Quotes About Ruins

My soul has been haunted by something like those forgotten melodies that come back to us at twilight, during those slow hours in which memory, like a ghost among ruins, stalks our thoughts.

n'aimait la mer qu'à cause de ses tempêtes, et la verdure seulement lorsqu'elle était clairsemée parmi les ruines. Il fallait qu'elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profit personnel ; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son cÅ"ur, – étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu'artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages.

Abituata alla tranquillità, desiderava per contrasto tutto ciò che era movimentato. Amava il mare soltanto per le sue tempeste, e la vegetazione soltanto se cresceva a stento e rada in mezzo alle rovine.

She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Van zee hield zij alleen vanwege de stormen, en van gras uitsluitend als het schaars opschoot tussen de ruïnes.

L'amour est une plante de printemps qui parfume tout de son espoir, même les ruines où il s'accroche.

Accustomed to the tranquil side of nature, she sought the dramatic in its stead. She loved the sea only for its storms, and the green grass only when it grew in patches among ruins.

Accustomed to the peaceful, she turned in reaction to the picturesque. She loved the sea only for its storms, green foliage only when it was scattered amid ruins.

Affermazione di libertà che lo innalzava nella stima di se stesso. Era come l'iniziazione al mondo, l'accesso ai piaceri proibiti. Non le piaceva il mare se non in tempesta, e l'erba se non quando era disseminata tra la rovine. Bisognava che potesse ricavare dalle cose una specie di profitto personale, e respingeva come inutile tutto quello che non contribuiva a riempire il suo cuore: di temperamento più sentimentale che artistico ricercava emozioni e non panorami.

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.

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.

I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road.

I said to myself, with all the ardour of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating years.

Exham Priory itself I saw without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks' nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers.

Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed.

Where once had risen walls of 300 cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty millions of men now crawled only the detestable green water-lizard.

I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape.

On a knoll in the marshes stand the ruins of an old croft-house. This knoll is perhaps only in a certain sense the work of nature; perhaps it is much rather the work of long dead peasants who built their homes there on the grassy bank by the brook, generation after generation, one on the other's ruins.

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.

The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses.

To savour Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them.

Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old.