Quotes about window (961 quotes, page 4)

“It is unfortunate that he still has nonfree software in his computer. He needs to defenestrate it (which means, either throw Windows out of the computer or throw the computer out of the window).”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

On hearing someone owns a GNU+Linŭ/Windows dual boot machine, quoted in "Richard Stallman’s Opinion On Dual Booting – “Defenestrate It”" in digitizor (31 May 2011) http://digitizor.com/2011/05/31/richard-stallmans-opinion-on-dual-booting-defenestrate-it/
2010s

“I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.”

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) American poet

From her obituary in Century Magazine

Life

“Mrs. Burgoyne passed the last twenty years of her life in a large, solemn-looking house at Kensington; it is now a mad-house. How curiously do these changes in dwelling places, once cheerful and familiar, bring the mutability of our existence home! It would be an eventful chronicle, the history of even a few of the old-fashioned houses in the vicinity of London. You ascended a flight of steps, with a balustrade and two indescribable birds on either side, and a large hall, which, strange to say, was more cheerful in winter than in summer. In summer the narrow windows, the black wood with which it was panelled, seemed heavy and dull; but in winter the huge fire gave its own gladness, and had besides the association with old English hospitality which a blazing grate always brings. You passed next through two long drawing-rooms, whose white wainscoting was almost covered with family portraits. There cannot be much said for the taste of Queen Anne's time downwards — bagged, wigged, and hooped; there was not a picture of which the African's question might not have been asked, "Pray tell me, white woman, if this is all you?””

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Life , Family , Home , History

“I am thinking of airtight windows! No other country can build such airtight and beautiful windows.”

Angela Merkel (1954) Chancellor of Germany

Ich denke an dichte Fenster! Kein anderes Land kann so dichte und so schöne Fenster bauen.
Answering the question what emotions Germany arouses in her, Interview in the BILD-Zeitung on November 29, 2004
2004

Beauty , Thinking , Country

“Your eyes are windows to your dreams; Your ears are windows to your mind; You nose is the door to your heart - you can win over any man with just your smell.”

Siddharth Katragadda (1972) Indian writer

page 34
Dark Rooms (2002)

Dreams , Heart

“All big cities are the same now. It used to be easier at weekends. Not anymore, you get the white stretch limos everywhere. You see them at first, you think, "Is it a celebrity or a foreign dignitary?" No, its some slags. No one's sure how many slags, cause the windows are tinted. All you can say with any real degree of accuracy is that there is an indescriminate number of slags in said vehicle. There's at least two poking out the sunroof.”

Marcus Brigstocke (1973) comedian

Live At The Apollo (2006)

Thinking

“…all the formulas have flown out of the window.”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

Financial Times Interview (July 14, 2017)

“[In casual conversation] The reason why I feel relatively indifferent to [the Anglican Church of England] is it's lost its power, and it's so desperately keen to solicit support that they're willing to throw God out of the window in order to retain it. God for the many of the Anglicans is nothing more than a sort of awkward geriatric relative, kept upstairs, who might be embarrassingly coming downstairs, incontinently, and cause trouble.”

Jonathan Miller (1934–2019) British theatre director (born 1934)

Episode one: "Shadows of Doubt".
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004)

God , Feeling , Support , Indifference

“I'm stranded in the jungle,
Taking all the heat they was giving.
The night is dark but the sidewalk's bright
And lined with the light of the living.
From a tenement window a transistor blasts,
Turn around the corner things got real quiet real fast.
She hit me with a Tenth Avenue freeze-out.
Tenth Avenue freeze-out.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)

Light , Night

“The window-lights, myriads and myriads,
Bloom from the walls like climbing flowers.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Evening: New York"
Flame and Shadow (1920)

Flowers , Light

“I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

The Hospital Window (l. 1–4).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Light

“Now there is little difference, except packaging, between a Mac and a Windows machine. Not no difference, but at home we have — along with six Macs (one for everybody plus my travelling iBook) — three PCs and one Linux box, and I can move from one to the other without having to think about it much. What used to be a night-and-day difference in usability has become a small increment in Apple's favor”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

or favour for you Brits
MacUser interview (2004)

Travel , Home , Thinking , Night

“I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his [Degas'] art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.”

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) American painter and printmaker

Quote, c. 1875; as cited by Nancy Mowll Mathews, in Mary Cassatt: A Life, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998, p. 114 - ISBN 978-0-585-36794-1
Cassatt admired Edgar Degas, whose pastels had made a powerful impression on her when she encountered them in an art dealer's window in Paris, 1875

Life , Art , Change

“All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight.
I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight.
My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night
Leaving all of love's ashes behind me.
The wind knocks my window, the room it is wet.
The words to say I'm sorry, I haven't found yet.
I think of her often and hope whoever she's met
Will be fully aware of how precious she is.
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

And I answer them most mysteriously,
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"
Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Ballad In Plain D

Love , Hope , Feeling , Bird

“One must build to the praise of a Being above, to build the noblest memorial of himself. Then, Angelo may verily " hang the Pantheon in the air." Then the unknown builder, whose personality disappears in his work, may stand an almost inspired mediator between the upward-looking thought and the spheres overhead. Each line then leaps with a swift aspiration, as the vast structure rises, in nave and transept into pointed arch and vanishing spire. The groined roof grows dusky with majestic glooms; while, beneath, the windows flame, as with apocalyptic light of jewels. Angelic presences, sculptured upon the portal, invite the wayfarer, and wave before him their wings of promise. Within is a worship which incense only clouds, which spoken sermons only mar. The building itself becomes a worship, a Gloria in Excelsis, articulate in stone; the noblest tribute offered on earth, by any art, to Him from whom its impulse came, and with the ineffable majesty of whose spirit all skies are filled.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 499.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Art , Angels , Light , Memory

“Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#92
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Love , Books , Feeling , Thinking

“Ships, houses, mills… in one word everything that is made by people must stand upright and be painted with care. This is actually a good presentation compared to other, less symmetrical things, like the trees, skies, etc. It doesn't create the painting, but it certainly strengthen the illusion. It's just like somebody who is neatly dressed, but whose tie is coming off. The windows of a house must be straight, a mill in a pure construction, the blades well-positioned in perspective.”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Schepen, huizen, molens eb in één woord alles, wat door menschen gemaakt is, moet recht staan en met zorg geschilderd worden. Dit staat juist zeer goed tegenover andere, minder symmetrische dingen, als boomen, luchten enz. Het maakt het schilderij wel niet, maar draagt toch bij tot de illusie. 't Is er net mee, als met iemand, die keurig gekleed is, maar wiens das los zit. De ramen van een huis moeten recht, een molen zuiver van constructie zijn, de wieken in het perspectief staan.
Quote of Roelofs; as cited by H.F.W. Jeltes, in Willem Roelofs : bizonderheden betreffende zijn leven en zijn werk, met brieven en andere bijlagen, Van Kampen, Amsterdam, 1911, pp. 86-87
undated quotes

People , Tree , Painting , Housing

“The simple fact is that code quality tends to improve as you move between platforms… non-obvious bugs on Windows become VERY obvious in the Linux port and vice versa, and thus get fixed. So even the Windows gamers will win in all of this.”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in, "Chat with Ryan Gordon" http://web.archive.org/web/20010502182109/http://www.descent-3.com/pad/news/16.html Chrono's Pad (2001-02-11)

“If I had a Luger, I thought, I could drill the bastards. I leaned on one elbow and pointed a finger at the window, seeing what kind of shot I would get. Perfect. There was just enough light in the street for a good silhouette. I knew it would happen quickly, I’d have no choice: just pull the trigger and go deaf from the terrible noise, a frenzy of screaming and scratching followed by a ghastly thump of a body knocked back and down to the sidewalk.”

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

1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)

Light , Perfection

“In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

Donald McGill (1875–1962) British artist

George Orwell "The Art of Donald McGill", in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1984) Vol. 2, pp. 194-5.
Criticism

Literature , Mood , Past , Heart

“They [Taoists] were fond of pointing out that the value of cups, windows, and doorways lies in the part of them that are not there.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

Parting

“What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows: American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U. S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Money , Family , Reality , Reading

““The fact is, there’s no such thing as an ultimate state of consciousness. It’s a myth; sentience has meaning only insofar as it’s connected into the physical world…
If you’d like to see it, here’s a view of the Omega Point.” It gestured to open a large inscape window in the sky. Instantly Doran’s head was filled with an undifferentiated roar; white noise matched in the window by endless video snow.
Choronzon laughed. “The more information there is in a signal, the more it resembles noise. You’re looking at infinite information density, gentlemen, a signal so packed with information that it has become noise. These idiots pushed so far in one direction that they ended up at the opposite pole…
Perhaps the fanatics of Omega Point had gotten their wish, but if so they had been mistaken in thinking that the Absolute was something that hadn’t been there all along. Absolute meaning, it seemed, was no different from no meaning at all.”

Karl Schroeder (1962) Author. Technology consultant

Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 14 (p. 158).

World , Thinking

“The dogs did bark, the children screamed,
Up flew the windows all;
And every soul cried out, "Well done!"
As loud as he could bawl.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

St. 28.
The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1785)

Children , Dogs , Soul

“The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part I, p. 39
Watt (1943)

Lie , Secret , Flowers , Bird

“Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

A Long Story; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Light

“This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.”

Ted Hughes book The Hawk in the Rain

"Wind"
The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

Light , Housing , Sea , Madness

“Style should be like window-glass, perfectly transparent, and with very little sash.”

Nathaniel Emmons (1745–1840) American clergy

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 481.

“If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to come and rescue you.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

People , Family , Home , Business

“We walked along Buitenkant and there by the sand works at the Oosterspoor [former train-station in Amsterdam], I can' tell you how beautiful it was there in the twilight. Rembrandt, Michel, [French Barbizon painter] and others have painted it, the ground dark, the sky still lit by the glow of the sun, already gone down, the row of houses and towers standing out above, the lights in the windows everywhere, everything reflected in the water. And the people and carriages like small black figures everywhere. Like one sometimes sees in a Rembrandt. And it put us in such a mood that we began talking about all sorts of things.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1870s

People , Beauty , Mood , Light

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying "Boo!" Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

The on-air statement he gave at the end of "The War of the Worlds" broadcast, October 30, 1938.

War , World , Hope , Business

“I come here to your beautiful country -’ Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil after coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers. ‘- your beautiful country, I say,’ he said defiantly. ‘…So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance - most necessary to men in prime of life - and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Life , Men , Beauty , Bird

“Went for a walk, whistling. Saw a throne in a window. I said: What chair is this? Is it the one great Ferdinand sat in, when he sent the ships to find the Indies? The seat is frayed. Hardly a day passes without an announcement of some kind of marriage, a pregnancy, a cancer, a rebirth. Sometimes they drift in from the Yukon and other far places, come in and sit down at the kitchen table, want a glass of milk and a peanut-butter-and-jelly, I oblige, for old times’ sake. Sent me the schedule for the Little League soccer teams, they’re all named after cars, the Mustangs vs. the Mavericks, the Chargers vs. the Impalas. Something funny about that. My son. Slept with What’s-Her-Name, they said, while she was asleep, I don’t think that’s fair. Prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights. They went away, then they came back, at Christmas and Eastertide, had quite a full table, maybe a dozen in all including all the little…partners they’d picked up on their travels….”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“Aria”.
Sixty Stories (1981)

Marriage , Cars , Travel , Thinking

“Well, I flung the window open an' I shouted, "Yes, that's right Millandra – I'm goin' to Greece for the sex; sex for breakfast, sex for dinner, sex for tea, an’ sex for supper." Well, she just ignored me but this little cab driver leans out an' pipes up, "That sounds like a marvellous diet, love." "It is," I shouted back, "have y' never heard of it? It's called the 'F' Plan."”

Willy Russell Shirley Valentine

Shirley, page 40.
Shirley Valentine (1986)

Love , Sex , Tea

“Ballet for a rainy day
Silent film of melting miracle play
Dancing out there through my window
To the backdrop of a slow descending grey”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Ballet For A Rainy Day".
Skylarking (1986)

Dance

“Who will be at Sanssouci tonight?
It's only when you're outside that you notice
Only through the window you can see them
Once the door is open, all will vanish.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

Sanssouci
Song lyrics, Release the Stars (2007)

“Take me. I'm an ordinary player in the key of C.
And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity.
Who's gonna love you when you're looks are gone?
God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Outrageous
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)

Love , God , Flowers , Water

“Had another dream about the lions at the door
They were not half as frightening as they were before
But I'm thinking about eternity
Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me
Walls, windows, trees, waves coming through
You be in me I'll be in you
Together in eternity
Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me
Up among the firs where it smells so sweet
Or down in the valley were the river used to be
I got my mind on eternity
Some kind'a ecstasy's got a hold on me, and I'm
Wondering where the lions are and I'm
Wondering where the lions are…”

Bruce Cockburn (1945) Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter

Wondering Where the Lions Are, Track 6 (See also:Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Park)
Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws (1979)

Dreams , Thinking , Tree

“Lately I've been lookin' through the windows of my soul
And I can see there's not much left to hold
Just an empty space surrounded by the pieces of
A badly broken heart that's forgotten how to love.”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

A Woman's Touch, written with Wayne Perry.
Song lyrics, Blue Moon (1996)

Love , Soul , Heart

“Trellises for leafy vines, which will lose their foilage in the fall, should be set up over southern windows so that sunlight will penetrate into the house through the winter months.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Winter , Housing

“The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin façades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn’t mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 9 (p. 136)

Hope , Music , Feeling , Sense

“The windows of my soul are made of one way glass
Don't bother looking into my eyes
If there's something you want to know - just ask.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Willing to Fight
Song lyrics

Way , Soul

“It has been raining for a whole month and I lie in bed in the morning like one drunk or ill, refusing to get up. Suddenly I hear a chorus of birds announcing a clear day. Quickly I pull aside the curtain, push open the window and see the beautiful sun shining and glistening and the forest looks like having a bath. Ah, is this not happiness?”

Jin Shengtan (1610–1661) Chinese writer

"Thirty-three Happy Moments"

Lie , Beauty , Bird , Sun

“It is a secret but I have pulled the chain out of the wall. I can see out the little window all I like.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

Born of Man and Woman (1950)

Secret

“As for principles of law, he should know those which are necessary in the case of buildings having party walls, with regard to water dripping from the eaves, and also the laws about drains, windows, and water supply. And other things of this sort should be known to architects, so that… they may be careful not to leave disputed points for the householders to settle after the works are finished, and so that in drawing up contracts the interests of both employer and contractor may be wisely safe-guarded.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter I, Sec. 10

Law , Water , Drawing

“Harvard was an extraordinary window on the world.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 1, 1919 - 1968 The Road to 24 Sussex Drive, p. 39
Memoirs (1993)

World

“.. No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 29
1920's, My life (1922)

Money , Feeling , Sense , Painting

“Given that background, I was interested in what Steve Jobs might say about the future of Apple. His survival strategy for Apple, for all its skill and drama, was not going to propel Apple into the future. At that moment in time, Apple had less than 4 percent of the personal computer market. The de facto standard was Windows-Intel and there seemed to be no way for Apple to do more than just hang on to a tiny niche.
In the summer of 1998, I got an opportunity to talk with Jobs again. I said, "Steve, this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the PC business says that Apple cannot really push beyond a small niche position. The network effects are just too strong to upset the Wintel standard. So what are you trying to do in the longer term? What is the strategy?"”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

He did not attack my argument. He didn’t agree with it, either. He just smiled and said, "I am going to wait for the next big thing."
Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 14; Similar story in Rumelt (2007)

Smile , Way , Business , Strong

“You can't be a lover if you want to keep on using
What are you using that's stronger than the love
Sometimes I'm knocked out by the damage that you're doing
Knocked out, locked out, push comes to shove
Listen to the wind tearing at the windows
Watching how the white moon melts into the cloud
Important little tyrants, impotent little pharaohs
Men/man of sorrows lost into the crowd ~ Richochet”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

Love , Men , Lovers , Tear

“Something I've done since I was a kid – of opening windows and imagining what it would be like to jump. But I never take it seriously.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

1999 interview with Rolling Stone quoted in ** Chris Cornell: Inside Soundgarden, Audioslave Singer's Final Days, Rolling Stone, 29 May 2017 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/chris-cornell-david-fricke-on-soundgarden-singer-final-days-w484560,
On depression and suicide

Imagination

“The light from the big window fell right on the picture. I took a good look at it. Then I shifted a bit nearer and took another look. Then I went back to where I had been at first, because it hadn't seemed quite so bad from there.
"Well?" said Corky, anxiously.
I hesitated a bit.
"Of course, old man, I only saw the kid once, and then only for a moment, but -- but it *was* an ugly sort of kid wasn't it, if I remember rightly?"
"As ugly as that?"
I looked again, and honesty compelled me to be frank.
"I don't see how it could have been, old chap."”

P.G. Wodehouse book Carry On, Jeeves

Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

Light

“I caught a glimpse of sun rays filtering through a window, thus lighting up a portion of this magnificent building. I was racing against the sun, desperately trying to finish my sketch before the light disappeared. I knew I had only an hour and a half before sunset.”

Wahbi Al-Hariri (1914–1994) Artist, architect, author

Source: Lisa Kaaki (2002-01-25). Wahbi Al-Hariri - the last of the classicists http://www.webcitation.org/6HcrXOzJ5. Arab News. Saudi Research & Publishing Company.

Light , Sun

“If no attempt is made to control excessive heat loss through glass… a solar house may require as much as 20 percent more fuel than an orthodox house during December and January… Wendell Thomas recognized and solved this problem… by burying the house in the ground, except for the south and east window areas. …at night… windows are covered with from inside by insulation boards and drapes…”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Problem , Loss , Housing , Night

“What's my line?
I'm happy cleaning windows
Take my time
I'll see you when my love grows
Baby don't let it slide
I'm a working man in my prime
Cleaning windows…”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Cleaning Windows
Song lyrics, Beautiful Vision (1982)

Love , Time , Baby , Happiness

“The dynamics of the city. His mother had been scared of cities. It had been part of his education. She had told him cities are dangerous places. They're full of tough, scary guys. He was a tough boy himself but he had walked around as a teenager ready and willing to believe her. And he had seen that she was right. People on city streets were fearful and furtive and defensive. They kept their distance and crossed to the opposite sidewalk to avoid coming near him. They made it so obvious he became convinced the scary guys were always right behind him, at his shoulder. Then he suddenly realized no, I'm the scary guy. They're scared of me. It was a revelation. He saw himself reflected in store windows and understood how it could happen. He had stopped growing at fifteen when he was already six feet five and two hundred and twenty pounds. A giant. Like most teenagers in those days he was dressed like a bum. The caution his mother had drummed into him was showing up in his face as a blank-eyed, impassive stare. They're scared of me. It amused him and he smiled and then people stayed even farther away. From that point onward he knew cities were just the same as every other place, and for every city person he needed to be scared of there were nine hundred and ninety-nine others a lot more scared of him. He used the knowledge like a tactic, and the calm confidence it put in his walk and his gaze redoubled the effect he had on people. The dynamics of the city.”

Lee Child book Running Blind

Source: Running Blind (2000), Ch. 1.

People , Education , Fear , Smile

“Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 16, p. 144

Men , Stupidity , Failure , Thinking

“Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)

People , World , Religion , Understanding

“When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.”

John Fowles book The Collector

The Collector (1963)

Men , School , Home , Sister

“Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come? We will have hotcakes for breakfast. How can I protect this...? My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. Of every hue and caste am I.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Love , Dreams , Cars , Feeling

“And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets
So crowded that you can't look out the window in the morning?”

Nick Drake (1948–1974) British singer-songwriter

Hazey Jane II
Song lyrics, Bryter Later (1970)

World

“When you traveling by bus, it is always difficult to decide whether you should sit in a seat by the window, a seat on the aisle, or a seat in the middle. If you take an aisle seat, you have the advantage of being able to stretch your legs whenever you like, but you have the disadvantage of people walking by you, and they can accidentally step on your toes or spill something on your clothing. If you take a window seat, you have the advantage of getting a clear view of the scenery, but you have the disadvantage of watching insects die was they hit the glass. If you take the middle seat, you have neither of these advantages, and you have the added disadvantage of people leaning all over you when they fall asleep. You can see at once why you should always hire a limousine or rent a mule rather than take the bus to your destination.”

Daniel Handler book The Vile Village

Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village (2001)

People , Travel , Clothes

“But it never occurred to him to want to be a philosopher, or dedicate himself to Speculation; he was still too fickle for that. True, he was not drawn now to one thing and now to another – thinking was and remained his passion – but he still lacked the self-discipline required for acquiring a deeper coherence. Both the significant and the insignificant attracted him equally as points of departure for his pursuits; the result was not of great consequence – only the movements of thought as such interested him. Sometimes he noticed that he reached one and the same conclusion from quite different starting points, but this did not in any deeper sense engage his attention. His delight was always just to be pressing on; wherever he suspected a labyrinth, he had to find the way. Once he had started, nothing could bring him to a halt. If he found the going difficult and became tired of it before he ought, he would adopt a very simple remedy – he would shut himself up in his room, make everything as festive as possible, and then say loudly and clearly: I will do it. He had learned from his father that one can do what one wills, and his father’s life had not discredited this theory. Experiencing this had given Johannes indescribable pride; that there could be something one could not do when one willed it was unbearable to him. But his pride did not in the least indicate weakness of will, for when he had uttered these energetic words he was ready for anything; he then had a still higher goal – to penetrate the intricacies of the problem by force of will. This again was an adventure that inspired him. Indeed his life was in this way always adventurous. He needed no woods and wanderings for his adventures, but only what he possessed – a little room with one window.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Johannes Climacus p. 22-23
1840s, Johannes Climacus (1841)

Life , Way , Departure , Problem

“Write her a poem, spill your heart to her in sweet cadences; but I didn't know how to write poetry. It was love and dove with me, bad rhymes, blundering sentiment. Oh Christ in Heaven, I'm no writer: I can't even put down a little quatrain. I'm no good in this world. I stood at the window and waved my hands at the sky; no good at all, just a cheap fake; neither writer nor lover; neither fish nor fowl.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love , World , Lovers , Fish

“The boy watches his father cross the road and thinks there is something about the way his dad moves through the world that is truly impressive. Cars screech to a halt, drives shake their fists and stick their heads out the windows and curse and blow their horns and Bunny walks on as if radiating some super-human force field, like he has walked off the pages of a comic book. The world can't touch him. He seems to be the grand generator of some hyper-powerful electricity.”

Nick Cave book The Death of Bunny Munro

The Death of Bunny Munro (2009)
Books

Books , World , Cars , Way

“As told in the final section of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour Christmas CD:
Jeff Foxworthy: Tell 'em the one you did.
Engvall: Aw, why'd you have to bring that up?
Foxworthy: Come on, share that one with the group.
Engvall: Alright. Well, nobody's immune from this, not even me.
Foxworthy: Not even Brainiac here.
Engvall: I'm in the car park at the mall, and there's this guy with a coat hanger inside his window… and I could not stop myself. I said, "You lock your keys in your car?"”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Driver: No, just washed it, gonna hang it up to dry (dumbass). Here's your sign.
Here's Your Sign, "Here's <i>MY</i> Sign..."

Cars , Guy , Christmas

“We can be sure our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the father's house, that he sees us and blesses us. Yes, bless us, Holy Father. We entrust your dear soul to the Mother of God, your Mother, who guided you each day and who will now guide you to the glory of her son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time (full) of joyful hope and profound gratitude.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Homily during the Requiem Mass of the funeral of [Pope John Paul II], on April 8, 2005
2005

God , Sadness , Hope , Soul

“Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done. … Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and we should be grateful to it for precisely this reason, for allowing us to mingle ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful lightness, as mere intellectual propositions. … We function of the basis of a necessary myopia. Therein is the sheer energy of existence, a blind will no less impressive than that which we find in a moth arduously crossing a window ledge, … refusing to contemplate the broader scheme in which he will be dead by nightfall. The arguments for our triviality and vulnerability are too obvious, too well known and tedious to rehearse. What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity even when their wider non-sense is clear. The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 324.

Life , Death , Beauty , Error

“This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 20
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

People , Way , Understanding , Reality

“And silence … is loud! And I'd be straining real hard to hear what those two boys were saying. And finally, just when they figured I had my ear right against the window, one of those ol' boys would turn to the other and say "Did you know that Jesus died for your sins?" And the other one would say "Why no, tell me about it!"”

Mike Warnke (1946) Evangelical Christian minister

Alive (album) (1975)

Boy , Silence

“Death continued to stare at the emperor with his cold, hollow eyes, and the room was fearfully still. Suddenly there came through the open window the sound of sweet music. Outside, on the bough of a tree, sat the living nightingale. She had heard of the emperor's illness, and was therefore come to sing to him of hope and trust. And as she sung, the shadows grew paler and paler; the blood in the emperor's veins flowed more rapidly, and gave life to his weak limbs; and even Death himself listened, and said, "Go on, little nightingale, go on."”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Nightingale

The Nightingale
Fairy Tales (1835)

Life , Death , Hope , Music

“No no, Jock…we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love."
"I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife."
"I never think of policemen's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine.”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972), Ch. 3.

Love , Beauty , Idea , Thinking

“Everything takes place in an infinitely greater field than what is framed by the size of the picture or by what is materially in the picture. This matter [door/window/wall] is but a support inviting the viewer to participate in the much larger game of a thousand and one visions and feelings; it is the talisman lifting or sinking walls into the deepest recesses of our spirit, opening and at times closing windows in the construction of our impotence, our bondage, or our freedom. The 'subject-matter' then may be found in the picture or it may exist solely inside the spectator's head.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Feeling , Game , Support , Freedom

“She [Isa's mother] called up Lufthansa and said, 'I have this daughter, you see, and she needs airplane windows,' she said. That's how she did it.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

Isa Genzken's mother, who was in her 90s, helped her in obtaining a section of jetliner window panels for an artwork Isa wanted to make: a series of cut-out airplane windows
after 2010, No, It Isn't Supposed to Be Easy' (2013)

Daughters

“Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Broken Window (ch. 2)

Death , Money , People , Feeling

“If there's one thing I can't bear, it's when hundreds of old men come creeping in through the window in the middle of the night and throw all manner of garbage over me. I can't bear that.”

Peter Cook (1937–1995) British architect

"The World Domination League" (1964)
E. L. Wisty

Men , Night

“For a long time he stood at the window looking at the shining rails. They had always fascinated him. Squinting a little he saw them stretch away to infinity, carrying him off to his rediscovered youth.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P.371

Youth , Time

“And you mother still close to me,
you know that it is not enough to live an ordered and honest life.
You have been faithful for years to bring order into our house.
As soon as the dawn appeared in the night sky,
you rose towards the tasks awaiting you –
in the silence of a mental prayer.
Perhaps it is not enough even the overwhelming love,
to which you gave the sober expression of concrete acts.
The sacred wool, the steaming milk and the bed
composed with inimitable care by your hands.
Going back in time you recounted to your children their births,
and the birthdays have slowly vanished.
The beginning is now found from a thousand beginnings,
with the ancient, with the unknown, with Christ.
A present act includes them all,
opening after the events have passed.
And there is a severe duty for struggle,
something in our own life could be wrenched away by it.
The guards will soon appear,
and they will take me to my cell with the high window.
You will still be with me,
as mother and inexhaustible human presence.
Giving freely of your love, you still knew that your son is freedom.
You were a nearness, that always found something to do.
I have watched you unflinching under hardness and spite,
always moving, and acting,
holding back your inner rebellion you had pity on rage.
Now we are together to work and open all around.
In the loving gift to the world which ever crucifies us
is our fulfilment.
Seeing its limitations, still to treasure everything
is the gesture of infinite miracle,
and you were right: order comes from this principle,
the earthly goods, as our brothers the prophets tell us,
will be given unto us.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Love , Life , Children , World

“Seven thirty-nine, more than three hundred miles to the north and east, Jack Reacher climbed out of his motel room window. One minute earlier, he had been in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. One minute before that, he had opened the door of his room to check the morning temperature. He had left it open, and the closet just inside the entrance passageway was faced with mirrored glass, and there was a shaving mirror in the bathroom on a cantilevered arm, and by a freak of optical chance he caught sight of four men getting out of a car and walking toward the motel office. Pure luck, but a guy as vigilant as Jack Reacher gets lucky more times than the average.”

Lee Child book Echo Burning

Echo Burning, Ch. 1 (2001).

Men , Cars , Guy , Chance

“During the summer of 2012, one Ferguson police officer detained a 32-year-old African American man who had just finished playing basketball at a park. The officer approached while the man was sitting in his car and resting. The car’s windows appeared to be more heavily tinted than Ferguson’s code allowed, so the officer did have legitimate grounds to question him. But, with no apparent justification, the officer proceeded to accuse the man of being a pedophile. He prohibited the man from using his cell phone and ordered him out of his car for a pat-down search, even though he had no reason to suspect that the man was armed. And when the man objected – citing his constitutional rights – the police officer drew his service weapon, pointed it at the man’s head, and arrested him on eight different counts. The arrest caused the man to lose his job.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Cars , Search , Question , Appearance

“I scarcely remember counting upon happiness — I look not for it if it be not in the present hour — nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to Benjamin Bailey (November 22, 1817)
Letters (1817–1820)

Sun , Parting , Happiness

“I feel like the script to Nightmare 4 is so tender hearted and thought out. I completely related to that character. That’s me in grade school, junior high, etc. Daydreamer, all I did was read books all summer long, looking out the window at the cute guy playing soccer in the backyard. Literally I was Alice. That was my life, so I completely related to the character and I think a lot of us can relate to the character at times in our life when we just want to be part of the wall. We just want to be wallpaper and not bring attention to ourselves and disappear into fantasy worlds. I believe a lot of people, at least a lot of people have told me that they really related to that character. But at one point in life, you have to make a decision to stand up for yourself and stand up for those that you love.”

Lisa Wilcox (1964) American actress

Lisa Wilcox Interview: Clinger, Nightmare on Elm Street and Star Trek: The Next Generation http://www.nerdreport.com/2015/10/22/lisa-wilcox-interview-clinger-nightmare-on-elm-street-and-star-trek-the-next-generation/ (October 22, 2015)

Love , Life , People , Books

“At the beginning God said: “Let there be light,” and light was, and light is, and light shall be. So Christianity is rolling on, and it is going to warm all nations, and all nations are to bask in its light. Men may shut the window-blinds so they cannot see it, or they may smoke the pipe of speculation until they are shadowed under their own vaporing; but the Lord God is a sun!”

Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832–1902) American Presbyterian preacher, clergyman and reformer during the mid-to late 19th century.

Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832-1902), The Pathway of Life, New York: The Christian Herald, 1894 p 254.
The Pathway of Life, New York: The Christian Herald, 1894

Men , God , Light , Sun

“.. when I had my imaginary friend I would look out of the small glass panes of the window and fill them with steam. Then, I would draw a little window and go out through it. Opposite our house, there was a milk store that was named Pinzon, and I would travel from the little window through the "o" in Pinzon, and from there into the center of the earth, where I had my friend, and we would dance and play... I do not remember my friend's house, and she had no name. She was like me in age. She had no face. The truth is, I do not remember if she had a face or not, and she was very lively. I could not describe her.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

9 September 1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My life', pp. 66-67

Truth , Age , Travel , Dance

“The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun.”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part I, ch. 5 (Sylvia Barrett)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Hostility , Sun

“With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open—a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.”

Aravind Adiga book The White Tiger

The Fourth Night.
The White Tiger (2008)

Cars , Water

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money , People , Sadness , Angels

“I brought Durand eight pictures, among them my 'Sunset' and the motif done from my window. They have been praised, but I find them poor, - tame, grey, monotonous, - I am not at all satisfied. - I am working with fury and I have finally discovered the right execution, the search for which has tormented me for a year. I am pretty sure I have it now, all I need is to spend this coming autumn in Rouen or in some other place where I can find striking motifs.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, from Osny, February 1884, in a letter to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 61
1880's

Search , Autumn

“Go bang the window and see what happens -- just test it. See that? Trudeau had the office bulletproofed. I always contended that the reason he did it was because the American embassy is right outside. They probably wanted to shoot him.”

Brian Mulroney (1939) 18th Prime Minister of Canada

[Newman, Peter, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, 2005, Random House Canada, Toronto, 0-679-31351-6], p. 331.

“I care not, Fortune, what you me deny;
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,
You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve.
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave:
Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave.”

James Thomson (poet) The Castle of Indolence

Canto II, Stanza 3.
The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Children , Health , Nature

“Every neighborhood on the planet has a house like this on the block. We've all driven past it. A bunch of people living there, too old to be kids, but never gonna be adults… You can tell that by the "AEROSMITH ROCKS" banner in the living room window… Four sociopathic pitbulls roaming the yard at all times… The brown one has one leg, just flops to the fence every couple of hours… You can tell when the family's doubled their net worth 'cause they parked a new gutted Chevelle in the driveway… The mailman's afraid to bring the mail, so he just gives it to the cops, 'cause hell, they're gonna be there anyway… And if you don't recognize this house in your neighborhood, you live in this house in your neighborhood.”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Love is Evol (2009)

People , Family , Hell , Time

“They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: “Give me bread.””

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Act 3, sc. 3
Dirty Hands (1948)

“Chinese tend to love moderation because of their temperament. If you said, for example, the room is so dim that there is an window to be installed here, no one would agree. But if you intended to dismantle the roof, they would come to mediate and therefore would agree to install a window.”

Lu Xun (1881–1936) Chinese novelist and essayist

Source: From Wu Sheng de Zhong Guo (Silent China) (1927)

Love

“I remember her standing in the tall grass and cattails
Away from the windows at the end of the day.
Watching the men from the landing in the tall hats & coat-tails.
She'd never look different, but something would change.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

A Mind with a Heart of Its Own, written with Jeff Lynne
Lyrics, Full Moon Fever (1989)

Men , Grass , Change

“I happen to like the "feel" of OpenGL more, which isn't something I can explain well to those that aren't programmers, but I don't think it matters much at this point which API one chooses. More or less, you have feature parity between both APIs, both have made a handful of design mistakes, and both do a few things in slightly more pleasant ways than the other. Of course, the unforgivable thing about Direct3D is that it only works on Windows. If it was truly cross-platform, though, I wouldn't really object to using it. But since you write OpenGL almost everywhere, and Direct3D almost nowhere, it seems like a false choice to me.”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in Luboš Doležel, "Interview: Ryan C. Gordon" http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovor-ryan-c.-gordon-icculus?page=1 AbcLinuxu.cz (2011-03-08)

Way , Feeling , Thinking , Falseness

“I still think that Boccioni was a great artist and a passionate man. I like El Lissitsky's painting very much. But Mondrian that great merciless artist, is the only one who had nothing left over. The point they all had in common was to be both inside and outside at the same time. A new of likeness!... for me to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

Thinking , Passion , Winter , Time

“Stamping around, waiting, I cursed England aloud, hands dug deep into pockets, dancing to the wind that knocked in vain at the Sunday shops. Cigarette-packets, football fixtures, bus-tickets sailed by in dust-ghosts of Saturday. A woman with a puce face and a blancmange-coloured prayer-book was waiting also for The Priest and Pig, and she looked puce disapproval at me. Twenty minutes late, the bus yawned in from town, near-empty, and it swallowed us in a gape of Sunday ennui. So we sundayed along, rattling and creaking in Sunday hollowness, I upstairs, tearing my elevenpenny ticket while I read the prospectus of Winter Commercial Classes stuck on the window.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Books , Tear , Winter , Waiting

“Better be careful, Jason warned himself. Why should I be careful? A nagging thought just below the surface of his mind gave him an uneasy feeling again, the feeling that something was wrong, that things were not what they seemed. Was that his imagination or just being in this small office, no air-conditioning, not even an electric fan? For some reason, the blank walls bothered him. No pictures. And no windows. I want to get out of here. He realized that he could get out of there. He could simply get up and leave. He didn't have to even speak to anybody. Hadn't they said this was voluntary? He was a volunteer. Well, he didn't feel like being a volunteer anymore. He wanted to go home.”

Robert Cormier book The Rag and Bone Shop

Source: The Rag and Bone Shop (2000), p. 99-100

Feeling , Home , Imagination

“But then again, Cape Town is an old lover. There are good days and bad days. Mostly, I think, I have made my peace. On the stormy days – perhaps a Cape Times report on gangland rape, or Sol Kerzner’s promise of a Noddyland hotel for the Waterfront, will trigger my unfaithfulness – Potchefstroom and Perth look suddenly greener. On the good days – maybe a school of Heaviside’s dolphins playing outside my window, full-moonrise from Signal Hill or a spring morning so unutterably blue it demands to be drunk, not written about – life here seems unrepeatable anywhere else in the world. As in all relationships, the dialogue is never over.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

Cape Town Calling (2007)

Life , World , Unfaithfulness , School

“The window I'm proudest of is at the Granby courthouse. … When the building was inaugurated …the Bishop of Saint-Hyacinthe… told me something that still warms my heart.
"Why is the third story so beautiful? Isn't that where people wait to be taken to prison?"
"Everyone has the right to see a flower before dying, Your Grace. The flowers shouldn't be grey."”

Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001) Canadian artist

"You speak like the Gospels."
Original in French: La verrière dont je suis la plus fière se trouve au palais de justice de Granby. … À l'inauguration de l'édifice... l'évêque de Saint-Hyacinthe... m'a fait un commentaire qui me rechauffe toujours le coeur.
Pourquoi le troisième étage est-il si beau? N'est-ce pas là ou se trouvent les gens qui attendent leur transfert en prison?
Monseigneur, tout homme a le droit de voir une fleur avant de mourir. Il ne faut pas que les fleurs soient grises.
Vous parlez comme les Évangiles.
L'esquisse d'une mémoire, 1996

People , Beauty , Flowers , Waiting

“At a very young age I found I could irritate people with this born ability to mimic just about anything I hear. I listened to sparrows outside my bedroom window and then could talk to them and other birds, and squirrels, horses, cows and an occasional human. Some folks refer to this as a special talent to me it was a fortunate aberration that has been a great tool in this biz. I try to be authentic in reproduction of animals. When it comes to the creatures it was usually an open page and I really enjoyed creating sound for them usually to picture on screen in a sound studio…what fun!!! Also, this is sometimes punishing to the vocal cords thus the three days.”

Frank Welker (1946) American actor

Frank Welker Talks TRANSFORMERS PRIME, Voicing Megatron Throughout His Career, How the Voice-Acting Industry Has Changed and Working with Peter Cullen http://collider.com/frank-welker-transformers-prime-interview/ (November 1, 2012)

People , Age , Bird , Animals

Quotes about window page 4

Quotes about window
page 4