Quotes about curtain

A collection of quotes on the topic of curtain, likeness, world, down.

Quotes about curtain

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning photo
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you — you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers’ Union (12 November 1969) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970) “Expulsion".

J.M.W. Turner photo
Erich Maria Remarque photo
Walter Raleigh photo
Stefan Zweig photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo

“Do not say, "Draw the curtain that I may see the painting." The curtain is the painting.”

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: "I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. Nor do I ask; I do not care. I create phenomena in swarms, and paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. Do not say, "Draw the curtain that I may see the painting." The curtain is the painting.

Virginia Woolf photo
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien photo

“The journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Context: PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.
GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.
PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?
GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.
GANDALF: No. No, it isn't.

Mark Twain photo

“Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene”

Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Oscar Wilde photo

“The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.”

Variant: The one charm about the past is that it is the past.
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Rainer Maria Rilke photo
Yiannis Ritsos photo
Ransom Riggs photo
Pablo Picasso photo

“I treat paintings as I treat objects. If a window in a picture looks wrong, I close it and draw the curtains, just as I would do in my own room.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Quote in "Picasso", Hans L. C. Jaffe, Thames and Hudson Ltd
Attributed from posthumous publications

Barack Obama photo

“For decades, this vision stood in sharp contrast to life on the other side of an Iron Curtain. For decades, a contest was waged, and ultimately that contest was won -- not by tanks or missiles, but because our ideals stirred the hearts of Hungarians who sparked a revolution; Poles in their shipyards who stood in Solidarity; Czechs who waged a Velvet Revolution without firing a shot; and East Berliners who marched past the guards and finally tore down that wall. Today, what would have seemed impossible in the trenches of Flanders, the rubble of Berlin, or a dissident’s prison cell -- that reality is taken for granted. A Germany unified. The nations of Central and Eastern Europe welcomed into the family of democracies. Here in this country, once the battleground of Europe, we meet in the hub of a Union that brings together age-old adversaries in peace and cooperation. The people of Europe, hundreds of millions of citizens -- east, west, north, south -- are more secure and more prosperous because we stood together for the ideals we share. And this story of human progress was by no means limited to Europe. Indeed, the ideals that came to define our alliance also inspired movements across the globe among those very people, ironically, who had too often been denied their full rights by Western powers. After the Second World War, people from Africa to India threw off the yoke of colonialism to secure their independence. In the United States, citizens took freedom rides and endured beatings to put an end to segregation and to secure their civil rights. As the Iron Curtain fell here in Europe, the iron fist of apartheid was unclenched, and Nelson Mandela emerged upright, proud, from prison to lead a multiracial democracy. Latin American nations rejected dictatorship and built new democracies, and Asian nations showed that development and democracy could go hand in hand.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)

Edgar Allan Poe photo
Pablo Picasso photo

“I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

Suman Pokhrel photo

“Haunted trees
covered behind the curtains of their own leaves
stare at the dark
from the fringe of streets.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

<span class="plainlinks"> In Midnight Street http://www.prachyareview.com/poems-by-suman-pokhrel/</span>
From Poetry

Edvard Munch photo

“I am at work on a girl. It is quite simple a girl getting up on the edge of her bed and pulling on her stockings. The bed is whitish, and in addition there are white sheets, a white nightdress, a bedside table with a white cover, white curtains and a blue wall.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

as model for his painting 'Morning', 1884
Quote in Munch's letter to Olav Paulsen, September 1884; as cited in Edvard Much – behind the scream, w:Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 53
1880 - 1895

Barack Obama photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Ozzy Osbourne photo

“I had a vision, l saw the world burn
And the seas had turned red
The sun had fallen, the final curtain
In the land of the dead
Mother, please show the children
Before it's too late
To fight each other, there's no one winning
We must fight all the hate”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Revelation (Mother Earth), written by Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads and Bob Daisley
Song lyrics, Blizzard of Ozz (1980)

W.B. Yeats photo

“Somewhere beyond the curtain
Of distorting days
Lives that lonely thing
That shone before these eyes
Targeted, trod like Spring.”

Quarrel In Old Age http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1567/, st. 2
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

Aisha photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo

“His tired gaze - from passing endless bars -
has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds.
To him there seem to be a thousand bars,
and out beyond these bars exists no world. His supple gait, the smoothness of strong strides
that gently turn in ever smaller circles
perform a dance of strength, centered deep within
a will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable. But sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part,
the pupils of his eyes dilate as images
of past encounters enter while through his limbs
a tension strains in silence
only to cease to be, to die within his heart.”

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehen der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.<p>Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.<p>Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf—. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille—
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.
As translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
Der Panther (The Panther) (1907)

Alejandro Jodorowsky photo
Thomas Paine photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“As soon as it becomes possible, by dint of a strong will, to overthrow the entire past of the world, then, in a single moment, we will join the ranks of independent gods. World history for us will then be nothing but a dreamlike otherworldly being. The curtain falls, and man once more finds himself a child playing with whole worlds—a child, awoken by the first glow of morning, who laughingly wipes the frightful dreams from his brow.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sobald es aber möglich wäre, durch einen starken Willen die ganze Weltvergangenheit umzustürzen, sofort träten wir in die Reihe der unabhängigen Götter, und Weltgeschichte hieße dann für uns nichts als ein träumerisches Selbstentrücktsein; der Vorhang fällt, und der Mensch findet sich wieder, wie ein Kind mit Welten spielend, wie ein Kind, das beim Morgenglühen aufwacht und sich lachend die furchtbaren Träume von der Stirn streicht.
"Fatum und Geschichte," April 1862

Desiderius Erasmus photo
Barack Obama photo

“You were born as freedom forced its way through a wall in Berlin, and tore down an Iron Curtain across Europe. You were educated in an era of instant information that put the world’s accumulated knowledge at your fingertips. And you came of age as terror touched our shores; an historic recession spread across the nation; and a new generation signed up to go to war. 
You have been tested and tempered by events that your parents and I never imagined we’d see when we sat where you sit.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Commencement Address at Ohio State University (May 2013)
Context: You were born as freedom forced its way through a wall in Berlin, and tore down an Iron Curtain across Europe. You were educated in an era of instant information that put the world’s accumulated knowledge at your fingertips. And you came of age as terror touched our shores; an historic recession spread across the nation; and a new generation signed up to go to war. 
You have been tested and tempered by events that your parents and I never imagined we’d see when we sat where you sit. And yet, despite all this, or more likely because of it, yours has become a generation possessed with that most American of ideas – that people who love their country can change it. For all the turmoil; for all the times you have been let down, or frustrated at the hand you’ve been dealt; what I have seen from your generation are perennial and quintessentially American values. Altruism. Empathy. Tolerance. Community. And a deep sense of service that makes me optimistic for our future.

P. D. Ouspensky photo

“When I possessed the keys, read the book and understood the symbols, I was permitted to lift the curtain of the Temple and enter.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

Card XI : Justice http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/sot/sot22.htm
The Symbolism of the Tarot (1913)
Context: When I possessed the keys, read the book and understood the symbols, I was permitted to lift the curtain of the Temple and enter. its inner sanctum. And there I beheld a Woman with a crown of gold and a purple mantle. She held a sword in one hand and scales in the other. I trembled with awe at her appearance, which was deep and mysterious, and drew me like an abyss.
"You see Truth," said the voice. "On these scales everything is weighed. This sword is always raised to guard justice, and nothing can escape it."
"But why do you avert your eyes from the scales and the sword? They will remove the last illusions. How could you live on earth without these illusions?
"You wished to see Truth and now you behold it! But remember what happens to the mortal who beholds a Goddess!"

Janet Evanovich photo
Margaret Mitchell photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Victor Hugo photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
Charlie Chaplin photo
Eudora Welty photo
Cornelia Funke photo
Guy Gavriel Kay photo
Raymond Carver photo
John Steinbeck photo
Danielle Trussoni photo
Margaret George photo
Raymond Chandler photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Mike Malloy photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Li Qingzhao photo

“The West Wind blows the curtains
And I am frailer than the yellow chrysanthemums.”

Li Qingzhao (1084–1155) Chinese writer

《醉花陰》 ("Ninth Day, Ninth Month"), as translated by Kenneth Rexroth and ‎Ling Chung in Li Ch'ing-chao: Complete Poems (New Directions, 1979), p. 14

Dave Barry photo
Jerome David Salinger photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Alan Sillitoe photo
Alfred Brendel photo
Malcolm Muggeridge photo
John Major photo

“I have been a Member of Parliament for 18 years. I have been a member of the Government for 14 years, of the Cabinet for ten years and Prime Minister since 1990. When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do. I shall, therefore, advise my parliamentary colleagues that it would be appropriate for them to consider the selection of a new leader of the Conservative Party to lead the party through Opposition through the years that lie immediately ahead.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"Major's Speech", The Times, 3 May 1997, p. 2.
Statement in Downing Street on 2 May 1997 following the general election in which the Conservative Party was heavily defeated. Major was just about to resign as Prime Minister and announced his decision to stand down as party leader simultaneously.
1990s, 1997

Jack Benny photo

“Jack: [poking his head through the stage curtains] Bob, will you please give me my pants back?”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)
Variant: Don Wilson: [Poking his head through the curtains] Bob, Bob, quick, give me Jack's pants!

Tyagaraja photo

“Wont you draw back the curtain within me,
O Lord Venkataramana of Tirupati, Open up this screen of envy.”

Tyagaraja (1767–1847) Carnatic musician and composer

[Jackson, William Joseph, Tyāgarāja and the Renewal of Tradition: Translations and Reflections, http://books.google.com/books?id=CZBnppBQgOsC&pg=PA69, 1 January 1994, Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 978-81-208-1146-1, 169–]

Habib Bourguiba photo

“Bourguiba on Gamal Abdel Nasser- "not aware of the danger of Communism. Once the Iron Curtain drops, there is no escape."”

Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) Tunisian politician

[ARAB LEAGUE: Defying Nasser, TIME, Monday, Oct. 27, 1958, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,937614,00.html, September 6, 2011]

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Color doesn't work unless it works in space. Color alone is just decoration - you might as well be making a shower curtain.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

Edward Bernays photo

“After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

Source: Matthew Arnold (1939), Ch. 12: Resolution

Francois Rabelais photo

“I am going to seek a grand perhaps; draw the curtain, the farce is played.”

Francois Rabelais (1494–1553) major French Renaissance writer

Je m'en vais chercher un grand peut-être; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée.
Last words, according to the Life of Rabelais (1694) by Peter Anthony Motteux.
Variant translations:
I am going to seek the great perhaps.
I am going to search for the great perhaps.

Seymour Papert photo
Greg Egan photo

“Every night, at exactly a quarter past three, something dreadful happens on the street outside our bedroom window. We peek through the curtains, yawning and shivering in the life-draining chill, and then we clamber back beneath the blankets without exchanging a word, to hug each other tightly and hope for sound sleep before it's time to rise.

Usually what we witness verges on the mundane. Drunken young men fighting, swaying about with outstretched knives, cursing incoherently. Robbery, bashings, rape. We wince to see such violence, but we can hardly be shocked or surprised any more, and we're never tempted to intervene: it's always far too cold, for a start! A single warm exhalation can coat the window pane with mist, transforming the most stomach-wrenching assault into a safely cryptic ballet for abstract blobs of light.

On some nights, though, when the shadows in the room are subtly wrong, when the familiar street looks like an abandoned film set, or a painting of itself perversely come to life, we are confronted by truly disturbing sights, oppressive apparitions which almost make us doubt we're awake, or, if awake, sane. I can't catalogue these visions, for most, mercifully, are blurred by morning, leaving only a vague uneasiness and a reluctance to be alone even in the brightest sunshine.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

Scatter My Ashes http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/SCATTER/Scatter.html, published in Interzone (Spring 1988)
Fiction

André Maurois photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Alfred Denning, Baron Denning photo
Noel Gallagher photo
Henry Adams photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

State of the Union Address to Congress http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/avwebsite/PDF/54text.pdf (7 January 1954)
1950s

Harry Turtledove photo
Brian W. Aldiss photo
Andy Warhol photo

“You wouldn't believe the number of people who hang the electric chair painting in the homes, especially if the colour of the canvas matches the curtains.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

As quoted in Marie Deparis (2009), "Mounir Fatmi: Gardons Espoir / Keeping Faith" (bilingual exhibition notice, as a retranslation from the French "On n'imagine pas le nombre de personnes qui accrocheraient chez elles le tableau de la chaise électrique, surtout si les coloris de la toile s'harmonisent avec les rideaux.")
1968 - 1974, Electric chair quote

Jack Benny photo

“Bob Hope: By the way, this is where Bing did his last show and I think they've done very nicely. They've gotten most of it out of the curtains.”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

David Copperfield photo

“I want to tell you why I did this. My mother was the first one to tell me about the Statue of Liberty. She saw at first from the deck of the ship that brought her to America: she was an immigrant. She impressed upon me how precious our liberty is and how easily it can be lost. And then one day it occurred to me that I could show with magic how we take our freedom for granted. Sometimes we don't realize how important something is until it's gone. So I asked our government for permission to let me make the Statue of Liberty disappear… just for a few minutes. I thought that if we faced emptiness where, for as long as we can remember, that great lady is, lifted up our land, why then… we might imagine what the world would be like without liberty and we realize how precious our freedom really is. And then I will make the Statue of Liberty reappear, by remembering the world that made it appear in the first place. The world is freedom. Freedom is the true magic. It's beyond the power of any magician. But wherever one human being guarantees another the same rights he or she enjoys, we find freedom. [The curtain between the live audience and the Statue of Liberty used to hide the secret of its disappearance is raised] How long can we stay free? But just as long as we keep thinking, and speaking, and acting as free human beings. Our ancestors just couldn’t. We can. And I will show you the way. Nooooow!”

David Copperfield (1956) American illusionist

The curtain is lowered and the Statue of Liberty reappears
From "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" (April 8th, 1983)

Laurence Sterne photo
Arthur Sullivan photo

“The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience.”

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) English composer of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Quoted in The Musical Times, February 1909; cited from Percy A. Scholes The Mirror of Music, 1844-1944 (London: Novello, 1947) vol. 1, p. 267.

Heather Brooke photo
McDonald Clarke photo

“Whilst twilight's curtain spreading far,
Was pinned with a single star.”

McDonald Clarke (1798–1842) American writer

Death in Disguise (Boston edition, 1833), line 227. A number of variants are reported:
While twilight's curtain gathering far
Is pinned with a single diamond star.
Now twilight lets her curtain down,
And pins it with a star.
Compare: "And drew my midnight curtain with fingers bloody red", Thomas Hood, Dream of Eugene Aram; "The moon is a silver pinhead vast, That holds the heavens tent-hangings fast", William R. Alger, "The Use of the Moon", Poetry of the Orient (1865), p. 178.

Ben Croshaw photo