Quotessence
Home / Topics / Glass Quotes

Glass Quotes

Browse 74 quotes about Glass.

Glass Quotes

“Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?” The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun.”

“Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.”

“People are like glass. Some you can see straight through; others shine bright lights and iridescent colours everywhere they go. Some you look at and see parts of yourself reflected, and you look into some and see nothing but darkness. Some people magnify so that everything around them seems bigger anc more beautiful, while others can make even the largest things seem infinitely smaller. People can be cracked or chipped, fragile or scratched, and still stay in one piece: even more precious and loved for all of their broken parts. But sometimes ... people shatter.”

“I think this is one bad side of a mirror; it helps us to see the reflection of the effects of our own actions on ourselves. We smile and it smiles back to us, we frown and it frowns to us. How I wish it shows us the reflections of the effects of our actions on other people as well so that we will be conscious!”

“When you look through a window you gasp at the beautiful tree in the backyard or the magical sunrise coming over the horizon, No one looks at a window and is taken away by the complexity of the transparency of millions of atoms joined together to form, from our perception of a crystal clear yet structural opening to the exterior, the same is with life, if you spend your whole life being a medium to enable others then you will be nothing but a sheet of glass, overused, underappreciated, and fragile to opportunity”

“On my bedside table is a snow globe with a winterscape inside. Church, park bench, girl standing shin-deep in snow. Tip the snow globe over and a blizzard of slow snow falls over church and bench and girl. What is it about snow globes that makes them fascinating and terrifying at once? My heart lurches at the thought of the snow-globe girl waiting endlessly, with only the hope of a new snow blizzard to settle on her mantle when the next person tips her snow-globe world over. Not a gust of breeze may ruffle her skirt, not a bird may perch atop the steeple. The only way out of a snow globe is by shattering the glass dome that is its sky.”

“We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.”

“Fireworks made of glass. An explosion of dew. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Silence. There are drugs that work the same, and while I am not suggesting that our founder purchased the glassworks to get more drops, it is clear that she had the seed planted, not once, but twice, and knew already the lovely contradictory nature of glass and she did not have to be told, on the day she saw the works at Darling Harbour, that glass is a thing in disguise, an actor, is not solid at all, but a liquid, that an old sheet of glass will not only take on a royal and purplish tinge but will reveal its true liquid nature by having grown fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, and that even while it is as frail as the ice on a Parramatta puddle, it is stronger under compression than Sydney sandstone, that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from.”

“I felt the stupidity rising in my throat and bit down harder, staring at his collarbone and the small piece of blue sea glass he wore on a leather cord around his neck, rising and falling. Rising. Falling. Seconds? Hours? I didn’t know. He’d made the necklace the year before from a triangular piece of glass he’d found during their family vacation to Zanzibar Bay, right behind the California beach house they rented for three weeks every summer. According to Matt, red glass was the rarest, followed by purple, then dark blue. To date he’d found only one red piece, which he’d made into a bracelet for Frankie a few months earlier. She never took it off. I loved all the colors – dark greens, baby blues, aquas, and whites. Frankie and Matt brought them back for me in mason jars every summer. They lived silently on my bookshelf, like frozen pieces of the ocean I had never seen. “Come here,” he whispered, his hand still stuck in my wild curls, blond hair winding around his fingers. “I still can’t believe you made that,” I said, not for the first time. “It’s so – cool.” Matt looked down at the glass, his hair falling in front of his eyes. “Maybe I’ll give it to you,” he said. “If you’re lucky.”

“The snow grew deeper as we laboured down the hill. The land was a flat white pall, spread out like rumpled wool. Into the distance stretched the solid sea, sullen and murky beneath the ice. The sea will trick a man, seeming frozen and steadfast on the surface, but under the white crust, the black water gulps greedily at the breathing world above. In time, I knew, despite everything that had happened, the sun would rise and the light would glitter off the ice, like shards of glass. The world would glow.”

“Oval Window, 1953 - 1957 In 1953 came the first major changes in Beetle styling. Rear view was increasingly a problem and so the boys in Wolfsburg cut out the centre post and made the split into an oval. Some callous butchers are known to have manually cut the center post of the split rear window out either to improve rear visibility or to make their cars look newer! This window stayed in vogue until 1958 with the first small square rear window model. Note that the rear bonnet was the same as the Split, except for minor changes such as handle and ‘popes nose’ designs. Taillights are larger and also oval shaped. Outer lens is GLASS, not plastic and has a distinctive honeycomb pattern. These Bugs also came with pop-up (semaphore) indicators in the b-pillars.”

“Symbolically meaningful (and symbolically insignificant), glass intensifies all the contradictions at play in contemporary furniture: the inability of people to determine their own condition and destiny (Baudrillard, 2005: 42). By promising proximity, intimacy and transition (while at the same time promoting distance, detachment and immobility), glass reproduces in the microcosm of the domestic ambience the inequalities at work within the macrocosm of contemporary society. The happy ending embedded in its discourse is thus retracted by its ‘see- but- don’t- touch’ aesthetic quality.”

“It's going to be fun," Terlu said. He snorted, but then he smiled and held out the half-finished icing rose. "Taste?" "You're supposed to be making them for the feast. I can't---" He popped it in her mouth. It melted and flavor burst from it. She'd expected pure sugar, but what she tasted was strawberries and vanilla--- it was a bite of spring. "Oh! How did you do that?" "Each color rose is going to have a different flavor." "You're brilliant." He blushed. "I'm glad you like it. I'm going to put them all over the sugar glass, to symbolize the cracks that the plants healed." "Sounds beautiful.”