Ruins Quotes

“There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.”
― Sophie Kinsella, The Undomestic Goddess

“Everybody is equally weak on the inside, just that some present their ruins as new castles and become kings –”
― Simona Panova, Nightmarish Sacrifice

“Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. ”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.”
― Susan Hill

“You can't stop a soldier from being frightened but you can give him motivation to help him overcome that fear. I have no such motivation. I can't have. I'm a witcher: an artificially created mutant. I kill monsters for money. I defend children when their parents pay me to. If Nilfgaardian parents pay me, I'll defend Nilfgaardian children. And even if the world lies in ruin - which does not seem likely to me - I'll carry on killing monsters in the ruins of this world until some monster kills me. That is my fate, my reason, my life and my attitude to the world. And it is not what I chose. It was chosen for me.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Krew elfów

“The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.”
― Heinrich Heine

“He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height”
― Gustave Flaubert

“My beautiful proof lies all in ruins.”
― Georg Cantor

“Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

“It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there'd been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Uglies

“These are the ruins
I mapped onto my body so I might always be lost.”
― Traci Brimhall

“The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

“Why am I begging you, who parades your suffering over the ruins like a king in order to ensure that you will never be touched deeply, you who're always laughing.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins

“Shame on those who remain unmoved, whose pace fails to quicken, on entering one of these old habitations, a manor-house falling to wrack and ruin or a desecrated church!”
― Petrus Borel

“We are born in the shadow of fading memories and fallen dreams, living our days within the decaying bones of an age long gone.”
― Darran M. Handshaw, The Engineer

“There is, I find, something very evocative about ruins - particularly recent ones. (introduction to "Calico Black, Calico Blue")”
― Joel Knight

“Maybe there’s something instinctive in us, that we’re drawn to human habitation and can’t resist a ruin, the way newborn babies respond to a crude drawing of a face. These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we’ve retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“The architects have left us clues below – such that we may one day be able to comprehend, it is my hope. But the answers, I fear... the answers lie in death... It is up to us to make sure that we do not find such a cruel solution to our lives.”
― Darran M. Handshaw, The Engineer

“When we look at the ruins, we always get the same feeling: It's as if the ruin will suddenly come alive and tell its own interesting story!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Certaines personnes appellent des structures telles que les pyramides égyptiennes des "ruines anciennes", mais nous les appelons des" ponts parfaits "où nous pouvons atteindre et toucher les merveilleux maîtres du passé !”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Mortally you will feel how it is to be whole and in ruins”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“The Old Hall loomed ahead, caught directly in the setting sunlight. For a brief moment, it was perfectly illuminated, as if lit by a thousand burning lanterns, glowing in some kind of mighty revelry. I am ancient, it murmured. I was powerful and grand. Now I am wise and beautiful.”
― Allyson S. Barkley, A Vision in Smoke

“The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump fung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.”
― Robert Frost, New Hampshire

“Even when the magnificent buildings of the past are ruined centuries later, they continue to shine like candle flames that weaken by the wind but never go out!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“…a short seven miles away is the Neolithic village called Skara Brae. There is preserved a huddle of roofless huts, dug half underground into midden and sand dune. There, you can marvel at the domestic normality, that late Stone Age people had beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads. You can feel both their presence, their day-to-day lives, and their utter absence. It’s a good place to go. It re-calibrates your sense of time.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Nearby a wide, brackish river froths, bubbling around rock. Tall, slender saw palmettos make lonely islands of rubble and root. On a steep slope, a single wall of a five-story concrete building stands. It looks like a castle cut from construction paper, flat instead of three-dimensional.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“What empire has ever been anything more than the ruins that are discovered by the one that rises after it? They never last, Khârn. Ever. And neither will this one.”
― Ian St. Martin, Angron: Slave of Nuceria

“The ruins were no longer ruins. On the cliffs, at the highest point of the island, white towers rose to breathtaking points. As they thundered up the slope, the rest was revealed: a vast fortress, almost a citadel, its jumble of solid buildings and soaring parapets ringed by pale walls. It was clean and shining and new-made, entwined with climbing plants and trees and dark moss. In the darkness it glowed with a hundred hanging lights.
She was seeing the island as it had been thousands of years ago, under an ancient moon. This was the lost civilization of Hy-Brasil.”
― H.G. Parry, The Magician’s Daughter