Quotes About Ruins

The most famous of them all was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis.

No, said a voice from the dark doorway. A weary voice, a voice for speaking long after midnight, a voice to be used when all paths are blocked, when castles have fallen to ruins, when morning will not come again.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

We're left without a chance, ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions.

Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper. In the darknes the danger seemed to grow. You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence. Everyone looked at their house and thought, "Tomorrow it will be in ruins, tomorrow I'l have nothing left.

you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

Thus are dreams dashed and good intentions lost. Everything returns to the dust, and everything is reduced to blind fighting in the shadowed ruins of cities against men who were brothers until madness claimed their minds. Everything returns to the dirt, and the dirt becomes your camouflage, and hides your face and your cap badge in the dark, when death comes, growling, to find you out.

The door was open; I stepped in. A ghost town with a ghost theater, yet the former grandness still evident, the gold wallpaper peeling, the velvet seats in attendant rows, though ripped and ruined. Why did I cry? Not because it was a wreck, but because I felt the history.

What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

Jewish and Palestinian nationalism are virtually contemporaneous, and grew out of the disruptions that created new national movements from the ruins of the old empires / i.

It was like archeology. There was digging and there was dirt. And there was broken things.

Madness rides the star-wind ... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses ... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial.

The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.

The very ruins have been destroyed.

Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

They burnt down the whole palace and they laughed menacingly. The shadows of the dreams and memories they burnt alive walked all over the ruins, trying to hold on to the charred pieces of their body.

He made her think of ruins, of mysterious places in shadow and darkness, of storms and torrents of rain.

She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture.

The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations.

Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.

This alleged mystery, though, is a knot that we can untie with the Bible in our hands. We can acknowledge that man has all the marks of a majestic temple about him – a temple in which God once dwelt but which is now in utter ruins, a temple in which a shattered window here and a doorway and a column there still give some faint idea of the magnificence of the original design – but a temple which from end to end has lost its glory and has fallen from its once lofty position.

O time! The beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter And only healer when the heart hath bled— Time! The corrector where our judgments err, The test of truth, love, sole philosopher. —Lord Byron, Childe Harold IV, 1818

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

Olvidados en las selvas de Chiapas, los templos y las pirámides de Palenque o de Yaxchilán han sobrevivido durante más de mil años a los asaltos de los elementos y de las plantas, en tanto que los de México sucumbieron a la voluntad destructora de los hombres.