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness

it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place where we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there." (p.23)

According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one.

In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafés, we may dilute our feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community.

In another paradox that des Esseintes would have appreciated, it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.

Give me a platform of ideas and harmonies on which to gesture and unfurl my wings. Give me a place to stand.

The periphery of a place can tell us a great deal about its heartland. Along the edge of a nation's territory, its real prejudices, fears and obsessions — but also its virtues — irrepressibly bubble up as its people confront the 'other' whom they admire, or fear, or hold in contempt, and know little about.

Home was homeless. It could exist anywhere, because its only substance was familiarity.