Famous Quotes & Sayings

J. R. R. Tolkien

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

J. R. R. Tolkien

But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?

J. R. R. Tolkien

So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!" So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat...giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Iyanla Vanzant

I came from nothing. I came from the projects and welfare and ended up a millionaire with no frame of reference. I was bound to hit a wall sooner or later.

Isaac Hanson

Generally, I end up being the one thrown against the wall, because Zach is the drummer. He's stronger than me.

Isaac Marion

My "heart". Does that pitiful organ still represent anything? It lies motionless in my chest, pumping no blood, serving no purpose, and yet my feelings still seem to originate inside its cold walls. My muted sadness, my vague longing, my rare flickers of joy. They pool in the center of my chest and seep out of there, diluted and faint, but real.

Isaac Marion

I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.

Isaac Asimov

Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man.

Isaac Asimov

All the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy ... could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed.

Irene Cara

If something isn't working out in one aspect of my career, it's not any big neurotic, crazy phase for me, it's just something that I accept, and that's okay. I'm not going to keep banging my head against the wall.

Elton John

Better to build a bridge than a wall.

Elle Fanning

I was kind of scared at first to do that [vice-over] because when you're on set, a lot of the things going on around you - the environment and playing off other actors - and that's what makes it easier and helps you to be in your character. So, realizing you're not going to have that and you're going to be secluded in this booth, it's like, "How am I going to be a character when I'm just in these walls?"

Ian Hart

I need something to do when I'm not working, or I crawl up the walls. So I've just taken up kung fu. I was looking for some kind of calming, relaxing activity. I tried yoga, but it wasn't really me.

Ian Caldwell

...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.

Hugh Howey

My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.

Hugh Jackman

I'm not a kid. You don't get in this business for anonymity. It's not like I have posters of myself on the wall, but at the same time, I'm kind of ready for a little bit of it, but I worry for my little one, and my family - their privacy. That's what I'm more protective of.

Horatio Alger

No period of my life has been one of such unmixed happiness as the four years which have been spent within college walls.

Horace

Faults are committed within the walls of Troy and also without. [There is fault on both sides.]

Horace

Be this our wall of brass, to be conscious of having done no evil, and to grow pale at no accusation.

Gloria Steinem

I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.

Gloria Steinem

It was the first female-style revolution: no violence and we all went shopping.

J. P. Morgan

I'm not in Wall Street for my health.

J. K. Rowling

Everything was curved to fit the walls: the stove, the sink and the cupboards, and all of it had been painted with flowers, insects and birds in bright primary colours.

J. K. Rowling

They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin

J. K. Rowling

He sounds exactly like Moody," said Harry quietly, tucking the letter away again inside his robes. "'Constant vigilance!' You'd think I walk around with my eyes shut, banging off the walls....

J. K. Rowling

You'd think I walk around with my eyes shut, banging off the walls.

J. K. Rowling

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

H. G. Wells

Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.

Jack London

He was always striving to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread.

George Herbert

Would it even be possible to add a "suggested wallpaper" feature that analyzes your favored walls and shows similar ones?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.