A Quote by Derek Walcott

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

Derek Walcott

Quote Topics

Abandoned Apart Estates Few Forts History Landscapes Over Rises Ruins Sigh Sugar

Quote Author

Derek Walcott
Poet
January 23, 1930 - March 17, 2017

What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.

Oliver Goldsmith

Ruins are ideal: the perceiver's attitudes count so heavily that one is tempted to say ruins are a way of seeing.

Robert Harbison

The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin to build. Anyhow, looking out from ruins one clearly sees; there are no obstructing walls.

Rose Macaulay

That's what the majority of people in the world do, they walk among the ruins of their life. Things that didn't work out, relationships that went sour, jobs that disappeared. All they can think about is their ruins, and when you focus on that you can't build a new you.

Richard Simmons

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

Jeffrey Eugenides

My films have a lot of historical context; I'm a huge fan of ruins. You see a lot of ruin work in my movies, I like ruins.

James Bobin

I wonder if we climb to heaven over the ruins of many cherished schemes.

Laurel Lea

My soul is lost, my friend, tell me how do I begin again? My city's in ruins, my city's in ruins.

Bruce Springsteen

We live ruins amid ruins.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We may be sure that out of the ruins of our capitalist civilization a new religion will emerge, just as Christianity emerged from the ruins of the Roman civilization.

Herbert Read

He who demands mercy and shows none ruins the bridge over which he himself is to pass.

Thomas Adams

Think about what happens when architecture becomes ruins. All you have left are some little columns on a cliff, but it's still such an overwhelming experience that you could say architecture is that which makes ruins beautiful.

Santiago Calatrava

For winter's rains and ruins are over... And in Green under wood and cover Blossum by blossom the spring begins.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

In those days, I still thoroughly enjoyed the romance I called "by myself"; I didn't know yet how it gets lonely, picks up a sharp edge later on that ruins a day now and then-- ruins more than that, if you're not careful.

Elizabeth Kostova

Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire.