Famous Quotes & Sayings

Vincent Van Gogh

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

Virginia Woolf

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

Virginia Woolf

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall ...

Virginia Woolf

...she felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream...

Virginia Woolf

With my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is forever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest.

Virginia Woolf

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

William Blake

I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate Built in Jerusalem's wall.

Wentworth Miller

When I got to college, acting suddenly seemed like a very risky proposition and all my friends were going to law school or med school or Wall Street.

Werner Herzog

Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can't really be stopped.

Werner Herzog

The paintings are not just on flat walls - you have these enormous niches, bulges and protrusions, as well as stalactites and stalagmites. The effect of the three-dimensionality is phenomenal. It's a real drama which the artists of the time understood, and they used it for the drama of their paintings.

Walid Jumblatt

The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

Walid Jumblatt

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

Walid Jumblatt

I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting . . . it was the start of a new Arab world.. The Berlin Wall has fallen.

Samuel Beckett

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

Samuel Butler

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

Salman Rushdie

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.

Wesley Snipes

I actually take images of things and put them up around the wall and in a room. I set a room aside. It might be colors, it might be animals, or energy and words. And I'll just leave it there, so it begins to work on my subconscious when I think about the character. Which gives me some latitude to be really flexible and spontaneous but within the context of the character and the world of the character without having to think about it. Or I'll look at something or read something and let it work on my subconscious mind.

Wanda Sykes

These CEOs, man ... If you're that ruthless, you're a scary dude. I tell you, now when I walk past a little gang banger, I don't even blink. But if I see a white dude with a Wall Street Journal, I haul ass. Before I walk past the Arthur Andersen building, I cut through the projects. If you cut through the projects, you may just lose what you have on you that day. I ain't never been mugged of my whole future.

W. G. Sebald

I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind...

Virginia Euwer Wolff

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

W. H. Auden

All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

William D. Cohan

Having worked at four separate Wall Street firms, having seen a variety of talent at those places, and having competed against Goldman as a banker, one thing you have to be struck by is the power of their recruiting.

Wayne LaPierre

How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame — from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave — while provoking others to try to make their mark? A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?

Tracee Ellis Ross

Throughout high school, I was obsessed with magazines. I used to just comb through them and plaster things on my wall.

Upton Sinclair

Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there .

Ursula K. Le Guin

Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

Ursula K. Le Guin

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!

Tyra Banks

I don't go to the cool, trendy restaurants. I go to either the holes in the wall or the super-fancy restaurants where there are no cool people.

Twyla Tharp

I've always had to keep the walls in place, and the only way to do that is to keep yourself constantly occupied. From the time I was 8 years old, until I went to college, I worked. There was no social life.

William Glasser

We may be up against a stone wall, but we don't have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to.