Quotes about porcelain

A collection of quotes on the topic of porcelain, use, doing, likeness.

Quotes about porcelain

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

Source: The God of Small Things

Dreams, Travel

“Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
"I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Secret, Girl, Boy, Dead

“I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Sadness, Beauty

“Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.”

Pat Conroy book Beach Music

Source: Beach Music

Soul

“One strange act, which was precursor of many such in Chinese history, may be noted. The Chinese Repository, XI, 68o, records: 'Sept. 3. A party of British officers and others acting the barbarian in right good earnest visited the porcelain tower. They went (so the Abbots testified) with hatchets and chisels and hammers and cut off and carried away large masses doing no inconsiderable damage.' A Chinese observer of this desecration noted that `the English barbarians frequently ascended the pagoda… took away several glazed tiles, which is indeed detestable in the extreme'. William Dallas Barnard even excuses this act of desecration as 'a not unnatural desire to possess specimens or relics'. This inveterate tendency to desecrate and destroy was repeated again and again in European relations with China, in the Summer Palace in 1860, in Tientsin in 1870, and in Peking itself in 1900.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Panikkar, K. M. (1953). Asia and Western dominance, a survey of the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498-1945, by K.M. Panikkar. London: G. Allen and Unwin.
Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

History, Summer

“He could leap the corral,
If he rose
To his full height;
He could splinter the fencing light,
With three blows
Of his porcelain hoofs in flight —
If he chose.
He could shatter his prison wall,
Could escape them all —
If he rose,
If he chose.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

The Unicorn in Captivity (1955)

Light

“If you ask someone whether our Constitutional rights are being flushed down the porcelain oubliette, and their response is, "If I answer that honestly they'll arrest me," then you already have your answer.”

Robert X. Cringely (1953) American technology journalist and columnist

Discussing Ladar Levison's statement that he couldn't legally explain why he had to shut down secure-email system Lavabit or "become complicit in crimes against the American people"
[August 9, 2013, http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/personal-email-and-private-clouds-fall-in-war-privacy-224603?source=IFWNLE_nlt_notes_2013-08-12, Personal email and private clouds fall in war on privacy, Notes from the Field, InfoWorld, 2013-08-12]

“The Chinese early learned to work in metals; bronze occurs in the 11th-10th centuries B. C., useful iron from about 500 B. C. At a later period they made brass… True porcelain was first made about A. D. 600. They were probably in possession of mercury at an early date, and learnt how to decompose cinnabar into mercury and sulphur, and recompose it from these materials.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

A Short History of Chemistry (1937)

Learning

“My fossils, ferns and porcelain (i. e. my hobbies) are an island of sanity in a mad world, an island found by others of my profession who devote a quiet hour to their postmarks, butterflies, stamps or poetry. My palaeontology was a sure restoration of equanimity after the frustrations of working for and with some politicians.”

Claud William Wright (1917–2010) British paleontologist

Shovelton, Patrick (2010). Claud Wright: Senior civil servant who was also a leading expert in geology, palaeontology and archaeology — Obituary http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/claud-wright-senior-civil-servant-who-was-also-a-leading-expert-in-geology-palaeontology-and-archaeology-1917829.html, The Independent, Monday, 8 March 2010.

World, Madness