Spires Quotes - Page 2

• The same architect who designed the Seattle fair's futuristic Science Center, with its lacy Gothic arches and spires, Minoru Yamasaki, was hired to design the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Seattle had promised fairgoers a glimpse of the world that would exist in 2001. That year eventually unfolded as something less than the dream we'd imagined.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Dream, Years, Design

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• When we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. . . . O toiling hands of mortals! O wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Travel, Ocean, Feet

  'Virginibus Puerisque' (1881) 'El Dorado'

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• Lo! body and soul!--this land! Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and The sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships; The varied and ample land,--the South And the North in the light--Ohio's shores, and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies, covered with grass and corn.

  Walt Whitman

  New York, Light, Ohio

  Walt Whitman (2008). “Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1860-1867”, p.534, NYU Press

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• There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.

  David James Duncan

  Beautiful, Moving, Men

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• Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?

  Alexander Pope

  Heaven, Taught

  Alexander Pope (1850*). “The works of Alexander Pope. With notes by dr. Warburton”, p.243

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• There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Ideas, Heaven

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 404, 1895.

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• In this way they went on, and on, and on-in the language of the story-books-until at last the village lights appeared before them, and the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass; as if it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world!) marking, whatever light shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new shadow on that solemn ground.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Book, Reflection

  Charles Dickens (1872). “Works of Charles Dickens”, p.123

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• Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic.

  Martin Filler

  Art, Growth, Renaissance

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• But Anne with her elbows on the window sill, her soft cheek laid against her clasped hands, and her eyes filled with visions, looked out unheedingly across city roof and spire to that glorious dome of sunset sky and wove her dreams of a possible future from the golden tissue of youth's own optimism. All the Beyond was hers, with its possibilities lurking rosily in the oncoming years — each year a rose of promise to be woven into an immortal chaplet.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Dream, Sunset, Eye

  J. M. Barrie, Charles Dickens, Johanna Spyri, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum (2015). “Greatest Christmas Novels in One Volume: Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Heidi, The Romance of a Christmas Card, The Little City of Hope, The Wonderful Life, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter Pan…”, p.1840, e-artnow

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• Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.

  Barack Obama

  Islamic, Peaceful, Culture

  A New Beginning: Speech at Cairo University, delivered 4 June 2009, Cairo, Egypt

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• Leo frowned at the giant's spire. "Can't we blow it up or something?" "Without me, you do not have the power," Hera said. "You might as well try to destroy a mountain." "Done that once today," Jason said.

  Rick Riordan

  Blow, Trying, Mountain

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• Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

  J. G. Ballard

  Fashion, Skulls, Heaven

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• How can I appreciate light from an aging
  sun shining through new configurations neither pine
  nor ash? How can I extol the nuturing
  fragrances from the spires, the spicules
  of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?

  Pattiann Rogers

  Light, Appreciate, Shining

  Pattiann Rogers (1994). “Firekeeper: new & selected poems”

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• The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

  Norman Mailer

  Moon, Night, Vegas

  Norman Mailer (2013). “An American Dream: A Novel”, p.256, Random House

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• I envisioned huge piles of the Elf Hotel flying off the belt, taking down everybody in sight. I had seen pictures of that Elf Hotel - it had sharp candy-cane spires that could easily impale someone. If anyone was ever going to be killed by an Elf Hotel, it would be my parents.

  Maureen Johnson

  Sight, Parent, Flying

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• Into my hear an air that kills through yon far country blows what are those blue remembered hills what spires,what farms are those? that is the land of lost content I can see it shining plain the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

  A. E. Housman

  Country, Blow, Air

  A Shropshire Lad no. 40, l. 5 (1896)

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• At noon I feel as though I could devour all the elephants of Hindostan, and then pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg cathedral; in the evening I become so sentimental that I would fain drink up the Milky Way without reflecting how indigestible I should find the little fixed stars, and by night there is the Devil himself broke loose in my head and no mistake.

  Heinrich Heine

  Stars, Mistake, Night

  Heinrich Heine (1882). “Heinrich Heine's Pictures of Travel”

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• You wonder how they do it and you look to see the knack You watch the foot in action, or the shoulder or the back, But when you spot the answer where the higher glamours lurk You'll find in moving higher up the laurel covered spire That most of it is practice and the rest of it is work.

  Grantland Rice

  Sports, Moving, Practice

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• At this sunset hour, the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the canyon's top and the walls of the canyon up there look as if God had reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding these rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun.

  Barry Goldwater

  Beautiful, Photography, Wall

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• He is as much a part of the Derby tradition as the Twin Spires themselves

  John Mallory Asher

  Twins, Tradition, Derby

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• The 2006 event logo combines the twin spires of Churchill Downs, one of the great signature elements in sports, with the greatest international day of Thoroughbred racing. We look forward to displaying the logo widely throughout the commonwealth of Kentucky, and to our international outlets.

  Damon Thayer

  Sports, Kentucky, Racing

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• More and more too, the old name absorbs into me. Mannahatta, 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!

  Walt Whitman

  Beautiful, New York, Sunshine

  Walt Whitman, Floyd Stovall (2007). “Prose Works 1892, Volume II: Collect and Other Prose”, p.683, NYU Press

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• We wish that this column, rising towards heaven among the pointed spires of so many temples dedicated to God, may contribute also to produce in all minds a pious feeling of dependence and gratitude. We wish, finally, that the last object to the sight of him who leaves his native shore, and the first to gladden his who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and the glory of his country. Let it rise! let it rise, till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and the parting day linger and play on its summit!

  Daniel Webster

  Country, Gratitude, Morning

  Daniel Webster (1843). “An Address Delivered at the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, June 17, 1843”, p.59

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• Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Gun, Years

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Journeys, Adventures & Life in Harmony with Nature – 6 Book Collection (Illustrated): Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada & Canoeing in the Wilderness - North American Highlands Series”, p.961, e-artnow

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• From the window, I watch the city and the freeway. In the distance, the sky-rises look like mystic spires, unbearably close and far. I want to pick them up and eat them. I want to scream out loud sometimes, but I never do.

  Brenna Yovanoff

  Distance, Sky, Cities

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