Quotes about window
page 6

Gabriele Münter photo
Lindsay Lohan photo
Daniel Buren photo
Kalpana Chawla photo
Giorgio de Chirico photo
Aron Ra photo
Aubrey Beardsley photo

“I think the title page I drew for Salomé was after all "impossible". You see booksellers couldn't stick it up in their windows.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

Letter to Robert Ross, August 1893.

Richard Rodríguez photo
Chris Rock photo

“Oprah is rich, Bill Gates is wealthy. If Bill Gates woke up tomorrow with Oprah's money, he'd jump out a fuckin' window and slit his throat on the way down saying, "I can't even put gas in my plane!"”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (HBO, 2004)

Brian Keith photo
Ernest Flagg photo
Michelle Obama photo
Will Eisner photo

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

June Vincent photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Alexej von Jawlensky photo

“It was very tiny, our house [ St. Prex ], and I had no room for my own, only a window, which I could call mine. But I was so gloomy and unhappy in my soul after all those dreadful experiences, that I was quite content to sit at the window and quietly collect my thoughts and feelings. I had a bit of paint but no easel, so I went into Lausanne – twenty minutes on the train – and bought a small easel from a photographer... It was highly unsuitable for painting but for more than twenty years I have painted my best work on that little easel”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

in mainly small sizes
from: 'Lebenserinnerungen', 1938
This small house was in St. Prex, in Switzerland, lake Genova, where Jawlensky concentrated himself on the view around his house in the years after 1914.. ..he painted here more than 400 'Variations on a landscape theme', in St. Prex
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p. 186

Robert Burns photo

“O Mary, at thy window be!
It is the wished, the trysted hour.”

Mary Morison, st. 1 (1793)

Karl Pilkington photo

“Stop looking at the walls, look out the window.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 2 Episode 1
On Art

Ernest Hemingway photo

“Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.”

Part 1, Ch. 1 (the opening lines of the novel)
The line Yogi Johnson quotes is actually from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. This is one of several misattributed quotes in the novel.
The Torrents of Spring (1926)

Henry Mazer photo

“You can’t just take kids off the streets, put them in a hall, and expect them to know how to react…. During my first season, while I was conducting a youth concert, one kid went through a plate glass window and two bathrooms were totally destroyed…”

Henry Mazer (1918–2002) American conductor

As quoted in Rosenberg, Deena and Rosenberg, Bernard (1979). The Music Makers, New York: Columbia University Press, 1st ed., pg. 326, ISBN  0231039530.
Then-Chicago Symphony Orchestra Associate Conductor Henry Mazer and director of its youth concerts in March 1975 on Youth Musical Education in the Chicago Public Schools.

Linus Torvalds photo

“When you say, "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare at you blankly and say, "Hey, I got those with the system, for free."”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Post to comp.os.linux.development.apps newsgroup, 1995-03-08, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3jju43%24gc8%40klaava.helsinki.fi,
1990s, 1995-99

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Ryan C. Gordon photo
Antoni Tàpies photo
George Moore (novelist) photo

“Faith goes out of the window when beauty comes in at the door.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

The Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11304/11304-8.txt (1905) [Appleton, 2005, digitized edition], ch. IX (p. 169).

John Gray photo
Donovan photo

“When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be…”

Donovan (1946) Scottish singer, songwriter and guitarist

Sunshine Superman (1966), Season Of The Witch

Morton Feldman photo

“My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.... He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?"”

Morton Feldman (1926–1987) American avant-garde composer

At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.
Quoted in in "AMERICAN SUBLIME : Morton Feldman's mysterious musical landscapes", by Alex Ross. in The New Yorker (19 June 2006)

Lionel Tertis photo
Dennis M. Ritchie photo
John Varley photo
Sufjan Stevens photo
Henry Adams photo

“Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint Bonaventure or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since they got into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the windows; but society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas's Man much as Saint Thomas delivered him to the government; a two-sided being, free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy or a victim of energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as the interests of society seemed for the moment to need.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: p>To religious mystics, whose scepticism concerned chiefly themselves and their own existence, Saint Thomas's Man seemed hardly worth herding, at so much expense and trouble, into a Church where he was not eager to go. True religion felt the nearness of God without caring to see the mechanism. Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint Bonaventure or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since they got into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the windows; but society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas's Man much as Saint Thomas delivered him to the government; a two-sided being, free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy or a victim of energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as the interests of society seemed for the moment to need. Certainly Saint Thomas lavished no excess of liberty on the Man he created, but still he was more generous than the State has ever been. Saint Thomas asked little from Man, and gave much; even as much freedom of will as the State gave or now gives; he added immortality hereafter and eternal happiness under reasonable restraints; his God watched over man's temporal welfare far more anxiously than th State has ever done, and assigned him space in the Church which he can never have in the galleries of Parliament or Congress. [... ] No statute law ever did as much for Man, and no social reform ever will try to do it; yet Man bitterly complained that he had not his rights, and even in the Church is still complaining, because Saint Thomas set a limit, more or less vague, to what man was obstinate in calling his freedom of will.Thus Saint Thomas completed his work, keeping his converging lines clear and pure throughout, and bringing them together, unbroken, in the curves that gave unity to his plan. His sense of scale and proportion was that of the great architects of his age. One might go on studying it for a life-time.</p

David Pogue photo

“You're witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone.”

David Pogue (1963) Technology writer, journalist and commentator

" Hello BlackBerry, Meet the iPhone http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/technology/personaltech/13pogue-email.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin," The New York Times, March 13, 2008.

Wallace Stevens photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.
I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?… time has healed the wounds -- and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting -- ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.
Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham -- that city which some call "Bombingham" -- which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. My brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: "We shall overcome."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing its hope and faith.
Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

Esperanza Aguirre photo

“When socialism comes through the door, employment jumps out the window.”

Esperanza Aguirre (1952) Spanish politician

Source: http://www.larazon.es/noticia/7874-aguirre-ni-zapatero-ni-sus-delfines-saben-arreglar-la-que-han-liado. 'La Razón' Diary. May 6th, 2011.

Anastacia photo
Franz Halder photo
Marc Chagall photo
Charlie Brooker photo
John C. Dvorak photo
Benoît Minisini photo

“During my studies at the E. P. I. T. A., I wrote a Lisp interpreter under Windows 3.1. During six months, I discovered Windows, its stupid memory model, the Microsoft C compiler, and its numerous bugs.”

Benoît Minisini (1973) French computer programmer

Quoted from the Gambas Website, http://gambas.sourceforge.net/introduction.html http://gambas.sourceforge.net/introduction.html

Thomas Friedman photo
Maurice Denis photo

“What amazement, followed by what a revelation! In place of windows opening on nature, like the impressionists, these were surfaces which were solidly decorative, powerfully colorful, bordered with brutal strokes, partitioned.”

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) French painter

Quote of Denis, 1909: from Bouillon 2006, pp. 17-18; as cited on Wikipedia: Maurice Denis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Denis - reference [9]
In 1889, Denis was captivated by an exposition of works of Paul Gauguin and his friends at the Cafe Volponi, on the edge of the Paris Universal Exposition, that year
1890 - 1920

Marvin Minsky photo
Edgar Degas photo

“Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread…… Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebooks; Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, nos 30 & 34 circa 1877; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 182
quotes, undated

Goran Višnjić photo
John Muir photo
Walter Besant photo
Nicole Krauss photo

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan photo
Eric Cantona photo

“I feel close to the rebelliousness and vigour of the youth here. Perhaps time will separate us, but nobody can deny that here, behind the windows of Manchester, there is an insane love of football, of celebration and of music.”

Eric Cantona (1966) French actor and association football player

Eric Cantona Manchester Quote T-Shirt, TShirtsUnited, 2010-01-06 http://www.tshirtsunited.com/catalogue/tshirts/explayers/eric-cantona-manchester.html,

Lucy Larcom photo

“Oh, her heart’s adrift with one
On an endless voyage gone!
Night and morning
Hannah’s at the window binding shoes.”

Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) American teacher, poet, author

"Hannah Binding Shoes".
Poems (1869)

Claude Lévi-Strauss photo

“A day will come when the idea that for the sake of food the people of the past raised and massacred living beings and with complete equanimity displayed their flesh in bits and pieces in shop windows, will no doubt inspire the same revulsion that the cannibalistic meals of the Americans, Oceanians, or Africans inspired in the travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

"La leçon de sagesse des vaches folles" [The wise lesson of mad cows], in Études rurales (2001); as quoted in Matthieu Ricard, A Plea for the Animals, trans. Sherab Chödzin Kohn, Shambhala Publications, 2016, p. 68 https://books.google.it/books?id=bTLuDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA68

Ted Kennedy photo

“From the windows of my office in Boston … I can see the Golden Stairs from Boston Harbor where all eight of my great-grandparents set foot on this great land for the first time. That immigrant spirit of limitless possibility animates America even today.”

Ted Kennedy (1932–2009) United States Senator

Attributed to a 2007 Senate speech by Kathy Kiely, "Kennedy 'fashioned the modern day legal system of immigration' " http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20090826/NEWS01/908260380/Kennedy++fashioned+the+modern+day+legal+system+of+immigration+, USA Today, 26 August 2009
Attributed

Chuck Berry photo

“As enviable and unreachable as a face in a train window.”

Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) English-American novelist and essayist

"James Thurber: Men, Women, and Dogs," p. 228
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

John Donne photo
Ted Hughes photo

“Wee Willie Winkie rins through the town,
Up stairs and doon stairs in his nicht-gown,
Tirling at the window, crying at the lock,
"Are the weans in their bed, for it's now ten o'clock?"”

"Wee Willie Winkie" (1841). The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 2nd ed. 1997, page 511. ISBN 0-19-860088-7.

Henry Adams photo
Tom Waits photo

“(When asked for advice for younger musicians) "Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold."”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

<i>Musician</i> magazine, October 1987.

Charles Lamb photo
Joseph Conrad photo

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

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

Michael Swanwick photo

“Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.”

Jean Kerr (1922–2003) Irish-American author and playwright

"The Ten Worst Things about a Man"
The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)

Paul Simon photo

“A winter's day
In a deep and dark
December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

I Am a Rock
Song lyrics, Sounds of Silence (1966)

“We cannot keep thieves from looking in at our windows, but we need not give them entertainment with open doors.”

Thomas Adam (1701–1784) clergyman, religious writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 582.

John Milton photo
Mickey Spillane photo

“Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn't notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.
There were others like me, sharing the dark and the solitude, but they were huddled in the recessions of the doorways not wanting to share the wet and the cold. I could feel their eyes follow me briefly before they turned inward to their thoughts again.
So I followed the hard concrete footpaths of the city through the towering canyons of the buildings and never noticed when the sheer cliffs of brick and masonry diminished and disappeared altogether, and the footpath led into a ramp then on to the spidery steel skeleton that was the bridge linking two states.
I climbed to the hump in the middle and stood there leaning on the handrail with a butt in my fingers, watching the red and green lights of the boats in the river below. They winked at me and called in low, throaty notes before disappearing into the night.
Like eyes and faces. And voices.
I buried my face in my hands until everything straightened itself out again, wondering what the judge would say if he could see me now. Maybe he'd laugh because I was supposed to be so damn tough, and here I was with hands that wouldn't stand still and an empty feeling inside my chest.”

One Lonely Night (1951)

John Sloan photo

“[choosing his scenes by:].. night vigils at the back window.”

John Sloan (1871–1951) American painter

The Gist of Art Joan Sloan, New York: Artist Group, 1939, p. 220
The Gist of Art (1939)

John Dos Passos photo
R. A. Salvatore photo
Octavio Paz photo
Whittaker Chambers photo
Brad Paisley photo