Quotes about balcony (33 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I can't have your subjects throwing my family over the balcony, that would never do.'
'Good,' said Snibril.
'I'll do it myself.”

Terry Pratchett book The Carpet People

The Carpet People (1971; 1992)

Family

“Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.”

Terry Pratchett book The Unadulterated Cat

The Unadulterated Cat (1989)

Animals

“When the conclave elected me Pope. Before I accepted I asked if I could spend a few minutes in the room next to the one with the balcony overlooking the square. My head was completely empty and I was seized by a great anxiety. To make it go way and relax I closed my eyes and made every thought disappear, even the thought of refusing to accept the position, as the liturgical procedure allows. I closed my eyes and I no longer had any anxiety or emotion. At a certain point I was filled with a great light. It lasted a moment, but to me it seemed very long. Then the light faded, I got up suddenly and walked into the room where the cardinals were waiting and the table on which was the act of acceptance. I signed it, the Cardinal Camerlengo countersigned it and then on the balcony there was the '"Habemus Papam."”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica

Way , Light , Waiting

“I lived in the royal library, among all the books."
"You resided in a… library?"
"Theresuites inside and great balconies that overlooked the city, but yes. I was most content among those shelves, so one night, I simply never left.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Shadow's Claim

Books , Night

“this song is for the guy who keeps yelling from the balcony, and it's called 'we hate you, please die.”

Bryan Lee O'Malley (1979) Artist

Source: Scott Pilgrim, Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life

Hate , Guy

“Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying… and every day on the balcony of the sea wings open fire is born and everything is blue again like morning.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Sea

“…to harness and directed peaceful energy from the viewers under the mountain through a twenty foot, five pointed Texas Star Vortex which was hung between the two massive exterior columns on the balcony into the historically tarnished Dallas Dealy Plaza and book depository hoping to honor John F. Kennedy's memory.”

Carson Grant (1950) American actor

Kaminsky, Denise, Aug 2006, "Carson Grant: Actor/Artist- A Lifetime of Art", Denise's Interviews and Media News, p. 1
Prytyskacz,Jean, "Focus on an Artist", Westside Arts Coalition Newsletter, Spring 2007, p. 5
About a walk-under suspended cellophane and plastic 3-D hologram mountain installation Harmony Mountain (100' x 100') Carson constructed inside the second floor of the old Dallas Union Train Station for the SIGGRAPH 1990 Convention, Texas

Books , Peace , Hope , Mountain

“[Unnamed actress on the set of Grand Prix] never had eyes for me. Hell, she wouldn't even talk to me, after she'd found out that I was just an unimportant actor. Good grief! Then, this is what happened: We were sitting in the foyer of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. She, myself and Antonio. Then an assistant director crossed our path. That actress was trying to get him to take us to the theatre where they were showing the rushes of the day before. After some discussion, she persuaded him. He said: `Be quiet, I'm gonna lose my job…' So we hid in the balcony, looking down, where that wonderful director Frankenheimer was sitting. After some minutes of racing cars, finally her scene came, and she was doing a phone call - she was playing a sophisticated magazine editor -, and suddenly you could hear the director, who had this loud, resonant voice, howling in rage, because he didn't like her at all. `Oh my God, she's awful! She can't walk, she can't talk, look at her hair!' So he turned to that faggot hairdresser, who was like Katherine the Great, and this guy said: `Well, usually she plays this peasant types. I don't know why you cast her for this role in the first place!”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

And remember, this actress was sitting there with us, and she nearly went crazy! She was squirming with embarrassment. This is an actor's nightmare, you know. The next day she was fired.
Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

God , Cars , Guy , Hell

“Now that was very impressive. But before you try to impress the ladies in the balcony, make sure the horns come in.”

Pierre Monteux (1875–1964) French conductor

Quoted from Freedland, M. André Previn. Century, 1991. p97
To a student conductor.

“!-- Setting forth once more, embarking upon the search once again: the narrow path that snakes among livid rocks and desolate, camel-colored hills; white houses hanging suspended from cliffs, looking as though they were about to let go and fall on the wayfarer’s head; the smell of sweating hides and cow dung; the buzz of afternoon; the screams of monkeys leaping about amid the branches of the trees or scampering along the flat rooftops or swinging from the railings of a balcony; overhead, birds circling and the bluish spirals of smoke rising from kitchen fires; the almost pink light on the stones; the taste of salt on parched lips; the sound of loose earth slithering away beneath one’s feet; the dust that clings to one’s sweat-drenched skin, makes one’s eyes red, and chokes one’s lungs; i --> Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 1

Color , Search , Bird , Thinking

“The moment I stood there I saw people from houses to my right, left and front were already on their balcony’s and they stared at me all at once as if I was from Jupiter. Their interrogative expression was asking me ‘who the hell are you?’ repeatedly. I did not give a damn, though.”

Gaurav Sharma (author) (1992) Author and novelist

Gone are the Days (2016)

People , Hell , Housing

“As I write, a bee flies into my window and an ant crawls along the balcony. The ant and the bee are enjoying their present temporary life even as I am enjoying my temporary existence. When I become an "ancient one," so too will the ant and the bee become an "ancient bee" and an "ancient ant." What mystery and what joy that I should be living today at this hour by this place before this window with pen, inkstone, and paper spread before me, while my mind thinks and my hand writes in the company of the present bee and the present ant!”

Jin Shengtan (1610–1661) Chinese writer

"What Can I Do About It?"

Life , Thinking , Bee , Joy

“Query: How to contrive not to waste one's time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting room; by remaining on one's balcony all a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.”

Albert Camus book The Plague

The Plague (1947)

Books , Way , Travel , Time

“I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally. It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek tenor sax play at sunset.”

Roger Zelazny book He Who Shapes

He Who Shapes (1965)

Love , God , World , Music

“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim, cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuschia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake's head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent's progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny iron balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuschia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Star , Flowers , Lying , Parent

“Our first play in 1981 was Jean Genet’s The Balcony, a prophetic choice, set in Paris in turmoil, just as London was being torched during the Brixton riots, an explosion of racial tensions that had been simmering for some time. I insisted on casting a Caribbean actress to play the lead, Irma the Madam of the Brothel.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

The South African Interview (August 8, 2011)

Time

“Her robe is a cloud, her face a flower;
Her balcony, glimmering with the bright spring dew,
Is either the tip of earth's Jade Mountain,
Or a moon-edged roof of paradise.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"A Song Of Pure Happiness I" (清平调之一)

Mountain , Spring , Flowers

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

Jerome David Salinger book A Girl I Knew

A Girl I Knew (1948)

Heart Touching , Universe

“When the time came for Pompadour herself to die, she confessed, was given her viaticum, and was from that time forth forbidden to see her lover. And when her body was borne away from Versailles, Louis was thought to have behaved rather badly because he watched the sad procession from a balcony. Let no one suppose that these people lived lives that were any more free from religious and neighbourly censure than the adulterers in our smallest Canadian villages. Even wealth and privilege could not wholly insulate them from that frost.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Madame de Pompadour (1954).

People , Sadness , Lovers , Time

“It's a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930's swoop-facaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof gardens and turning to wave as you pass.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Love , Sun , Future

“Every morning, at the balcony, after establishing a conscious contact with each of those who are present, I identify myself with the Supreme Lord and merge myself completely in Him. Then my body, completely passive, is nothing but a channel through which the Lord passes freely His forces and pours on all His Light, His Consciousness and His Joy, according to each one's receptivity.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

In "The Formation Of The Ashram", and also in [ The Mother: The Story of Her Life by Georges Van Vrekhem ( 2004) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=8hgG8aweqncC&pg=RA1-PT134&lpg=RA1-PT134, p. 134

Light , Joy

“Balla [his former art teacher in Italy] flabbergasted us because, not content with being involved in a Futurist campaign, as you can well imagine him doing, he launched himself into a complete transformation. He rejected all his works and all his working methods. He started work on four pictures of movement (one painting was his 'Girl running on a balcony'), which were still realist but incredible ahead of their time.... He confided this to w:Aldo Pallazzeschi: 'They (Balla's former - so much younger pupils Boccioni and Severini] did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

In a letter to Gino Severini, Jan. 1913; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
Boccioni is referring in this quote to their common former teacher Balla who lived and worked that time in Paris
1913

Art , Confidence , Imagination , Girl

“It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened. I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)

Feeling

“From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Life , Death , Fear , Water

“The moment on the town hall balcony was very heartfelt and I was moved to tears by the fantastic welcome from all the people in the street looking up on us where we stood. We felt like royalty at that moment, waving to them all down there.”

Anni-Frid Lyngstad (1945) Swedish female singer

What Made Australians The World's Most Feverish ABBA Fans? by Neil McMahon, published by The Sydney Morning Herald. 17 February 2017 http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/what-made-australians-the-worlds-most-feverish-abba-fans-20170215-gue00r.html
Sydney Morning Herald interview (2017)

People , Tear

“Villages and valleys pass by [Balla viewed during his train voyage to Düsseldorf in July 1912] and with my friend the binoculars [field glasses] I stare into the closest windows; semi-undressed people who wash themselves, bedding on balconies, clean almost empty rooms, a stupendous white shoulder of a women who, with a nude arm opens a door and goes inside.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

quote from a letter to Balla's family, July 1912; as quoted in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 306, note 34

Women , People , Training

“[Talking about "The First Singles Apartment"] They're all furnished pretty much the same way. In your bedroom, you have the mattress on the floor, protected by a mountain of dirty clothes, milk crates for night stands, lava lamp with a permanent glob in the bottom, stolen road sign on the wall, a blanket for a curtain. Out in the hall it was the mystery stain on the carpet, Budwiser mirror on the wall. Out on the balcony it was the rusted-out Hibachi grill, plant with no leaves on it, bike with no chain on it. In the den you had the spool. If you get one of those, you'll be like "it's coffee table time!" Next to that, the $9,000.00 stereo. We're going hungry, but we've got tunes! That was the stereo, you could turn it on after midnight and make the people down the street wet the bed. And the beanbag chair with duct tape on it to keep the stuff from fallin' out of it.”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

You Might Be a Redneck If… (1993)

People , Way , Mountain , Coffee

“I hadn't seen the previous two Creature films but I was aware of them. My Universal contract was still in effect and there wasn't another film property that they could use me in at the time. It wasn't a bad script and I made the most of it. Leigh Snowden, I thought, was a beautiful ingénue. I remember there were both Ricou Browning and Don Megowen as the Creature, in and out of the water. I thought the Creature costume, both before and after the burning incident, was convincing. There was a scene that takes place on a balcony where I was being pursued by the Creature. He picks me up to toss me over. In the final cut a dummy goes over, yet for a moment before the director yelled "Cut!"”

Jeff Morrow (1907–1993) American actor and World War II veteran

I thought I was going over for real.
Psychotronic Video interview http://www.zomboscloset.com/zombos_closet_of_horror_b/2013/08/the-jeff-morrow-interview-part-4.html (1993)

Beauty , Universe , Water , Time

“There is no doubt that Goya thought that one of the drugs chiefly responsible for the sleep of reason was the Church, and he had the lowest possible opinion of ecclesiastical institutions. However, this did not prevent him from painting religious pictures, completely sincerely because, like all Latin people, however little he believed in Christianity, he felt himself to be within the structure of the Catholic Church. One of his finest works was the decoration of a church near Madrid called S. Antonio de la Florida. He used the kind of device that would have appealed to Tiepolo. He painted a balcony round the drum of a cupola, and behind it he put a crowd of loiterers who are supposed to be watching the saint raise a man from the dead. Very few of them are interested in this unusual event. They are interested in each other or themselves, and show very well the curious tension between the individual and the collective, which is the essence of a crowd.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 3: Goya

People , Sleep , Painting , Sincerity

“Let us explain again by examples. In painting a person on a balcony, seen from inside the room do not limit the scene to what the square of the window renders visible; we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-baked throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies etc. This implies the simultaneity of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic and independent from one another. In order to make the spectator live in the center of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto the picture must be the synthesis of what one remembers and what one sees. You must render the invisible which stirs lives beyond intervening obstacles, what we have on the right, or the left, or behind us, and not merely the small square of life artificially compressed, as it were, by the wings of a stage set. We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or more exactly, its interior force.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Boccioni is referring in this quote to the 'Manifesto of Futurist Painters' of 1910, and its core Futurist concept of dynamic sensation; p. 47.
1912, Les exposants au public', 1912

Life , Sun , Painting , Housing

“You wished to be only a spectator, the gentleman in the balcony who wipes the glasses of his lorgnette in order to lose none of the comedy. Well, you could not do so. That role is not permitted a man. He must act, and he acts always, even when he thinks he is looking on, even when he washes his hands as Pontius Pilate, that dilettante, too, who uttered the words of your masters and of yourself. What is truth? Truth is that there is always and everywhere a duty to fulfil.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Epilogue.
Cosmopolis (1892)

Truth , Thinking

“I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes his tutor's monologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

People , Food , Beauty , Dogs

“The herdist instinct is furthermore not only personal, in the sense that it clamors for a personal collectivism; it creates also a longing and desire for the visual or acoustic contemplation of identitarian or uniformistic phenomena. The true herdist, the man truly dominated by that inferior instinct, will not only rejoice in marching amongst twenty thousand uniformly clad soldiers, all stepping rhythmically in one direction, but he will find an almost equal gratification in contemplating the show from a balcony. He will not only be happy in sitting amidst two hundred other bespectacled businessmen, drinking beer and humming one chant in unison, but the aspect of a skyscraper with a thousand identical windows will probably impress him more than a picture by Botticelli or Zurbarán.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pg 16
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

Drink , Beer , Personality , Happiness