Porcelain Quotes

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. (John Adams)

I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.

David Levithan

Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. "Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

Laurie Halse Anderson

You can talk about movies all you want, but I have this porcelain fetish. I've had it since I was a kid, because there were so many kids in my family, the only place I had any solace was in the bathroom.

Linda Fiorentino

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

John Quincy Adams

I have never seen the Old Testament prophets, but at the sight of that man floored by divine anger, widely straddling his enormous porcelain urinal and shielded by the tornado of his arms, a cloud of desperate contortions, above which his voice rose still higher, alien and hard-I came to understand the divine anger of holy men.

Bruno Schulz

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

Arundhati Roy

This is the porcelain clay of humankind.

John Dryden

Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom [...] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist-a red as brilliant as fresh paint.

Paul Auster

For us the Dresden Dolls were porcelain dolls that were made in that city at the time, that is what they were to us, and also a reference in Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, and in a song by The Fall.

Brian Viglione

If you ask someone whether our Constitutional rights are being flushed down the porcelain oubliette, and their response is, "If I answer that honestly they'll arrest me," then you already have your answer. (Robert X. Cringely)

He could leap the corral, If he rose To his full height; He could splinter the fencing light, With three blows Of his porcelain hoofs in flight - If he chose. He could shatter his prison wall, Could escape them all - If he rose, If he chose.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

See, I went to an all-gay high school. Art and Design. Now the truth is it wasn't really all gay, but they bused them in, it was the law. [...] So I went to this high school, I had friends like Pablo. Pablo used to breast-feed a porcelain doll during math. You know. My friend Lauren used to roll cigarettes on her boots.

Harvey Fierstein

There are tons of things in your home and life that you don't use, need, or even particularly want. They just came into your life as impulsive flotsam and jetsam and never found a good exit. Whether you're aware of it or not, this clutter creates indecision and distractions, consuming attention and making unfettered happiness a real chore. It is impossible to realize how distracting all the crap is - whether porcelain dolls, sports cars, or ragged T-shirts - until you get rid of it.

Timothy Ferriss

Adherents of formal logic may be compared to a maker of porcelain dishes who would contend that he was simply paying attention to the form of his dishes, pots, and vases, but that he did not have anything to do with the raw material.

Joseph Dietzgen

The mountain reminds one of an upturned earthenware bowl, the glazing a little bluish at times, but sometimes like gold-rimmed transparent Chinese porcelain, especially if the sun is low in the west over the sea, because then the rays play on the glacier in two directions.

Halldór Laxness

The Chinese early learned to work in metals; bronze occurs in the 11th-10th centuries B. C., useful iron from about 500 B. C. At a later period they made brass... True porcelain was first made about A. D. 600. They were probably in possession of mercury at an early date, and learnt how to decompose cinnabar into mercury and sulphur, and recompose it from these materials.

J. R. Partington

For people like me, books are something solid and real, whereas digital stuff is a bit more ethereal. I like the trophy on my shelf, the presence in my home. A nice book is just as valuable as a decoration as a beautiful porcelain urn - and, let's face it, a hell of a lot more useful.

John Romaniello

We're not handling things anymore before they arrive on our doorstep. I like to feel how thin porcelain can be, run my hand over a textile, see if I want to sit in a chair.

Nate Berkus

I got out of the bathroom of course. I locked the front door and pushed the big wardrobe up against the bathroom door. I thought it'd be good to be careful. A little too late, maybe. I'm not leaving my apartment. I'm not gonna give it away. No. There's no reason I should. The noise from the bathroom was the shattering of my porcelain toilet bowl. They're in the bathroom. A lot. There's a lot of them. A bunch of sniffling snouts. A bunch of rats. They're already chewing the wardrobe. I'm standing in my room, listening to their swarming. Thousands of rats, in my apartment. All of them gnawing. I wait. Wait for them to get in. They'll be in here soon. It won't be long. They're coming. Rats. My rats. I'm waiting. What else can I do?

András Petöcz

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady. (Ezra Pound)

There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.

Elizabeth Gilbert

At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain. I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea, with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with sonorous gongs.

Alan Watts