Steve Rushin Quotes

I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

The world stretches before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.

There's one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there's a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic.

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.

The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.

Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder.

In Gravity clad, He has nought in his Head, But Visions of Nobles & Kings With Commons below, Who respectfully bow, And worship the dignified Things

The ancient city Aqpu, where kings who had preceded me had built, had deteriorated and turned into ruined hills. I rebuilt the city completely, decorated it and made it bigger than it was before. I then built my palace.

Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built. This real greatness shines through the fake grandeur of rulers and endows these buildings with a lasting beauty.

It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases.

I could put my thumb up to a window and completely hide the Earth. I thought, 'Everything I've ever known is behind my thumb.'

I'll go out at night and look up at the stars and think, 'How ridiculously inconsequential I am in the scheme of things.'

At Wembley, everything is bigger, wider; the atmosphere is different.

There is something in sheer volume that awes and terrifies, lifts us out of ourselves.

Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.

HAMLET [...] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end. CLAUDIUS Alas, alas. HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

This theme of bigness — all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

To-day kings, to-marrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing.

Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream.

We live thetime that a match flickers; we pop the corkof a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?

A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse