The wall Quotes

“Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top.”

“I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a wall. I am a giant and I tower above you. I am a giant and I can't hear your voice. There is familiarity in this. I spent years like this growing up, my mother hovering over my every move, me responding monosyllabically, face blank, voice blank, heart blank. It is a coping mechanism and it is easy, if you are able to block out false promises of love with the understanding of what love has become.”

“The Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, the walls surrounding a medieval castle: obsolete walls evoke nostalgia. Make your walls obsolete.”

“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)”

“The walls that we build for self-protection become the walls of self-imprisonment later!!!!”

“That’s the key to walking through the Wall.... You have to first see it as not being a Wall, even though everyone you know still sees it as a Wall.”

“He stood in a room, looking around, seeing thousands of himself. He banged the walls made of mirrors, but they wouldn't break. Thier laugh filled his heart and with fear, he curled up and sat there. And then She came out of nowhere and wrapped her arm around him. She held his hand, together they got up and walked towards a wall. He raised his head and looked at the reflections, but all he saw there was only him. She turned and smiled at him and touched the wall. It cracked and shattered into pieces. She inside him broke all the walls around him. He was free, he was not held and haunted by his reflections anymore.”

“Relationships are like walls painted off-white and every time you’ll hurt me, it will be like resting dirty shoes on them, like bashing holes in the walls, one after the other. And then there will come a day, where the walls will be filled with so many holes, that there wouldn’t be any place left for you to place the tiniest kiss. Only then will I walk away for good.”

“[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.”

“He locked the doors and windows and sat in the middle of a room afraid of going out there in the storm and rain, in the darkest night he had ever seen. All of a sudden there were knocks everywhere and the walls turned into the glass so that he could helplessly witness his fears approach him like the ghosts. He saw them crawling on the wall and climbing the roof staring into his eyes, in no time the walls disappeared and they stood around him laughing and consuming him one by one at a time. all he saw, in the end, was the ugly and scary faces of himself.”