Curtains Quotes - Page 17

• The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath, While underneath such leafy tents they keep The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Sleep, Dust, Wind

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1871). “The poetical works of Henry W. Longfellow, ed. with a critical memoir by W.M. Rossetti, illustr. by W. Lawson. Illustr. by E. Edwards”, p.481

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• This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

  Bill Bryson

  Fall, Sadness, Self

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• I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

  Pablo Picasso

  Looks, Rooms, Painting

  Pablo Picasso, Janie Cohen (1995). “Picasso, Inside the Image: Prints from the Ludwig Museum, Cologne”, Robert Hull Fleming Museum

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• The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Views, Facts

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.1820, Delphi Classics

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• Whatever it is that occurs at death, I believe it deserves to be called a miracle. The miracle, ironically, is that we don't die. The cessation of the body is an illusion, and like a magician sweeping aside a curtain, the soul reveals what lies beyond.

  Deepak Chopra

  Lying, Believe, Miracle

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• Even on the iPad or the Kindle, when reading a book, you're rewarded for pressing a button - it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.

  Art Spiegelman

  Book, Reading, Ipads

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Every wife ought to answer for her man. If the husband be engaged in a seditious club, or drinks mysterious healths, or be frugal of his candles on a rejoicing night, let her look to him and keep him out of harm's way; or the world will be apt to say, she has a mind to be a widow before her time. She ought, in such cases, to exert the authority of the curtain lecture; and if she finds him of a rebellious disposition, to tame him, as they do birds of prey, by dinning him in the ears all night long.

  Joseph Addison

  Husband, Night, Men

  Joseph Addison, Thomas Tickell (1811). “The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison: With the Exception of His Numbers of the Spectator”, p.48

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• (You wouldn't believe how many people will hang up a picture of an electric chair? especially if it matches the color of their curtains.

  Andy Warhol

  Believe, Color, People

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• I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks.

  Alan Sillitoe

  Football, Running, Heart

  Alan Sillitoe (2016). “New and Collected Stories”, p.25, Open Road Media

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• The people who lived behind those clean lace curtains in row after row of identical boxes were newspaper readers, and every word in at any rate my newspaper must be clear and comprehensible to them, must be interesting to them, must encourage them to break away from littleness, stimulate their ambition, help them to want to build a better land.

  Arthur Christiansen

  Ambition, Land, People

  1961 Headlines all my Life, ch.1.

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• Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.

  Chris Abani

  Night, Quality, Tears

  Chris Abani (2014). “The Secret History of Las Vegas: A Novel”, p.124, Penguin

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• History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in East Germany and Eastern Europe about 22 years ago... The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the Iron Curtain that divided Germany and Europe, and indeed the world, into two blocs.

  Angela Merkel

  Wall, East Germany, Years

  Angela Merkel's Remarks in an Exchange of Toasts with President Obama, www.newsroomamerica.com. June 7, 2011.

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• The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That's enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce's office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services.

  Alan Bock

  Men, Years, Civilization

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• Can it be entirely accidental that the most famous fictional spy of them all, James Bond, Number 007, deadly marksman, intriguer, the ultimate man behind the curtain, sexual athlete and ruthless patriot, is also a Scot, as was the author, whose wish-fulfilment he was?

  Linda Colley

  Athlete, Men, Numbers

  Linda Colley (2005). “Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837”, p.132, Yale University Press

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• While the Soviet Union has imposed its rule on its neighbours and drawn an iron curtain between east and west, we in Great Britain have given freedom and independence to more than forty-eight countries whose populations now number more than a thousand million - a quarter of the world's total.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Country, Eight, Iron

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• No, Groucho is not my real name. I am breaking it in for a friend. I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception. I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it. I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.

  Groucho Marx

  Real, Book, Play

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• You might be a redneck if your house doesn't have curtains, but your truck does.

  Jeff Foxworthy

  Redneck, House, Doe

  Jeff Foxworthy (2005). “Redneck Extreme Mobile Home Makeover: Or A Redneck Look at Fixing Up and Decorating Your House Without Loss of Limbs”, p.9, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Each successive Labour Government has been the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain.

  Roy Jenkins

  Government, Iron, Sides

  Roy Jenkins (1985). “Partnership of principle: writings and speeches on the making of the alliance”, Secker & Warburg

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• The speckled sky is dim with snow,
  The light flakes falter and fall slow;
  Athwart the hill-top, rapt and pale,
  Silently drops a silvery veil; And all the valley is shut in
  By flickering curtains gray and thin.

  John Townsend Trowbridge

  Fall, Light, Sky

  John Townsend Trowbridge (1871). “Vagabonds: And Other Poems”, p.42

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• Strangers with puzzled looks were amazingly cooperative in letting me into their rooms with my photographic gear. They let me take down the curtains, wash the windows, and rearrange the furniture. Often, too, they expressed their desire to share their view with others, as if it were a non-depletable treasure. I liked the idea that my photographic vantage points were not solely determined by myself. They were predetermined by others, sometimes years earlier, and patiently waited for me to discover them.

  John Pfahl

  Views, Years, Ideas

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• The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man. And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains.

  Alice Meynell

  Moving, Eye, Men

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• You know you knit too much when ... Before you buy anything, such as a hammock or curtains, you seriously wonder whether you could knit it.

  Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

  Knitting, Hammocks, Too Much

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• Performers and their public should never meet. Once the curtain comes down, the performer should fly away like a magician's dove.

  Edith Piaf

  Fly Away, Dove, Should

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• I feel sorry for a culture that depends too much on delegating its musical expression to professionals. It is fine to have heroes, but we should do our own singing first, even if it is never heard beyond the shower curtain.

  Linda Ronstadt

  Music, Sorry, Hero

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• other artists - poets, painters, sculptors, musicians - produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, - we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence.

  Charlotte Saunders Cushman

  Memories, Fall, Artist

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