“How I hate you. If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.”
Jack Vance book The Gray Prince
Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 15 (p. 152)
"Forward" to Yesterdays 1910 edition
“How I hate you. If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.”
Jack Vance book The Gray Prince
Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 15 (p. 152)
Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer
The Forerunner (1920)
Context: You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation.
And I too am my own forerunner, for the long shadow stretching before me at sunrise shall gather under my feet at the noon hour. Yet another sunrise shall lay another shadow before me, and that also shall be gathered at another noon.
Always have we been our own forerunners, and always shall we be. And all that we have gathered and shall gather shall be but seeds for fields yet unploughed. We are the fields and the ploughmen, the gatherers and the gathered.
J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985) American writer
“Meditation on Statistical Method”, 1960
The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams, Ohio University Press, 1960.
Other poetry
Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist
“The Eloquence of Greta Thunberg”, Thomas Gaulkin, https://thebulletin.org/2019/04/greta-thunberg-climate-change-eloquence/ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (25 April 2019) <br class="br">2019, "You did not act in time" (April 2019)
“How short our happy days appear!
How long the sorrowful!”
Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer
"The Mariner's Cave", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed.”
Ian McEwan book Atonement
Source: Atonement