256 Quotes About Ruins

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

Shame on those who remain unmoved, whose pace fails to quicken, on entering one of these old habitations, a manor-house falling to wrack and ruin or a desecrated church!

There is, I find, something very evocative about ruins - particularly recent ones. (introduction to "Calico Black, Calico Blue")

Ruins are more beautiful than adorned castles, for ruins are the cathedrals of time.

No matter how angry she was at him, she'd never deprive him of the change to see one of the ruins he'd spent his whole life dreaming about.

Out along the dim six-o’clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so’s not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box.

I’m reading all these books about ordinary people who saved kingdoms wishing I was them while my kingdom lies in ruins

Let's head out to the ruins." - Dan Cahill