Quotes about pier (24 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I've done a lot worse than jump off piers, son. Like throw a television out the window.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

The Osbournes television show

“I do believe that his given name is something odd. Peregrine, Penrose- Piers, that's it."
"He sounds like a dock." Lord Sundron put in.
"Mrs. Hutchins called me a light frigate this morning," Linnet said "a dock might be just the thing for me.”

Eloisa James (1962) American academic

Source: When Beauty Tamed the Beast

Light

“A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.”

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

Dreams , Disappointment

“Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Love , People , Secret , Age

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

War , People , Mountain , Star

“I confidently expect that we shall continue to be grouped with mothers-in-law and Wigan Pier as one of the recognized objects of ridicule.”

Edward Bridges, 1st Baron Bridges (1892–1969) British civil servant

On the civil service, in Portrait of a Profession: The Civil Service Tradition (1950)

Law , Confidence

“From the multitude of books published on the subject of cultivating the earth, one would have imagined the art to have been more studied, than it really has been; since upon the whole it continued in. a sort of declining condition from the days of Virgil and Columella, till the time of Constantine IV. and then lay in a kind of dormant state till about the middle of Henry VIIIth's reign, when it was rather revived,, than improved.
Indeed, about that time, Judge Fitzherbert, in England (better known among us, as author of another/ excellent work, called Natura Brevium) Tatti, Stefano, Agostino Gallo, Sansovino, Lauro, Tarello, &c. in Italy, published several considerable books in Agriculture; but our countryman was the first, if we except Crescenzio dell' Agricoltura, (whose fine performance was printed at Florence in 1478) and Pier Marino the translator of Palladius de Re Rustica, who made his work public in the year 1528.”

Walter Harte (1709–1774) poet and historian

Source: Essays on Husbandry (1764), p. 41-42.

Books , Art , Imagination , Study

“In recent centuries the only near spiritual relative of Tolstoy is the English poet, who in the fourteenth century, in the form of Piers Plowman, preached religious ideas so strikingly like those of Tolstoy. They are both individualists and they seek individual, not social, regeneration. …Both point to the simple toiling God-fearing peasant as one expressing the ideal of the Christian life and service.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 29-30

Life , God , Fear , Idea

“Propensities for crime are irrelevant in a discussion about the murder of an individual — Ms. Kathryn Steinle and all other victims of criminals who should not be in the U. S. For these deaths have nothing to do with aggregate crime rates; they're about individuals who should be alive: a baby that should have been born, a girl who should be among the living, young men and women who should not be dead. To justify the crime-probabilities line-of-inquiry in the context of killer Francisco Sanchez' presence that day on the San Francisco pier, you would need to show that had Sanchez been deported or jailed or turned back at the border—his victim, Ms. Steinle, would nevertheless have suffered the same fate at the hands of a native murderer. The same eventuality would need to be demonstrated with respect to each individual victim of a criminal alien. The implication is crushingly stupid.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Hispandering Effect," http://www.quarterly-review.org/the-hispandering-effect/ The Quarterly Review, July 12, 2015.
2010s, 2015

Death , Women , Men , Fate

“I know we must abide
each by the rules that bind us here:
the divers, and the sailors, and the women on the pier.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Women

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men , Beauty , Hope , Nature

“Pozzolana.—There is… a kind of powder which from natural causes produces astonishing results. It is found in the neighborhood of Baiae and in the country belonging to the towns round about Mt. Vesuvius. This substance when mixed with lime and rubble not only lends strength to buildings of other kinds, but even when piers of it are constructed in the sea, they set hard under water.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VI "Pozzolana" Sec. 1

Nature , Water , Sea , Country

“What is now called Macedonia was in earlier times called Emathia. And it took its present name from Macedon, one of its early chieftains. And there was also a city emathia close to the sea. Now a part of this country was taken and held by certain of the Epeirotes and the Illyrians, but most of it by the Bottiaei and the Thracians. The Bottiaei came from Crete originally, so it is said, along with Botton as chieftain. As for the Thracians, the Pieres inhabited Pieria and the region about Olympus; the Paeones, the region on both sides of the Axius River, which on that account is called Amphaxitis; the Edoni and Bisaltae, the rest of the country as far as the Strymon. Of these two peoples the latter are called Bisaltae alone, whereas a part of the Edoni are called Mygdones, a part Edones, and a part Sithones. But of all these tribes the Argeadae, as they are called, established themselves as masters, and also the Chalcidians of Euboea; for the Chalcidians of Euboea also came over to the country of the Sithones and jointly peopled about thirty cities in it, although later on the majority of them were ejected and came together into one city, Olynthus; and they were named the Thracian Chalcidians.”

Strabo Geographica

Book 7, Fragm 11
Geographica, 7 BC

People , Time , Parting , Sea

“Christine O'Donnell: Well, don't you think as a host, if I say "this is what I want to talk about", that's what we should address?
Piers Morgan: Not really, no. You're a politician.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Piers Morgan Tonight
CNN
Television, quoted in * Christine O’Donnell storms out of Piers Morgan interview over ‘rude’ treatment
2011-08-18
Steven
Nelson
Daily Caller
http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/18/christine-odonnell-storms-out-of-piers-morgan-interview-over-rude-treatment/
2011-10-15
TV appearances

Thinking

“A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 a. m. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Caen, Herb. "A city is like San Francisco, not a faceless 'burb" http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/A-city-is-like-San-Francisco-not-a-faceless-burb-3168435.php S.F. Gate, 2010.
Attributed

Justice , Girl , Flowers , Fish

“While in Campania the burning of the earth makes ashes, in Tuscany the combustion of the stone makes carbuncular sand. Both are excellent in walls but one is better to use for buildings on land, the other for piers under salt water.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VI, Sec. 6

Water

“Piers Morgan who used to be editor of The Mirror. He's got a whole new career now, as the bloke who used to be editor of The Mirror.”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

A Brief History of Timewasting, Room 101, The News Quiz

“God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
we'd fire no guns -- shed no tears!
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.”

Stan Rogers (1949–1983) Folk singer

Barrett's Privateers (1976)

God , Tear , Sea

“I had Piers Morgan call me a bigot. Because I believe what the Catholic Church teaches with respect to homosexuality, I'm a bigot. So now I'm a bigot? Because I believe what the Bible teaches. Now, 2,000 years of teaching and moral theology is now bigoted! And of course we don't elect bigots to office. We don't give them professional licenses. We don't give them preferential tax treatment. If you're a preacher and you preach bigoted things, you think you're gonna be allowed to have a 501(c)(3) as a church? Of course not. No, this has profound consequence! To the entire moral ecology of America! It will undermine the family; it will destroy faith in America!”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

Rick Santorum Argues With A Student Over Gay Marriage, Fails
Buzzfeed
2011-08-31
Matt
Stopera
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/rick-santorum-argues-with-a-student-over-gay-marri
2011-09-02
referring to Piers Morgan asking him "And I have to say that your views you espoused on this issue are bordering on bigotry, aren't they?" on

Family , Faith , Thinking

“Piers Morgan: And I have to say that your views you espoused on this issue are bordering on bigotry, aren't they?
Rick Santorum: No. I think just because we disagree on public policy, which is what the debate has been about, which is marriage, doesn't mean that it's bigotry. Just because you follow a moral code that teaches something wrong doesn't mean that — are you suggesting that the Bible and that the Catholic Church is bigoted? Well, if that's what you believe, fine, I don't, I think that 2,000 — well, I shouldn't say, not fine, I don't think it's fine at all. I think that is — that's contrary to both what we've seen in 2,000 years of human history and Western civilization and trying to redefine something that has been — that is seen as wrong from the standpoint of the church and saying a church is bigoted because it holds that opinion that is biblically based I think is in itself an act of bigotry.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

2011-08-31
Piers Morgan Tonight
CNN
Television, quoted in * Santorum: I Stand By My 'Man on Dog' Comment
Crooks and Liars
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/santorum-i-stand-my-man-dog-comment
2011-09-01

Marriage , History , Thinking

“Now, Piers Morgan is a bit of a ****.”

Griff Rhys Jones (1953) British actor and comedian

Have I Got News For You, series 27 episode 6, 21 May 2004

“At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers.”

Ernest Hemingway book To Have and Have Not

Source: To Have and Have Not (1937), Ch. 24
Often misquoted or inaccurately paraphrased as "In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found."
Context: At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager.

World , Parting

“You must try first to rid your mind of the traditional idea that the gothic is an intentional expression of religious gloom. The necessity for light was the motive of the gothic architects. They needed light and always more light, until they sacrificed safety and common-sense in trying to get it. They converted their walls into windows, raised their vaults, diminished their piers, until their churches could no longer stand.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: If you are to get the full enjoyment of Chartres, you must, for the time, believe in Mary as Bernard and Adam did, and feel her presence as the architects did, in every stone they placed, and in every touch they chiseled. You must try first to rid your mind of the traditional idea that the gothic is an intentional expression of religious gloom. The necessity for light was the motive of the gothic architects. They needed light and always more light, until they sacrificed safety and common-sense in trying to get it. They converted their walls into windows, raised their vaults, diminished their piers, until their churches could no longer stand. You will see the limit at Beauvais; at Chartres we have not got so far, but even here in places where the Virgin wanted it — as above the high altar — the architect has taken all the light there was to take.

Motivation , Idea , Sense , Light

“Alcohol is the rubber tyres between me and the pier.”

Bernard MacLaverty book Midwinter Break

He held up his glass to her. They chinked.
Ch 2 - p.27
Novels, Midwinter Break (2017)

Alcohol