Brick And Mortar Quotes

There's something about a place you've been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone... they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.

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.

I suddenly understood that even love and caring weren't always enough. They were the concrete bricks of our relationship, but unstable without the mortar of time spent together, time without the threat of imminent separation hanging over us.

Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize. Your words are the greatest power you have. The words you choose and their use establish the life you experience.

We'll always need printed books that don't mutate the way digital books do; we'll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we'll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.

It was a mistake to think of houses, old houses, as being empty. They were filled with memories, with the faded echoes of voices. Drops of tears, drops of blood, the ring of laughter, the edge of tempers that had ebbed and flowed between the walls, into the walls, over the years. Wasn't it, after all, a kind of life? And there were houses, he knew it, that breathed. They carried in their wood and stone, their brick and mortar a kind of ego that was nearly, very nearly, human.

The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble.

Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone.

There's nothing like a printed book; the weight, the woody scent, the feel, the look.

Hope. A strange word. In her past, it had been a light, wispy thing. Crushed as easily as a finger under a guard's boot. But now...now hope weighed so much, as if the Colosseum itself had collapsed on top of her. Mortar and suffering. Brick and time.

Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up. Brick and mortar, elevated train tracks, and miles of underground pipe, this city lived; day and night it thrived.

I would ask what it is you think you're doing, but... you are a teenager. I should have known better than to leave you in the car unattended. Next time, I'll seal you in there...probably with bricks. Maybe even mortar." Nick ignored his dry tone. "Just so long as you make sure nothing can get inside to kill me, I'm good with that." Ash frowned. "What are you talking about?" "The kid dead on the ground. Fourteen, Ash. Fourteen. I'm fourteen." "Yeah..." "Ash, I'm fourteen" "Got it. You're fourteen. I'm so proud you can count that high. It's a testament to the modern American educational system. But I should probably point out that you're no the only one. I'm told you go to a school with a whole class of -get this- kids who are fourteen." Nick rolled his eyes at the sarcasm. No wonder his mom wanted to hurt him for it. He finally understood. "Yeah, but they're not dead. Someone's killing fourteen-year-old boys, which I happen to be one. The cops said so. This is the second one in a day who's been murdered." "Yeah well given the lippiness of the average teenager, I can understand the urge" "You're not funny." "And you need to calm down. The only person you need to fear killing you when I'm around is me.

When love dries in a marriage, the children become mortar for the bricks. When the children leave, the bricks just sit atop each other. When the children die, the bricks tumble.

A library is more than a brick and mortar building filled with delicious books. It is also a community of people who live to invest in our youth, who read for knowledge and fun, and who are ready to include anyone who walks through the door.

The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.

A home is not a building or a street or a city or something so artificial as bricks and mortar. A home is where one's family is...

A cupcake temple?' Her chest still tight with anxiety, Bertie forced herself to imagine it: bricks of pound cake mortared with buttercream and chocolate ganache, torches like striped birthday candles set into the walls, pilgrims upon the Path of Delectable Righteousness delivering daily tributes of almond paste and raspberry filling. . . .

We say a building is made of brick, but it's the mortar, filling in the cracks, that holds it all together. That provides the strength." -Aphrodite

Your website is the center of your digital eco-system, like a brick and mortar location, the experience matters once a customer enters, just as much as the perception they have of you before they walk through the door.

The bad news is most of my books are ebooks and aren't for sale in brick-and-mortar bookstores. The good news is that most of my books are ebooks and are perfect for emailing and I'm perfectly willing to give them away for free. 


There’s something about a place you’ve been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a place. It becomes a distillation of what you felt for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone . . . they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.

The city was a real city, shifty and sexual. I was lightly jostled by small herds of flushed young sailors looking for action on Forty-Second Street, with it rows of x-rated movie houses, brassy women, glittering souvenir shops, and hot-dog vendors. I wandered through Kino parlors and peered through the windows of the magnificent sprawling Grant’s Raw Bar filled with men in black coats scooping up piles of fresh oysters. The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem like mere corporate shells. They were monuments to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America. The character of each quadrant was invigorating and one felt the flux of its history. The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects. I walked for hours from park to park. In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself … This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem oppressive to anyone.

The church is not a brick-and-mortar structure. The church is made of flesh & blood. Followers of #Christ are the church.

It's sad, but the world's made of sadness. if you hadn't noticed, great gray bricks of it and mortared all together with pain and obligation.

You are the master builder; you are the architect and the designer of your life. Your thoughts are the brick and mortar with which you erect the frame that literally molds your body, your circumstances, and ultimately your entire life. Thoughts

Libraries, museums, universities, everything we designed and built over six thousand years. Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

Even with all Caroline had lost and forgotten, she knew a lot about archaeology and past civilizations. I often wondered if knowing all those things, only saddened her that she couldn’t remember the rest. Though she had made peace with her life, it wasn’t the first time I’d pondered whether deep down she might need a sense of normalcy that having a brick and mortar home would give her.

I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made up of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.

Amazon has opened a brick-and-mortar store in the mall across the street from us. People want to know how well we are doing. I’ll tell you how well we’re doing: they’ve come to kill us. But we’ll survive.

Hospitals were to her a memento mori in bricks and mortar; an awful reminder of the inevitable end that was coming to all of us but which she felt was best ignored while one got on with the business of life.

On his youth, Yoshiro had prided himself of always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. Confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar fora structure called «individuality».

Sleeping in the same bed with someone to whom you can admit your failings is a lasting comfort indeed. This is not about "mea culpa" as surrender, it is about "mea culpa" as mortar in binding together the uneven bricks of a human foundation.

The well from which we draw our love to give to other people, should never be only as deep as the well wherein resides the love we have already received in our lives. The cycle must be broken. The former well must be abandoned and we must create a love in our hearts for others, from the bricks and the mortar of our own visions. Our raw materials must come not only from what we received; but our raw materials must come from what we envision to create. From your desires and your visions— your bricks and mortar should materialize. And if your former well is completely empty and dry— so what— you don't owe it to your past, to the people who hurt you, to make that emptiness and that void, your place for drawing water from!

Although home still represents stability in an unstable world, we're beginning to see that home can be how we live, a situation that we create and recreate. Home is less attached to bricks and mortar and more about the lives we lead, the ways that we connect with each other, the communities we build. Home is a state of mind, something we make for ourselves wherever we can. Hygge is the home we make in the flux and flow of our lives.

Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime, With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats; And men are whithered before their prime By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets. And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine; And death stalks in on the struggling crowd— But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

Old friends are the bricks and mortar of your life.

The bricks used to construct this story are facts, and they are held together in these pages with a mortar of fiction.

Home is not four walls of brick and mortar, Home is an emotion, Home is hope ~ Home, Select Poetry Collection

One does not require brick and mortar to build one's sanctum ....... one may simply require repose

The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects.

Vivian’s first impression of Solidago was that she had travelled back in time, but not to a time where architecture had been invented. All houses were twisted out of shape, to say the least. Windows either too large to open or too small to make a difference peppered the city in places one would never dream of having one. The walls were mostly cast in brickwork by the kind of stonemason whose day job was financial advising. Skewed walls with more bricks than mortar, knotted chimneys keeping the smoke inside and cupping rooftops whose main purpose was to gather rainwater – Solidago had it all and more. As the oldest civilization of the cosmos, Alarians might have been excellent at healing, philosophizing and weaving into the fabric of reality, but they were very poor city builders.

I would not find my answers in this church, or any church, I decided. I believed in God and I believed God held the answers, but after my talk with the pastor I also believed God was so much bigger and more powerful than this little brick-and-mortar church. The answers were out there, somewhere else.

We read, indeed, that the walls of Jericho fell down before the sound of trumpets,39 but we nowhere hear that those trumpets were hoarse and feeble. Doubtless they were trumpets that gave forth clear ringing tones, and sent a mighty vibration through brick and mortar. But the oratory of the Rev. Amos resembled rather a Belgian railway-horn, which shows praiseworthy intentions inadequately fulfilled.

The civilization of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar. These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of "divide and rule" in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built, and everything has to fight hard for its entrance into our recognition.

Your home, including it's location, is an inanimate physical construct. Despite this fact, this brick and mortar affects the outcome of your life more than any other physical object you will ever encounter.

To reduce a library to simple architecture, bricks and mortar is a mistake. Similarly, to suggest a library is defined by the books on the shelf is erroneous. Libraries are very special spaces, spaces where people come together in separate but joint pursuits of knowledge, of learning. Libraries are the heartbeats of communities.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.

But it is to the school that Tagore devotes central emphasis in The Religion of Man.14 He begins by expressing his lifelong dissatisfaction with the schools he attended: “The inexpensive power to be happy, which, along with other children, I brought to this world, was being constantly worn away by friction with the brick-and-mortar arrangement of life, by monotonously mechanical habits and the customary code of respectability” (144). In effect, children begin as madcap Bauls, full of love, longing, and joy in the presence of nature. Their love of play and their questioning spirit need to be strengthened, not crushed. But schools usually crush all that is disorderly,

Canis latrans,” Wolfenson finally remarked. Fincher furrowed his brow. “Latin for... barking dog?” “Yes, the coyote. They have a gift of making the howls of a few sound like the howls of the many.” He looked toward the roadblock of brick and mortar. “I believe that’s why the Landlord chose them as his messengers.

Rationality is the brick and mortar that creates a firm foundation of trust. It keeps things real, reflects only honesty, and helps you determine who people actually are, and what they really want. Emotion builds a foundation of sand, ever-shifting as moods change, creating sinkholes of confusion, doubt, and dishonesty.

Glazed brick, white mortar, and blue roof-tiles do not make a house beautiful; carved rosewood, gold cloth, and clear green jade do not furnish a house with grace; a man of cultivated mind makes a house of mud and wattle beautiful; a woman, even with a pock-marked face; if refined of heart, fills a house with grace. -House of Exile

My childhood had been vanishing bit by bit while I’d been living in New York, trying to pretend it had never existed. Maybe that was what the old saying – that a person can never really go home again – was all about. You couldn’t go home because even though home might still be there in brick and mortar, everything else would be unrecognizable.

Image the whole, then execute the parts— Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz Ere mortar dab brick!

Shop where you stay, shop where you see smile, shop such so they sustain.

said. ‘A home is not a building or a street or a city or something so artificial as bricks and mortar. A home is where one’s family is, isn’t that

A brick could be used to save humanity from mortality. Or at least save us from mortar. 


A brick represents my rationality, and a blanket represents my emotions. It’s robot versus mannequin, and to get a sense of who I am as a person, you need some mortar and a pillow.


The key to happiness wasn’t to pretend bruised souls and broken hearts didn’t exist because you couldn’t build something solid on a foundation made of pretense, no matter how well-intended. Instead, own it, embrace it, and grow past it. Build that life brick by brick with mortar made of sweat and tears of both joy and sorrow to act as the glue that holds it all together.

Good preservation is a life preserver thrown to us in a shipwreck. Good preservation keeps us in touch with the graces of this life. It's bricks and mortar, yes. It's arguments about true colors and authenticity and representation. But true preservation is like the hand that shelters a fire from the wind. It protects the spark of life." -- Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax, Twice

My views of what is missionary duty are not so contracted as those whose ideal is a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm,” Livingstone explained. “I have labored in bricks and mortar, at the forge and at the carpenter’s bench, as well as in preaching and medical practice. I feel that I am ‘not my own.’ I am serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men, or taking an astronomical observation.

On the east side of the street, the dark old factories—Civil War factories, foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys pumping smoke for a hundred years—were windowless now, the sunlight sealed out with brick and mortar, their exits and entrances plugged with cinderblock. These were the factories where people had lost fingers and arms and got their feet crushed and their faces scalded, where children once labored in the heat and the cold, the nineteenth-century factories that churned up people and churned out goods and now were unpierceable, airtight tombs. It was Newark that was entombed there, a city that was not going to stir again. The pyramids of Newark: as huge and dark and hideously impermeable as a great dynasty’s burial edifice has every historical right to be.

Even though I haven’t set foot under that roof for decades, I am forever part of its fabric. I’m the mortar that binds the bricks together, the pipes linking each tap, the wooden beams that hold up the roof.

Funny, there was a reason that people “built” lives together. Although the choices you made as husband and wife were not bricks, and time was not mortar, you were still constructing something tangible and real.

Hello Everyone! My name is Dan Brown and in the course of writing my first novel, some other guy, claiming to be me, had the chutzpah to steal my name and publish a book about some code that apparently became quite popular, so much so in fact that copies of it, as well as subsequent novels by the same guy, now accost me every time I visit a brick & mortar or online bookstore these days. Long story short, when I published my first novel (Roll Over, Hitler!) this past month, I decided to use my full name – Daniel Bruce Brown – which would have pleased my parents to no end had they still been alive, but basically makes me unknown to anyone who knows me by Dan Brown, which has to be, I don’t know, at least ten or fifteen people. So, anyway, here I am, hoping to be “discovered” and, in the meantime, hoping to make some new friends among folks who love the written word as much as I do.

The flesh of the body does not make it conscious its the unknown inside that does. The arms of the galaxy do not make it turn around its the unknown that holds it together and spin around. The mind does not create the thought it’s the unknown consciousness that is plugged to myriad’s of portals that does. A thing of beauty is not made of brick and mortar it’s made of an unknown divine spark. The world is essentially that unknown Drop the act and connect to the unknown.

Arabella dangled her legs out of the bedroom window and closed her eyes. She felt a butterfly brush against her knee, rubbed her skin against the mortar and bricks, drank in the warmth of the morning sunshine on her face, her arms, her feet.

But sometimes I do wonder if I'm love-blind the way some people are colour-blind, or most people are ghost-blind. If love (true or false, thick or thin, requited or un-) really is the only glue ever mortars our sad hearts' bricks together, and me not swift enough to recognize the label any time I happened to pass it by. Because: living is transience, after all--people aren't really permanent 'til they're dead, no matter what you might've felt for 'em beforehand. Always changing...

this was the real quicksand. Debt drew you down deeper and deeper, held you firm, so you never, ever got out no matter how hard you tried. Trickle-down economics? Yeah, right. Only thing that trickled down was that debt. Like piss on your head. And it would run down onto Calla, too. Her last year of high school started next week, and then what? College? At this rate, she’d need a full ride or have to take on predatory student loans for the rest of her life. Debt spackled upon debt, upon debt, upon debt: all mortar, no brick.

I have spent most of my adult life in a ghetto among countless other outsiders who have also learned how to talk through the wall. We revel in each other's voices, but the people within the walled city are often offended by the sounds of outsiders that penetrate the sturdy barriers of conformity. They attempt to silence the voices, but occasionally the valiant utterances of outsiders manage to loosen a bit of the mortar, perhaps even dislodge a few bricks, opening the wall to a strong, new light that has never before been seen by those who are safely walled up.

There’s something about a place you’ve been with someone you love. It takes on a meaning in your mind. It becomes more than a places. It becomes a distillation of what you feel for each other. The moments you spend in a place with someone… they become part of its bricks and mortar. Part of its soul.

That summer, in the wilderness of crumbling bricks and mortar, white roses had appeared in those derelict suburbs. Gramps said that if man was mad enough to destroy itself, at least the rats and cockroaches would have front-row seats, be able to enjoy the sight of Mother Nature reclaiming the earth. Outside

Not everyone works to get rich. In fact, most people do not. But almost everyone wishes to be respected. With promotion comes respect. And with delegation comes promotion. If your company is young and a bit rickety, meritocracy, delegation and promotion are the bricks and mortar that will make it stronger. Do

Even though I haven’t set foot under that roof for decades, I am forever part of its fabric. I’m the mortar that binds the bricks together, the pipes linking each tap, the wooden beams that hold up the roof. I have never truly been able to escape it. I am it and it is me. Good or bad, it has made me the person I am today.

But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.

It is as clear to me as sunshine–were there any in the sky–that the greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement, are these heaps of bricks, and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home! The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it.

If you're so miserable,' my daughter said delicately, 'why don't you leave him?' Oh my darling girl, I might have said, what a good question. In her worldview, bad marriages were simply terminated, like unwanted pregnancies. She knew nothing about this subculture of women who stayed, women who couldn't logically explain their allegiances, who held tight because it was the thing they felt most comfortable doing, the thing they actually liked. she didn't understand the luxury of the familiar, the known: the same hump of back poking up under the cover in bed, the hair tufting in the ear. The husband. A figure you never strove toward, never work yourself up over, but simply lived beside season upon season, which started building up like bricks spread thick with sloppy mortar. A marriage wall would rise up between the two of you, a marriage bed, and you would lie in it gratefully.

The members of the board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folk would never have discovered - the poor people like it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all year round; a brick and mortar elysium where it was all play and no work. "Oho!" said the board, looking very knowing; "we are the fellows to set this to rights; we'll stop it all in no time." So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they) of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel per day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctor's Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief under these two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people. For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence to the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel.

Once you have a thought that stays, you can rest your head on it. Then, as you cling to more and more thoughts, you build an inner structure for consciousness to focus on. The more consciousness narrows its focus onto this mental structure, the greater the tendency to utilize it to define the concept of self. Clinging creates the bricks and mortar with which we build a conceptual self. In the midst of vast inner space, using nothing but the vapor of thoughts, you created a structure of apparent solidity to rest upon.

Even though I haven’t set foot under that roof for decades, I am forever part of its fabric. I’m the mortar that binds the bricks together, the pipes linking each tap, the wooden beams that hold up the roof. I have never truly been able to escape it. I am it and it is me. Good or bad, it has made me the person I am today. To some, I’m a saviour, but to others, I’m a monster. I know what my work has been about, all the souls I’ve saved from torment. It’s part of the bargain that I can never share my role with the world.

You will be invited at almost every turn to believe that the coming Information Societies will be very like the industrial society you grew up in. We doubt it. Microprocessing will dissolve the mortar in the bricks. It will so profoundly alter the logic of violence that it will inevitably change the way people organize their livelihoods and defend themselves. Yet the tendency will be to downplay the inevitability of these changes, or to argue about their desirability as if it were within the fiat of industrial institutions to determine how history evolves.

I think you’re a reward for my patience. I’ve never had anyone there for me, not like this. I feel a sort of peace I’ve never had before.” Tears trail down my cheeks. “You changed my luck, Dame. And for the first time in my life, I feel like if I ever need rescuing, I’ll have somebody there to help save me.” Any brick or mortar I have left surrounding my heart disintegrates with his confession. He gives me all his trust, and I take it, and in return, I give him mine. Because he is worth it. “I will, Lucas. If you ever need saving, I’ll be there. I promise.” He presses his forehead to mine. “I’m counting on it.

Consider it this way. The present is a split second, so tiny and trivial as to be immaterial. Everything else, everything real and substantial, is a coral reef of dead split seconds, forming the islands and continents of our reality. Every moment is a brick in the wall of the past, building enormous structures that have identity and meaning, cities we live in. The future is wet shapeless clay, the present is so brief it barely exists, but the past houses and shelters us, gives us a home and a name; and the mortar that binds those bricks, that stops them from sliding apart into a nettle-shrouded ruin, is memory.

After all, family life was the mortar that kept the bricks together; the pitch that made the basket watertight; the chinking that kept out the wind and the weather. It was life itself, without an inch to spare. A person immersed in the realities of family life did not stop to ponder the meaning of life: that person was in life, up to his or her neck and beyond. The family was the beginning, the future, and the past. It protected the weak and the strong. It brought the like-minded together and gave the unalike a common cause. It gave shelter and hope. What more, Polly wondered, could a sensible person possibly want?

One thing that the history of Jerusalem teaches is that nothing is irreversible. Not only have its inhabitants watched their city destroyed time and again, they have also seen it built up in ways that seemed abhorrent. When the Jews heard of the obliteration of their Holy City, first by Hadrian's contractors and then by Constantine's, they must have felt that they would never win their city back. Muslims had to see the desecration of their beloved Haram by the Crusaders, who seemed invincible at the time. All these building projects had been intent on creating facts, but ultimately bricks and mortar were not enough. The Muslims got their city back because the Crusaders became trapped in a dream of hatred and intolerance. In our own day, against all odds, the Jews have returned to Zion and have created their own facts in the settlements around Jerusalem. But, as the long, tragic history of Jerusalem shows, nothing is permanent or guaranteed. The societies that have lasted the longest in the holy city have, generally, been the ones that were prepared for some kind of tolerance and coexistence in the Holy City. That, rather than a sterile and deadly struggle for sovereignty, must be the way to celebrate Jerusalem's sanctity today.

The pole stood against a brick wall which was the windowless side of the neighborhood school. Francie found that no two bricks were alike when she looked real close. It was a soothing rhythm the way they were put together with crumbly thin lines of white mortar. They glowed when the sun shone on them. They smelled warm and porous when Francie pressed her cheek against them. They were the first to receive the rain and they gave off a wet clay odor that was like the smell of life itself. In the winter, when the first snow was too delicate to last on the sidewalks, it clung to the rough surface of the brick and was like fairy lace.

We don't get to move from puppy love straight to the golden years of a decades-old marriage, where every joke and wrinkle is a testament to the enduring strength of your bond. First we have to really learn each other. And, in doing so, we have the opportunity to learn about ourselves in the context of that most wonderful, enriching, confounding entity: a committee relationship. It's not always as dreamy or exhilarating as falling in love. But this stage isn't about champagne and sweet nothings; it's about bricks and mortar. The idea is to build a solid foundation for your love - hopefully one that will serve you for many years to come.

We got out at Sonning, and went for a walk round the village. It is the most fairy-like little nook on the whole river. It is more like a stage village than one built of bricks and mortar. Every house is smothered in roses, and now, in early June, they were bursting forth in clouds of dainty splendour. If you stop at Sonning, put up at the “Bull,” behind the church. It is a veritable picture of an old country inn, with green, square courtyard in front, where, on seats beneath the trees, the old men group of an evening to drink their ale and gossip over village politics; with low, quaint rooms and latticed windows, and awkward stairs and winding passages.

I began a new project: a photo-essay about the Occupy Wall Street movement that was overtaking Manhattan. Inspired, I snapped hundreds of photographs, wanting to document this singular moment in New York’s pulsing body, watching people flooding the sidewalks like human rivers, converging at the green park as one ocean. I took shots of the sharpest signs and strangest masks; the angry bankers in their crisp blue button-downs; the lines of bored-faced cops, slouching with thick arms crossed. And peering through my viewfinder, I learned the skill of noticing more deeply; I felt a thrill—a new civil affinity budding in my dreams and in the brick-and-mortar city, simultaneously: that we, the people, were awakening to the truth that a bundle of twigs is inconceivably strong.

In fact, as these companies offered more and more (simply because they could), they found that demand actually followed supply. The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. Whether it was latent demand for niche goods that was already there or a creation of new demand, we don't yet know. But what we do know is that the companies for which we have the most complete data - netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody - sales of products not offered by their bricks-and-mortar competitors amounted to between a quarter and nearly half of total revenues - and that percentage is rising each year. in other words, the fastest-growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren't available in traditional, physical retail stores at all. These infinite-shelf-space businesses have effectively learned a lesson in new math: A very, very big number (the products in the Tail) multiplied by a relatives small number (the sales of each) is still equal to a very, very big number. And, again, that very, very big number is only getting bigger. What's more, these millions of fringe sales are an efficient, cost-effective business. With no shelf space to pay for - and in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees - a niche product sold is just another sale, with the same (or better) margins as a hit. For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

Olmsted did think about it and began to see the exposition as an opportunity to achieve something for which he had fought long and hard but almost always with disappointing results. Throughout his career he had struggled, with little success, to dispel the perception that landscape architecture was simply an ambitious sort of gardening and to have his field recognized instead as a distinct branch of the fine arts, full sister to painting, sculpture, and brick-and-mortar architecture. Olmsted valued plants, trees, and flowers not for their individual attributes but rather as colors and shapes on a palette. Formal beds offended him. Roses were not roses but “flecks of white or red modifying masses of green.” It irked him that few people seemed to understand the effects he worked so long and hard to create. “I design with a view to a passage of quietly composed, soft, subdued pensive character, shape the ground, screen out discordant elements and get suitable vegetation growing.

Home. After a lifetime of wandering, of seeking and failing, I finally understood the meaning of the word. Home isn’t a place, a structure you create from wood or bricks or mortar, building the walls high and strong, to keep out the storms of life. Home is in the things you carry with you, the treasures of the heart, like Gil’s Bible, or the memories of a family baseball game on a sunny summer day, or the feeling of singing “I’ll Fly Away” in an abandoned church as the storm passes over. It is a dwelling place you share with the people who matter most, a refuge in which you’re never alone. The Builder is always nearby, tearing down old walls and adding new rooms, repairing the damage of wind and weather, filling empty spaces with new gifts. Gifts beautiful and mysterious and unexpected. Like all beautiful gifts, a surprise to everyone but the Giver, who seeks us in our hidden places and beckons us home from our wanderings. Who knows that nothing adrift is meant to stay adrift forever.

The war for love is fought by saying: You’re the one I want, you’re the one I need, you’re the one I’ll fight to keep. Neither of us fought. When you’re cheated on, you build a house around yourself. You build it strong. The walls are made of Never Again. The bricks—all the things you did right, the mortar—your anger. Divorce makes you live in a tall house because you put more effort into your grieving than you ever put into your marriage. That’s what we do as humans, we grieve harder than we ever tried and we build a magnificent fortress of hurt and self-righteous indignation. In front of this fortress is a garden where you grow your shortcomings. It’s a magnificent garden because that’s where you put all of your effort now. A garden of well-tended self-abuse. You water the shit out of your garden and it grows and grows. I grew a variety of things in my garden: bitterness, self-hate, numbness, self-pity, resentment, and defeat. I tended that garden with such detail, trimming and nurturing my personal hell until I couldn’t find my way out. And let me tell you, it’s a full-time job to hate yourself that much.

Because so many people were betting against GameStop —and brick-and-mortar retail in general — the overall short position was enormous, almost comically so. At certain points over the past six months, it had bounced between 50 and even 100 percent of the overall float, meaning nearly all the shares of GameStop in existence had been borrowed and sold by short sellers, all of whom had an obligation to rebuy those shares at some point in the future. So, what if Keith was right, and the stock went up instead of down? It would be like watching investors trying to get out of a burning building, through a single, narrow door. The stock would rocket. As a financial educator, Keith knew that short selling could be one of the riskiest plays on the market. You really needed to be certain a stock was going down, because your upside was limited, but your losses could, theoretically, be infinite. The fact that so many competent investors were short selling GameStop could mean the stock really was a dog; but it also meant the stock was loaded with rocket fuel, and it wouldn't take much to ignite and sent it right to the moon.

GENESIS 11 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in  zthe land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone,  aand bitumen for mortar. 4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower  bwith its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” 5And  cthe LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come,  dlet us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8So  ethe LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9Therefore its name was called  fBabel, because there the LORD confused [1] the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Write about an empty birdcage" Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about your ribcage after robbery. Use negative space to wind a song from the place on the dresser where a music box isn’t. Write about the corners where the two of you used to meet. Draw the intersections, arrow to the sidewalk where her shoes aren’t near yours. Write about an empty birdcage. As in: write about a hinged-open jaw that is neither sigh nor scream. Use this to signify EXIT. Make sure to describe the teeth, the glint of metal deep down in the molars, the smell of breath after lack of water. Make sure to draw this mouth a thirsty and human portrait of what it means to be used up. Write about voice by writing about how it feels when it’s painful to swallow. If you must put noise in the scene make it the sound of bird wings flapping in a cardboard box. Show us an empty cage and give us the sound of confinement. Take hope and fold it small as seed, then suck on it. Slow and selfish. Write about an empty birdcage. Birdcage can read: building, structure, abandoned or adorned. As in: loop and tighten a vine of nostalgia around the room you currently brick yourself into. Recreate the sweet of jasmine, but mortar the door so it will not seep through. Write about an empty birdcage. Replay us the scene. As in: she presses her pale cheek against the window, as he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her pale cheek against the window, and he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her pale cheek against the window, as he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Again. She presses her her pale cheek against the window, as he turns his pinstriped back, slow and final. Write about an empty birdcage. Write about the hinges. Describe them as dry knuckles. Write how I became a moan.

I want to move my hands, but they’re fused to his rib cage. I feel his lung span, his heartbeat, his very life force wrapped in these flimsy bars of bone. So fragile yet so solid. Like a brick wall with wet mortar. A juxtaposition of hard and soft. He inhales again. “Jayme,” he says my name with a mix of sigh and inquiry. I open my eyes and peer into his flushed face. Roses have bloomed on his ruddy cheeks and he looks as though he’s raced the wind. “Mm?” I reply. My mind is full of babble, I’m so high. “Jayme,” he’s insistent, almost pleading. “What are you?” Instantaneous is the cold alarm that douses the flames still dancing in my heart. I feel the nervousness that whispers through me like a cool breeze in the leaves. “What do you mean?” I ask, the disquiet wringing the strength from my voice. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he explains, inhaling deeply. I feel the line of a frown between my brows. Gingerly, I lift the hem of his shirt. And as sure as I am that the world is round and that the sky is, indeed, blue the bruises and welts on his torso have faded to nothingness, the golden tan of his skin is sun-kissed perfection. Panic has me frozen as I stare. “I don’t understand,” I whisper. He looks down at his exposed abdomen. “I think you healed me.” He says it so simply, but my mind takes his words and scatters them like ashes. I feel like I’m waking from a coma and I have amnesia and everyone speaks Chinese. I can’t speak. If I had the strength to, I wouldn’t have the words. I feel the panic flood into me and fear spiked adrenaline courses through me, I shove him. Hard. Eyes wide with shock, he stumbles back a few steps. A few steps is all I need. Fight or flight instinct taking root, I fight to flee. The space between us gives me enough room to slide out from between him and the car. He shouts my name. It’s too late. I’m running a fast as my lithe legs will carry me. My Converse pound the sidewalk and I hear the roar of his engine. It’s still too late. I grew up here and I’m ten blocks from home. No newbie could track me in my own neighborhood. In my town. Not with my determination to put as much distance as I can between me and the boy who scares the shit out of me. Not when I’ve scared the shit out of myself. I run. I run and I don’t stop.