Antique Quotes

“Sensuality never ages nor go out of style.”
― Lebo Grand

“The Mologai. The sun shines less in the Mologai, but heat gathers there in the shade and smoke. Steep cramped dwellings, shops oldish. Oddly, smoke pervading the whole area. The streets cling to contours. You clamber up steps from one narrow alleyway to the next, among the stalls. It's an antique hunter's paradise - or rather purgatory, because the promise of heaven takes time to realize.”
― Jonathan Gash, Jade Woman

“Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of the secret attraction to a choas which lies concealed in the very bosom of the ordered universe, and is perpetually striving for marvellous births; the life-giving spirit of primal love broods here anew on the face of the water. The former (the antique) is more simple, clear, and like to nature in the self-existent perfection of her separate works; the latter (the romantic) notwithstanding its fragmentary appearance, approaches more to the secret of the universe.”
― August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

“Nowadays, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with one form or another of advanced technology and we have got to make it work safely and efficiently: this involves, among other things, the intelligent application of structural theory. However, man does not live by safety and efficiency alone, and we have to face the fact that, visually, the world is becoming an increasingly depressing place. It is not, perhaps, so much the occurrence of what might be described as 'active ugliness' as the prevalence of the dull and the commonplace. Far too seldom is the heart rejoiced or does one feel any better or happier for looking at the works of modern man. Yet most of the artefacts of the eighteenth century, even quite humble and trivial ones, seem to many of us to be at least pleasing and sometimes incomparably beautiful. To that extent people—all people—in the eighteenth century lived richer lives than most of us do today. This is reflected in the prices we pay nowadays for period houses and antiques. A society which was more creative and self-confident would not feel quite so strong a nostalgia for its great-grandfathers' buildings and household looks.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“She loved the smell of old truck; thick cotton and vinyl seat covers, old gasoline and oil, the smell of country, decades of farmers, workers and families taking trips back and forth to town, up backroads to swimming holes, over fields, through all the weather. She imagined what this truck would have seen if it had eyes and a memory. She was about to become one more episode in its existence.”
― Glenda Love

“But the principal cause of the difference lies in the plastic spirit of the antique, and the picturesque spirit of the romantic poetry. Sculpture directs our attention exclusively to the group which it sets before us, it divests it as far as possible from all external accompaniments, and where they cannot be dispensed with, it indicates them as slightly as possible. Painting, on the other hand, delights in exhibiting, along with the principal figures, all the details of the surrounding locality and all secondary circumstances, and to open a prospect into a boundless distance in the background; and light and shade with perspective are its peculiar charms. Hence the Dramatic, and especially the Tragic Art, of the ancients, annihilates in some measure the external circumstances of space and time; while, by their changes, the romantic drama adorns its more varied pictures. Or, to express myself in other terms, the principle of the antique poetry is ideal; that of the romantic is mystical: the former subjects space and time to the internal free-agency of the mind; the latter honours these incomprehensible essences as supernatural powers, in which there is somewhat of indwelling divinity.”
― August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

“Those critics who consider the authority of the ancients as models to be such, that in poetry, as in all the other arts, there can be no safety out of the pale of imitation, affirm, that as the nations in question have not followed this course, they have brought nothing but irregular works on the stage, which, though they may possess occasional passages of splendour and beauty, must yet, as a whole, be for ever reprobated as barbarous, and wanting in form.”
― August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

“Do you have any old copies of Dickens?

Bookseller: We've got a copy of David Copperfield from 1850 for $150.

Customer: Why is it so expensive if it's that old?”
― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

“She went to the not-quite-antique stores...and found an old bed quilt, blue and white, with stitches made by a hand she didn't know but trusted all the same, and laid it against the black metal bedstead.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients

“Суперництво між Афінами і Спартою підтримувало в усіх менших республіках стан латентної чи відвертої громадянської війни. У кожній із них протистояли одні одним прихильники народовладдя, які розраховували на допомогу Афін, і олігархісти, які розраховували на допомогу Спарти. Партія, що була при владі, якщо необережно починала якусь зовнішню війну, повинна була вести її навіть до найгіршого кінця, бо визнання невдачі, спроба укладення миру і взагалі кожен жест, який міг послабити напруженість психозу обложеного міста, загрожував приходом до влади внутрішніх супротивників, з якими не можна було розраховувати на переговори.”
― Jerzy Stempowski, Eseje