Bricks Quotes

When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.

But after spending ages walking around with everyone piling bricks in your arms, it can throw you off balance when someone removes a brick to carry for you.

The paint on the two-story brick building blistered in the heat like sunburnt skin.” 

I can't watch The Wizard of Oz / without wondering how many times / the Scarecrow had his heart broken / no brain to tell him no / all that courage telling him yes / I wonder if he was desperate from all that hurt / if he'd spend some nights asking the Tin Man if he was a fool / Tin Man saying yes / saying obviously / saying of course / because how could he know / how could he see / with that hole in his chest / where a heart should be. I can't watch The Wizard of Oz / without walking memory lane like a yellow brick road/ at the end of which / is someone who still loves me.

Bricks are meant for paths, Yet somehow we’re always still. If there’s nothing for us in the now, Then I know there never will. You belong up here in the light, and me in poppies down below. Maybe one day we’ll meet again, On the other side of a rainbow.

Debating societies had pondered long and hard over the "Oz question," and published many scholarly tracts within the pages of Spectrum. But while remnants of Tin Men had been unearthed by salvage teams, and Emerald City still existed as the center of learning and administration, no physical evidence of brick roads had ever been found anywhere in the Collective, either of natural or synthetic hue--and naturalists had long ago rejected the possibility that monkeys could fly to Oz. Oz, it was generally agreed, had been a fiction, and a fairly odd one.