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...

We know from accounts of Rilke’s life that his stay in Rodin’s workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet’s view of the mutilated body thus...

The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellent, mindless of the fact he is admiring the ruins of his parents.

My beautiful proof lies all in ruins.

The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there’d been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.

These are the ruinsI mapped onto my body so I might always be lost.

Ah, what sights and sounds and pain lie beneath that mist. And we had thought that our hard climb out of that cruel valley led to some cool, green and peaceful, sunlit place—but it’s all...

He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one...

Elijah is inexplicably moved by the broken columns and fragmented floors. He cannot help but find a meaning and a message in their poverty of stature. This is what remains, he thinks. It seems a...

I have emotions that are like newspapers that read themselves.I go for days at a time trapped in the want ads.I feel as if I am an ad for the sale of a haunted house:18...

Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see.

Refusing the false securities of a stable and linear past, such an approach celebrates heterogeneous sensations and surprising associations, random connections, the ongoing construction of meaning and also admits into its orbit the mysterious agency...

The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.

There’s no such thing as ruining yourlife. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction....

Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes… The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it...

Something always attracts us towards the ruins, because ruins remind us our fundamental problem: The problem of impermanence! Amongst the ruins we see the very end of our road! Whatever shows you the simple truth,...

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and...

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we...

The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised,...

On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the...

In the park which surrounded our house were the ruins of the former mansion of Brentwood, a much smaller and less important house than the solid Georgian edifice which we inhabited. The ruins were picturesque,...

Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatised memories;

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its...

I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don’t know what’s going to rise from the ruins.

Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.