Quotes about wall
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“By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Support, Time

“Not everything is about beating your head against the wall until it breaks.”
“Just most things.”

Rachel Caine book Glass Houses

Source: Glass Houses

“It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”

Elena Ferrante book The Days of Abandonment

Source: The Days of Abandonment

Past

“Do not dash if you only have the strength to walk, and do not waste your time pushing on the walls that will not give. More importantly, don't shove where a pat would be sufficient.”

Brandon Sanderson Elantris

Source: Elantris

Time

“Why should I tell you everything about how I feel when you never tell me anything? It's like banging my head on a wall, except at least if I were banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop. - Jace Wayland.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Jace and Clary, pg. 244
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)
Context: "I wish I could hate you. I want to hate you. I try to hate you. It would be so much easier if I did hate you. Sometimes I think I do hate you and then I see you and I-"
"And you what?"
"What do you think? Why should I tell you everything about how I feel when you never tell me anything. It's like banging my head on a wall, except at least if I were banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop."

Feeling

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Animal Dreams.
Animal Dreams (1990)
Variant: The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
Source: The Bean Trees

Life, Hope

“It's amazing how willpower can build walls.”

Yann Martel (1963) Canadian author best known for the book Life of Pi

“Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves

moments before the wind.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

World, Housing

“There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, 'If you know where you are, then please tell others.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

“Other crack teams get bat boomerangs and wall-climbing powers; we get Aquatruck.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

“You build a wall to keep something unwanted out … or to hold something precious in.”

Jodi Picoult Perfect Match

Source: Perfect Match

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Way, Loss, Happiness

“I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

Anaïs Nin book Incest: From a Journal of Love

July 7, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Variant: Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Source: Incest: From a Journal of Love
Context: I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Life, Way

“At one point, she'd wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she'd remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn't: cleanup.”

Kristin Hannah (1960) American writer

Source: Angel Falls

Women, Men

“I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

Source: You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Happiness

“Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will. What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Beauty

“When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.”

Sam Shepard (1943–2017) American playwright and actor

Imagination

“It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe.”

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) novelist from Dominica

Source: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Life, Death, Nature, Thinking

“How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?… I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Feeling

“Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.”

Peggy Noonan (1950) American author and journalist

Source: Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Catherine Earnshaw (Ch. XV).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.

World, Tear, Heart

“I sit there in my bed staring at the wall, feeling happy, enjoying the way the wall looks, how pink and how white it is. Pink and white, as far as I’m concerned, have never looked quite so pink and white before.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Way, Feeling, Happiness

“As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.”

Jerry Spinelli (1941) American children's writer

People, Smile, Star, Universe

“The only good thing about having your back to the wall is that it makes it really easy to choose which way you're going to go.”

Jim Butcher book Cold Days

Source: Cold Days

Way

“I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.”

Jon Ronson (1967) British journalist, documentary filmmaker, radio presenter and nonfiction author

Source: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

Family

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper

Time

“It's like banging my head against the wall, except if I were actually banging my head on a wall, I'd be able to make myself stop.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

“At least I thought it was a wall. It sure felt like one. It was hard. It was flat. It stretched out on either side of me. You know… wall.”

D.J. MacHale The Quillan Games

Source: The Quillan Games

“Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know.
-Songs of Sapphique”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

Thinking, Tree

“You can use your time to build bridges or walls. The latter is not only unChristlike, it limits impact & creates loneliness.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Time, Loneliness

“Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Source: Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

Thinking

“I’ve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

“A good book is never finished—-it goes on whispering to you from the wall.”

Virginia Euwer Wolff (1937) American children's writer

Books

“If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Idea

“Okay…' I hurried on. 'But why me?'
'You're a girl,' Lockwood called. 'Aren't you supposed to be more sensitive?'
'To emotions, yes. To nuances of human behavior. Not necessarily to secret passages in a wall.'
'Oh, it's much the same thing.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Screaming Staircase

Source: The Screaming Staircase

Secret, Behavior, Girl

“Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it.”

Dan Millman (1946) American self help writer

Fear, Courage

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

New York Times (27 July 1980)

Cars, Silence

“Walter Mitty: To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Life, World, Feeling, Drawing

“Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985)

World, Fools

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

“Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Nature

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

For Wife, love, Happy, Hope

“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

“If bringing down the wall would require you to fly, you must believe you can fly. Otherwise, when the decisive moment comes, you will surely discover you ahve no wings.”

Patrick Carman book The Dark Hills Divide

Source: The Dark Hills Divide

Decision, Flying

“All my years to this moment
All my roads to this wall.
All my words to this silence
All my pride to this fall.
-Songs of Sapphique”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

Silence

“Max?” said the Gasman. “Are those, um, rats?”
Lovely. “Yes, those do appear to be either rats or mice on steroids,” I said briskly, trying not to shriek and climb the walls like a girly-girl.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Love, Girl, Appearance

“Hey!" Claire called after him, as she leaned her backpack against the wall.
"No onions!"
"Your loss!"
"I meant for YOU! Not if you want to get kissed tonight!"
"Damn, girl. Harsh.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ghost Town

Girl, Kiss, Loss

“The more you try to simplify things the more you complicate them. You create rules, build walls, push people away, lie to yourself and ignore true feelings. That is not simplifying things.”

Cecelia Ahern book If You Could See Me Now

Source: If You Could See Me Now

People, Lie, Feeling

“The Holy Spirit showed me that when I put up walls to keep others out I also wall myself into solitary place of confinement.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Source: Beauty for Ashes: Receiving Emotional Healing

“Shall I show you the door… or would you rather go out through the wall?" - Maris”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Cloak & Silence

“Whoa," said Nico as he climbed off the bus. "Is that a climbing wall?"
"Yeah," I (Percy) said.
"Why is there lava pouring down it?"
"Little extra challenge…" - Percy”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

“But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.”

J. Sheridan Le Fanu book Carmilla

Variant: Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.
Source: Carmilla

Dreams, Light, Personality

“In theory, when yoou're done with training, you should be able ot kick a hole in a wall or eknock out a moose with a single punch."

"I would never hit a moose," said Clary. "They're endangered.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Variant: And second, keep in mind that you are a weapon. In theory, when you're done with training, you should be able to kick a hole in a wall or knock out a moose with a single punch."
"I would never hit a moose," said Clary. "They're endangered.
Source: City of Fallen Angels

Training

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 281
Context: Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

Life, Change

“once you laugh at you own weaknesses, you can move forward. Comedy breaks down walls. It opens up people. If you're good, you can fill up those openings with something positive. Mabye…….. combat some the ugliness in the world.”

Goldie Hawn (1945) American actress, film director, and producer.

People, World

“If you run into a psychic wall face-first, do you wind up with psychic bruises?
-Clary, pg.239”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“my sword reappeared in my pocket.
yeah, great timing. now i could attack the walls all i wanted. my cell had no bar, no window, not even a door”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Time

“It all began with a shoe on the wall. A shoe on the wall shouldn't be there at all.”

Dr. Seuss book Wacky Wednesday

Source: Wacky Wednesday

Shoe

“There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to – if there are no doors or windows – he walks through a wall.”

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) American author

"The Man in the Drawer", in Rembrandt's Hat (1973); cited from Selected Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) p. 225

Life, Time

“Percy hefted a bronze grenade. ‘I hope you labelled these right.’
He yelled, ‘Die, Romans!’ and lobbed the grenade over the wall.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Hope

“Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Variant: No, I say, it's fine.
Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains.
Just great, I say. Really.
Source: Fight Club

Painting

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love, Idea

“Angel screeched with fury and despair to the empty walls around her. "I'm human, do you hear me? It hurts!”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Nevermore

Angels, Hurt, Despair

“Houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else's.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Problem, Housing

“Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.”

Stephen King book Lisey's Story

Source: Lisey's Story

Lying, Housing

“History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.”

Jasper Fforde book Something Rotten

Source: Something Rotten

Color, History, Time

“In a fair fight, the don's man would almost certainly paint the walls with Locke and Calo's blood, so it stood to reason that this fight would have to be as unfair as possible.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Fight, Painting

“Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it’s worse when you see them wearing dark glasses, having streamers around their necks and a hat on their antlers. Because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

“You’ll pardon me,” he finally said, “if the suggestion that the minuscule black turnip you call a heart is suddenly overflowing with generosity toward me leaves me wanting to arm myself and put my back against a wall.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Heart

“It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war.”

Aristophanés The Birds

Birds (414 BC) <br class="br">Context: Epops: You're mistaken: men of sense often learn from their enemies. Prudence is the best safeguard. This principle cannot be learned from a friend, but an enemy extorts it immediately. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war. And this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.<br>Chorus [leader]: It appears then that it will be better for us to hear what they have to say first; for one may learn something at times even from one's enemies.<br>(tr. Anon. 1812 rev. in Ramage 1864, p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=AoUCAAAAQAAJ&pg;=PA45)

War, Learning

“It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Variant: It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.
Source: Invisible Monsters

Money, Beauty, Way

“Claire stretched out against the wall and kissed it. "Glad to see you, too," she whispered, and pressed her cheek against the smooth surface. It almost felt like it hugged her back.
"Dude, it's a," Shane said from behind her. "Hug somebody who cares.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Lord of Misrule

Kiss