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Quotes About Ruins

All that was left of it now were the ends; two rusting steel pylons reaching heavenward, at a slight lean toward each other. In daylight, from certain angles, it played a trick on the eye. One could almost see the trajectory of their yearning, following their invisible paths up and across. One could see the ghost of the entire arch just from the hint of its bases.
~ Neal Shusterman
Decades of conflict, including a long civil war in Mutal, led to the formation of two large blocs, one dominated by Mutal, the other by Kaan. As cities within the blocs traded attacks with each other, half a dozen cities ended up in ruins, including Naranjo, Oxwitza', Mutal, and Kaan.
~ Charles C. Mann
That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
~ Charles C. Mann
Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest that Folan's advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings, their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monument with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet high. So overwhelming was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul's history would remain forever unknown.
~ Charles C. Mann
We're all fallen people in a fallen world. Where does a man find healing amid so many broken places? How does he find love in the ruins and vine-wrapped shattered pieces of his own soul? Because love's springing up through the rocks.
~ Charles Martin
One Week Get tussled about by Bangkok's chaos, then cruise up to Sukhothai to tour the quiet old ruins. Continue north to Chiang Mai, an easygoing cultural city. Climb up the mountain range to Pai for mountain scenery and bluesy late-nighters.
~ China Williams
It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, my son, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live. The man who has never submitted to anything will soon submit to the burial mat.
~ Chinua Achebe
During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.
~ Chris Bohjalian
Dreams. Each man longs to pursue his dream. Each man is tortured by this dream, but the dream gives meaning to his life. Even if the dream ruins his life, man cannot allow himself to leave it behind. In this world, is man ever able to possess anything more solid, than a dream?
~ Kentaro Miura
Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it.
~ King Hussein I
These ruins are to the future what the past is to us
~ Carolyn Forché
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
~ George Orwell
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
~ George Washington
I hate to think that someday Americans will be looking at the ruins of their cities and saying that this happened because their leaders were afraid of the word unilateral.
~ Thomas Sowell
They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.
~ Dan Simmons, Hyperion
One of the few things we do know for sure about Teotihuacan is that its name was not Teotihuacan. That name means "city of the gods," and it's what the Aztecs called the place centuries later when they stumbled across its deserted ruins—for like so many other great Mesoamerican urban centers, this city was flourishing and then it wasn't.
~ Tamim Ansary
This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it's the old stuff, the stuff that's endured, that might just keep enduring.
~ Tana French
The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have left him of his desert.
~ Pierre Loti
And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.
~ Dorothy Dunnett
I gravitate towards places where humans have been and are no more, to the edge of man's influence, where the elements are taking over or covering man's traces.
~ Michael Kenna
Daß er aussichtsreiche Positionen in der Programmindustrie gegen die Ruinen und Weiden Horse Islands getauscht hatte, war vielleicht dem einfachen Umstand zuzuschreiben, daß ihn die meisten Grenzen empörten – es sei denn, sie hatten die Gestalt eines Strandes.
~ Christoph Ransmayr
As her vision cleared, Kira saw the ruins of the supply room. The grasper was a mangled mess, but several of its tentacles still waved with weak urgency, blobs of orange ichor oozing from its wounds. Carr had been thrown against the shelving. Shards of bones stuck out from his arms and legs. The orphaned piece of the xeno lay against the bulkhead across from her: a slash of torn fibers draped across the crumpled panels.
~ Christopher Paolini
Nada hay que ocupe y ate más el corazón que el amor. Por eso, cuando no dispone de armas para gobernarse, el alma se hunde, por el amor, en la más honda de las ruinas.
~ Umberto Eco
Nada hay en el mundo, ni hombre ni diablo ni cosa alguna, que sea para mí tan sospechoso como el amor, pues este penetra en el alma más que cualquier otra cosa. Nada hay que ocupe y ate más al corazón que el amor. Por eso, cuando no dispone de armas para gobernarse, el alma se hunde, por el amor, en la más honda de las ruinas.
~ Umberto Eco