Cathedral Quotes

“Love is hope and expectation. If many want to pencil it in, some don’t dare to ink it in, because love also means mystery and enigma. ( " Love as dizzy as a cathedral")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“By squirming out of our dungeon of indifference and wriggling from ourself-centered vault of unawareness, love can conjure up an aura of mental opulence and an inkling of infinity.( "Love as dizzy as a cathedral”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Love can be a natural endowment, a present, or a gift. If it is not just a donation, it can be a divine talent. Since love is a silver bullet, it can make the unimaginable possible through the power of its inspiration. ("Love as dizzy as a cathedral")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“My heart is a cathedral. Widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me.”
― Segovia Amil

“We don’t find God
in temples and cathedrals.
We don’t find Him
by standing on a
prayer rug or sitting in a pew.
God appears when we
love someone other than ourselves.
And we continue to feel His presence
when we do good for others.
Because God is not found
in mosques and synagogues.
He resides in our
hearts.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Lisbon, to me,
is the Lisbon of Pessoa.
Just like London is Woolf’s,
or rather, Mrs. Dalloway’s.
Barcelona is Gaudí's
and Rome is da Vinci’s.
You see them in every crevice
and hear their echoes
in every cathedral.
I’d like to be the child,
or rather, the mother of a city
but I neither have a home
nor a resting place.
My race is humankind.
My religion is kindness.
My work is love
and, well, my city
is the walls of your heart.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“How did you jump off the cathedral roof and not die?" - Clary Fray”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“What's that sound?" Fran said.
Then something as big as a vulture flapped heavily down from one of the trees and landed just in front of the car.It shook itself.It turned its long neck toward the car, raised its head, and regarded us.

"Goddamn it," I said.I sat there with my hands on the wheel and stared at the thing.
"Can you believe it?" Fran said."I never saw a real one before."

We both knew it was a peacock, sure,but we didn't say the word out loud.We just watched it.The bird turned its head up in the air and made this harsh cry again.It had fluffed itself out and looked about twice the size it'd been when it landed.

"Goddamn," I said again. We stayed where we were in the front seat.
The bird moved forward a little.Then it turned its head to the side and braced itself.It kept its bright, wild eye right on us.Its tail was raised, and it was like a big fan folding in and out.
There was every color in the rainbow shining from that tail.

"My God," Fran said quietly.She moved her hand over to my knee.
"Goddamn," I said. There was nothing else to say.

The bird made this strange wailing sound once more. "May- awe, may-awe!" it went.If it'd been something I was hearing late at night and for the first time, I'd have thought it was somebody dying, or else something wild and dangerous.”
― Raymond Carver

“The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air as if there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells, when they sounded told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their own age, and my pretty Dora's youth; and of the many, never old, who had lived and loved and died, while the reverberations of the bells had hummed through the rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up within, and, motes upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in air, as circles do in water.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“Picture books build readers, Mr. Leon. Two missing books from our collection is like two missing bricks from a cathedral.”
― Kristin O'Donnell Tubb, The Story Collector

“Aquella noche fue por primera vez a la ópera; con gran sorpresa descubrió que cantaban en italiano y, como no entendía una sola palabra, supuso que toda la representación era una especie de servicio religioso. Deambuló a altas horas de la noche hasta los iluminados chapiteles de San Esteban; la torre sur de la catedral, leyó en una placa, se había iniciado a mediados del siglo XIV y concluido en 1439. Viena, pensó Garp, era un cadáver; posiblemente toda Europa era un cadáver ataviado en un ataúd abierto.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“I find sanctuaries when looking up and when looking down. A humble ochre leaf swimming in a puddle elicits as much awe from me as a soaring cathedral. One was built to evoke reverence; the other is quiet and humble, yet to me, both are achingly beautiful. In them, I see the divine light of warmth and love. I feel lifted, comforted. I appreciate their presence in my life, reminders that I am home everywhere I go.”
― Amy Masterman, Sacred Sensual Living: 40 Words for Praying with All Your Senses

“And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations.

Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.

Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

“The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath of life to circulate throughout the entire cathedral. It seemed as though there escaped from him, at least according to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-Dame, and made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them believe that they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries and the fronts in motion. And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it waited on his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and filled with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit. One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all points of the structure. Now one perceived with affright at the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing, writhing, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the abyss, leaping from projection to projection, and going to ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo dislodging the crows. Again, in some obscure corner of the church one came in contact with a sort of living chimera, crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought. Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths were opened, here and there; one heard the dogs, the monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day, with outstretched neck and open jaws, around the monstrous cathedral, barking. And, if it was a Christmas Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit the death rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an air was spread over the sombre façade that one would have declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and that the rose window was watching it. And all this came from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken him for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its demon: he was in fact its soul.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

“The shape of remembrance etched
in the body's exertion, first leaf,
then foliage. Even the cathedral
with an empty backyard at night
clad in gossamer light from the moon.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Her steps took her deeper inside the cathedral. Everything was shockingly white. White carpets, white candles, white prayer pews of white oak, white aspen, and flaky white birch.

Evangeline passed row after row of mismatched white benches. They might have been handsome once, but now many had missing legs, while others had mutilated cushions or benches that had been broken in half.

Broken.

Broken.

Broken.”
― Stephanie Garber, Once Upon a Broken Heart

“There were times I'd see [my brother] looking at me and I would leave the room crying. I knew that I'd never be loved like that again. I just thought that we would always be together. I know you think I should have seen that as more aberrant than I did, but my life is not like yours. My hour. My day. I used to dream about our first time together. I do yet. I wanted to be revered. I wanted to be entered like a cathedral.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“My mind rests in
Cathedrals, Palaces, Castles,
Temples, Chateaus &
Graveyards of Undead Ideas -”
― Isbelle Razors

“It makes you feel sort of cheap and titchy. Like it's looking down at you, saying, I'm Canterbury Cathedral, who the hell are you?

Last Orders”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders

“The structure echoed the greatest cathedrals of Earth and Mars, rising up through empty air and giving both thrust-gravity stability and glory to God.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“It was spring and they stood on the banks of the small river that ran beside the ruins of the old cathedral at Dyemore Abbey. The stone arch rose into a clear, blue sky and below, the scattered stones that had once made up the cathedral were carpeted with yellow. Hundreds of thousands of daffodils, wild in this part of England, had taken over the old ruins and made a home for themselves. The view was gorgeous. The daffodils rolled in a yellow-dotted wave right up to the stream itself and splashed over onto the opposite bank, disappearing into the little wood there.”
― Elizabeth Hoyt, Duke of Desire

“When we look at a perfect cathedral, two different emotions emerge in us: On the one hand, the feeling of admiration for the architect and the workers who built this cathedral; on the other hand, the feeling of great anger for those who spent so much money on this cathedral, instead of spending this money for the hungry people who can't even find bread!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Sterling Memorial, the main library at Yale, had been built to resemble a Gothic cathedral, replete with stained glass, carved stonework, and a crenellated tower. Completed in 1930, the structure was "as near to modern Gothic as we dared" according to its architect, James Gamble Rogers. The use of the word "dare" always intrigued me. It suggested boundaries and infractions. There was, as I had come to expect at Yale, a scandalous story attached to the library's design. The benefactress, an old woman with failing eyesight, wanted a place of worship, and Yale wanted a library. Flouting its own motto, Lux et Veritas, Yale presented her with a structural trompe l'oeil. A cathedral in its outlines, but in its details a pantheon to books, where King Lear was a demigod and Huckleberry Finn a mischievous angel. The visual world had already become a greasy smudge to the benefactress, so the old biddy died never knowing the difference.
Light and Truth, indeed.”
― Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth

“And we stand there.
Singing the cathedral down.”
― Kate O'Donnell, This One is Ours

“May the road rise up to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
The rains fall soft upon your fields
And until we meet again
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.”
― James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral

“Mislim da smo završili", rekao je. "Mislim da si je uhvatio. Pogledaj. Šta misliš?"
Ali nisam otvorio oči. Hteo sam da ih još malo držim zatvorene. Činilo mi se da tako treba da postupim.
"Onda?", rekao je, "Da li gledaš?"
Oči su mi i dalje bile sklopljene. Bio sam u svojoj kući. Znao sam. Ali, nisam se osećao kao da sam negde unutra."
"To je stvarno nešto", rekoh.”
― Rejmond Karver

“But now I wanted nothing more than to be the girl so free that fireflies shined as her night-lights, cicadas sang her symphonies, and the forest stood as her cathedral.”
― Meagan Church, The Last Carolina Girl