Weekend Words: Ruin
"A man is a god in ruins."
“Chris Christie is now ruined” reads the headline in the Washington Post: “He has gone from someone admired for his political talent to the object of derision as an errand boy for someone who espouses fascistic ideas (e.g., punishing the press) and openly displays his bigotry (e.g., retweeting a Mussolini quote).”
A man is a god in ruins.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
—George Orwell
With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,
Confusion worse confounded.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.
—Virginia Woolf
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.
—W. H. Auden
There’s a fascination frantic
In a ruin that’s romantic;
Do you think you are sufficiently decayed?
—W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado
Our generation, like the one before us, must choose. Without the threat of the Cold War, without the pain of economic ruin, without the fresh memory of World War II’s slaughter, it is tempting to pursue our private agendas — to simply sit back and let history unfold. We must resist the temptation.
—William Jefferson Clinton
You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.
—Ernest Hemingway
A kiss may ruin a human life.
—Oscar Wilde
Babylon in all its desolation is a slight not so awful as that of a human mind in ruins.
—Scrope Davies, letter to Thomas Raikes, 1835
We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.
—Alfred Jarry
