"Bricks and mortar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their College Porters Not to think it strange or odd When a load of bricks and mortar's Dumped within the College quad; No indignant Tutor hauls Him who scales the College walls,— Plying on that airy ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... have given rise to various zeolites— apophyllite and chabazite among others; also to calcareous spar, arragonite, and fluor spar, together with siliceous minerals, such as opal— all found in the inter-spaces of the bricks and mortar, or constituting part of their re-arranged materials. The quantity of heat brought into action in this instance in the course of 2000 years has, no doubt, been enormous, but the intensity of it developed at any one ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... condition are the houses that it is as though they had broken away from the heterogeneous rabble of bricks and mortar that makes up the Royal Borough of Kensington, and run up in a crowd to the summit of the hill to look down contemptuously upon their less fortunate brethren in the plain. On Campden Hill there are houses to suit all purses ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... their holes might be seen in the centre of those pavements heretofore sacred to the flaneurs of Paris. Strewn over the streets were branches of trees; and fragments of masonry that had been knocked from the houses, bricks and mortar, torn proclamations, shreds of clothings half concealing bloodstains, were now the interesting and leading features of that fashionable resort; foot passengers were few and far between, the shops and cafes hermetically sealed, excepting where bullets had made air holes, and during ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar. We could illustrate the remark by a variety of examples, but, in our present sketch, we will only advert to one class as a specimen—that class which is so aptly and expressively designated ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... regular intervals as if they had been determined by some kind of machinery. Here, on the formation where I live, there are alternate layers of slate and sandstone, three or four inches thick, for thousands of feet in extent; they succeed each other as regularly as the bricks and mortar in a brick wall, and are quite as homogeneous. What does this mean but that for an incalculable period the processes of erosion and deposition went on as tranquilly as a summer day? There was no strike among the workmen, and no change in the plan of the building, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... round Heraclea, naturally marshy, and abounding with tall trees, furnished timber in abundance for every kind of work; and then, as the Aetolians had fled into the city, the deserted suburbs supplied not only beams and boards, but also bricks and mortar, and stones of every size for ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... surprised you find London dull, but I grieve that it has taken such an effect on you. I hoped that, as you are young, you would get used to the bricks and mortar ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it. It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed that opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems, of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... though some people think he is kind of careless about fire—that from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city; that somehow or other we have caught the sunshine in the bricks and mortar of our homes, and have builded therein not ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the surface of the water in pursuit of its prey, and dives down to escape from its enemies; and, strangest of all, the Argyroneta, that has its luminous dwelling at the bottom of streams; and just as a mason carries bricks and mortar to its building, so does this spider carry down bubbles of air from the surface to enlarge its mysterious house, in which it lays its eggs and rears its young. Community of descent must be supposed of species having such curious and complex instincts; but how came these feeble ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... man who lives alone and walks about with his eyes open, the mere bricks and mortar of a great city are instinct with character. Buildings become to him like living creatures. The streets tell him tales. For him, the house-fronts are written over with hieroglyphics which, to the passing crowd, are either unseen or without meaning. Fallen ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... hours of grinding toil and the complete lack of sympathy at home could not extinguish the divine fire of genius in the youthful Murgatroyd. Exhausted and hungry as he often was at the end of the day's work, he devoted his leisure to the study of bricks and mortar, and out of his scanty pocket-money he bought for himself first a trowel and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... Park, let me put a Query to some of your antiquarian readers in relation thereunto; and suffer me to make the Query a peg, whereon to hang sundry and divers little notes. And pray let no one ridicule the idea that Kennington has its antiquities; albeit that wherever you look, new buildings, new bricks and mortar, plaster and cement, will meet your eye; yet, does not the manor figure in Domesday Book? Is it not dignified by the stately name of Chenintune? Was it not held by Theodoric of King Edward the Confessor? And did it not, in times gone by, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... although they live distinctly within a provincial town, there is accorded to them, as though by brevet rank, all the merit of living in the county. In reference to persons so privileged, it is considered that they have been made free from the contamination of contiguous bricks and mortar by certain inner gifts, probably of birth, occasionally of profession, possibly of merit. It is very rarely, indeed, that money alone will bestow this acknowledged rank; and in Exeter, which by the stringency and excellence of its well-defined rules on such ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... a human life. Many ambitions combine and become part of a group spirit permeating the organization and reaching their fulfilment in the succession of leaders. The life and growth and happy self-realization of an institution is not the bricks and mortar—it is a living and elastic entity—never too stable, never too finished, a growing and plastic plant—to use a metaphor that has slipped in perhaps without arousing all the implications the term plant might carry ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... were again commencing to fall upon the houses, the crash that told of ruin and destruction was heard more frequently. One exploded in the Rue des Voyards, another grazed the tall chimney of the factory, and the bricks and mortar came tumbling to the ground directly in front of the shed where the surgeons were at work. Bouroche looked up ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... there? You may answer, "to please me." My dear friends, I should be the last person to deny that. I can never see a child picking a nosegay, much less a little London child, born and bred and shut up among bricks and mortar, when it gets for the first time into a green field, and throws itself instinctively upon the buttercups and daisies, as if they were precious jewels and gold;—I never can see that sight, I say, without feeling that there are such things as ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... profit—no more. Spring went on to summer, and then there was a very shadowy margin of profit. But James was not at all daunted. He was waiting now for the trams, and building up hopes since he could not build in bricks and mortar. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... time-honoured text, Ravenslee smiled, and leaping out of bed proceeded to wash and shave and dress, pausing often to glance glad-eyed from his open window upon the glory of the new day. And indeed it was a morning of all-pervading beauty, one such that even Mulligan's, its dingy bricks and mortar mellowed by the sun, seemed less unlovely than its wont, and its many windows, catching a sunbeam here and there, winked ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... the Colonel, with a sniff. "If I know anything of Jenkins he'd only put up something worse. I tell you, John, that where bricks and mortar are concerned ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... in the country—the glorious country! Outside of the thronged streets; away from piled up bricks and mortar; outside of the clank of machinery; the rumbling of carriages; the roar of the escape pipe; the scream of the steam whistle; the tramp, tramp of moving thousands on the stone sidewalks; away from ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Jasna they found a drosky, where there is always one to be found at the corner of the square, and they did not speak during the drive up the broad Marszalkowska to the rather barren suburb of the Mokotow (where bricks and mortar are still engaged in emphasizing the nakedness of the land), for the simple reason that speech is impossible while driving through the streets of the worst-paved city in Europe. Which is a grudge that the traveller may bear against ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... forbids the complete prevalence of such a theory. Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth: build walls round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the sap. But next to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more obstructive of true moral development than this substitution ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... any trial, or nonsense of that sort, you would be surprised. It is only since the Defence of the Realm Act was passed that England has become a free country. We keep a drag-net going continually, we have hundreds of agents in all suspected quarters, but this wilderness of bricks and mortar is too big even for us. Once an enemy agent has got himself into an English or Allied uniform, he is horribly difficult to run down. That is where you, and those like you, come in. Are you sure, my dear madame, that you can pass without ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... their cumbersome and ruinous procedure disappear, and India will set up her old Panchayats, in which justice will be dispensed in accordance with her own conscience. For your schools and colleges, upon which lakhs of rupees have been wasted in bricks and mortar for the erection of ponderous buildings that weigh as heavily upon our boys as the educational processes by which you reduce their souls to slavery, we will give them simpler structures, open to God's air and light, and the learning of our forefathers that will make them free ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... thus cut off from all communication, not only with the outside world, but even from the rest of England. The remnants of the armies of defence had been gradually driven in upon the vast wilderness of bricks and mortar which now held more than eight millions of men, women, and children, hemmed in by long lines of batteries and entrenched camps, from which thousands of guns hurled their projectiles far and wide into the crowded ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... favorable they need not work; if they are unfavorable they need not work. So far from man being the creature of circumstances he should rather be termed the architect of circumstances. From the same materials one man builds palaces and another hovels. Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks till the architect makes something out of them. In the same way, out of the same circumstances one man rears a stately edifice, while another, idle and incompetent, lives for ever amid ruins. Circumstances rarely conquer a strong man; he ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... love-making, in vacuo! As far as we can judge, and as far as we can keep our senses in such a region, it seems to us not a poem at all, hardly even poetical—but rather the materials for a poem, made up of science, religion, and love, the (very raw) materials of a structure—as if the bricks and mortar, and lath and plaster, and furniture, and fire and fuel and meat and drink, and inhabitants male and female, of a house were all mixed "through other" in one enormous imbroglio. It is a sort of fire-mist, out of which ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Grady, and had left a wife and three children in a tenement in "Hell's Kitchen", New York, to come to fight the Kaiser. He was a kind-hearted and decent Irishman, who had earned a hard living carrying bricks and mortar up a ladder ten hours a day; but he was absolutely convinced that there existed, somewhere under his feet, a hell of brimstone and sulphur in which he would roast for ever if he disobeyed the orders of those who were set in authority ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... pig met a man with a load of bricks and mortar, and he said: "Please, man, will you give me those bricks ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... bricklayers', masons' and joiners' sheds, wherein any new mechanical contrivance was put to the test. For more than eighteen years the vicinity of the house resembled a builder's yard, in the centre of which the Duke lived and moved and had his being, enjoying, in his way, the piles of bricks and mortar surrounding him. After he had decided upon the erection of a new building he had a model of it made for his inspection, and if approved of, it ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... away, pent in bricks and mortar, yearning deep to see the dance of the Spring, and chained out of sight of it. This might bring one glimpse ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... third heap in front of us?" said Dennis. "We'll make for that, and, if we reach it, then dash straight across the open for the back of the church, and leave the rest to chance. It's rotten work fighting broken bricks and mortar, but there it is; it's got to ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... that there should be no time lost, and men were set at work, carrying bricks and mortar. It so chanced that one of them, going in through a back entrance with a hod over his shoulder, and being young and lively, found his eye caught by the countenance of a pretty, frightened-looking girl, who seemed to be loitering about watching, as if curious or anxious. Seeing her near each time ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... successful. Indeed it is extraordinary that the two parts should be joined in such admirable harmony. It is impossible to give in words an idea of the slender grace of the Giralda, it does not look a thing of bricks and mortar, it is so straight and light that it reminds one vaguely of some beautiful human thing. The great height is astonishing, there is no buttress or projection to break the very long straight line as it rises, with a kind of breathless speed, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... once, in Massachusetts, a public institution has escaped the tyranny of bricks and mortar; and we are permitted to indulge the hope, that any future additions will tend to make this spot a neighborhood of unostentatious cottages, quiet rural homes, rather than the seat of a vast edifice, which may provoke the wonder of the sight-seer, inflame local or state ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... himself by building, Villiers had a monomania for bricks and mortar, yet he found time to write 'The Rehearsal,' a play on which Mr. Reed in his 'Dramatic Biography' makes the following observation: 'It is so perfect a masterpiece in its way, and so truly original, that notwithstanding its prodigious ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... noble life—the ladies moving along those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curling hair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts within. The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... was not pious or admirable, but possessed with the disease of building, and turned everything into bricks and mortar, just as it is said Midas turned things into ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... Numerous projecting mullioned windows broke up the line of the park front. Lesbia was fain to own that Rood Hall was even better than Park Lane. In London Mr. Smithson had created a palace; but it was a new palace, which still had a faint flavour of bricks and mortar, and which was apt to remind the spectator of that wonderful erection of Aladdin, the famous Parvenu of Eastern story. Here, in Berkshire, Mr. Smithson had dropped into a nest which had been kept warm for him for three centuries, aired and beautified by generations of a noble race which ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Everywhere Huxley was received with enthusiasm, for his name was a very familiar one. Two quotations from his address at Johns Hopkins are especially worthy of attention as a part of his message to Americans. "It has been my fate to see great educational funds fossilise into mere bricks and mortar in the petrifying springs of architecture, with nothing left to work them. A great warrior is said to have made a desert and called it peace. Trustees have sometimes made a palace and called it ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... will see that but one thing is needful to retard the progress of hidden fire, even in a wooden building, long enough at least for one to go up the hill and fetch a pail of water. This remedy consists simply in choking the flues and stopping the draught, which can easily be done by filling in with bricks and mortar between all the studs of both outer walls and inner partitions at or near the level of each floor. A cut-off half way up is an additional safeguard. The horizontal passages between the floor-joists should also be closed in a similar manner, otherwise the smoke ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... for the purposes of publicity and propaganda. The transformation of a hamlet into a seaside resort has been treated as a sort of psychological romance by Mr. OLIVER ONIONS in Mushroom Town, where the human beings are a background as it were for the bricks and mortar; Mr. A.S. NEILL, having chosen to make a farce of it, has provided a hero who believes in humorous advertisements, and has evidently persuaded the author to take him at his own valuation. This is hardly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... our plastic power... Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them into ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... of the Duke of Northumberland; another was the Earl of Leicester; another, the Duke of Devonshire; another, the Earl of Clarendon; another, the Duke of Buckingham; and so on, ad infinitum, dukes and earls alternately, like bricks and mortar in the wall of a house. There were other dignitaries besides, some that Sir Norman had a faint recollection of hearing were dead for some years—Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, the Earl of Bothwell, King Henry Darnley, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... do, and does them in the way that mobs do them. It has broken into the gardens, into the arts, the resting-places of nations, and with its factories to learn to love in, its treadmills to learn to sing in, it girdles its belt of drudgery around the world and carries bricks and mortar to the clouds. It shouts to every human being across the spaces—the outdoors of life: "Who goes there? Come thou with us. Dig thou ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... know a quaint, dreamy old region in the west of London, which bricks and mortar have not, as yet, overtaken, nor newfangled ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... outside of the wall, that they might serve to hang a curtain on them to defend and repel all blows whilst they were building the walls between that and the next floor, and the floor of this story they faced with bricks and mortar, that the enemy's fire might do them no damage; and on this they spread mattresses, lest the weapons thrown from engines should break through the flooring, or stones from catapults should batter the brickwork. They, moreover, made ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... quite a different way from ours. First of all a complete skeleton house is set up, made of wood, and, when this is finished, the spaces between the wooden structure are filled in with bricks and mortar. Before the roof is put on, a large green bush is hoisted up as far as the eaves, and there tied to the scaffolding poles. This is supposed to drive away the pixies or wicked fairies, and no one would dare to put the roof on without the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... having disposed of his peltries, and obtained new traps and a fresh outfit, started westward in the course of a fortnight, declaring that he could not breathe among the bricks and mortar. He promised that he would not fail to look out for Charley, for whose recovery, however, even Dick, by this time, had begun to despair. We were beginning to get a little tired of civilised ways and to sigh for the ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... however, did not reveal his change of feeling so much by neglect as by ceremony, which, sooner than anything else, builds a wall of separation between those who meet every day. For the oftener they meet, the thicker and the faster are the bricks and mortar of cold politeness, evidently avoided insults, and subjected manifestations of dislike, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... inherit land, garden, or house.(463) He then had no share in his father's house; he was not one of the family. The distinction is important, for, as we shall see later, the word "house" had a wider signification than mere bricks and mortar.(464) It was the ancestral estate. Over it the family had rights. It went back in default of heirs to the family of the last owner. We are therefore confronted with private ownership of land, but also with a sort ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... Professor Marsh, with great labour and sometimes at the risk of his scalp. Professor Marsh told me how he took him to the University, and proposed to begin by showing him over the buildings. He refused.] "Show me what you have got inside them; I can see plenty of bricks and mortar in my own country." [So they went straight to the fossils, and as Professor Marsh writes ("American Journal of Science" volume ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... hurricanes and snow storms that I ever knew in my life, at four o'clock in the morning of January 19th, 1857, this large steeple fell on the top of our house which was a three story brick building. It broke through the roof and smashed in all the upper tier of rooms, the bricks and mortar falling to the lower floor. We were in the second story, and some of the bricks came into our room, breaking the glass and furniture, and the heaviest part of the whole lay directly on our house. It was the opinion of ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... she patronised us," said Lady Sophie, laughing. "She did, indeed! And you know what she was. Her father was just a common builder at Loring, who made some money by a speculation in bricks and mortar." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... the country being so thoroughly impoverished and desolate;" and he accordingly, after viewing the marvels of the locality, pursued his way to Banda, and thence laid a dak (or travelled by palanquin with relays of bearers) to Calpee, "there to sit from nine to four, writing filthy accounts of bricks and mortar, square feet, cubic feet, and running feet, rupees, annas, and pie; squabbling with wrinkled unromantic villains, whose cool-tempered and overwhelming patience amply deserve their unlawful gains—I mean as labourers in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... cellar, and calls THAT going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the birds of the air—have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud—have forgotten all about live trees, and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... friars and nuns, and also some noble persons who have no ear for true harmony. They paint in Flanders, only to deceive the external eye, things that gladden you and of which you cannot speak ill, and saints and prophets. Their painting is of stuffs—bricks and mortar, the grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and bridges and rivers, which they call landscapes, and little figures here and there; and all this, although it may appear good to some eyes, is in truth done without reasonableness or art, without symmetry or proportion, ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... present time there must be tens of thousands of workmen employed in the building of hotels and villas between Marseilles and Ventimille. That the Riviera will finally be overbuilt no one can doubt; much of the original beauty of the country is already destroyed by this piling up of bricks and mortar, more beauty is doomed. But meantime work is brisk, wages are high, and the Post Office savings bank and private banks ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... chanced to like him from the first, completed the vanquishment of the journalist, if that object had not before been entirely accomplished; and within an hour after setting foot within that comfortable little home the young man felt that it had become dearer to him than any other building of bricks and mortar into which he ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... was a week since our last visit to Termonde, and it seemed even more desolate and forsaken than before. The Germans had shelled it again, and most of the remaining walls had been knocked down, so that the streets were blocked at many points and the whole town was little more than a heap of bricks and mortar. There was not a living creature to be seen, and even the birds had gone. The only sound that broke the utter silence was the shriek of the shells and the crash of their explosion. We were constantly checked ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... aspen grove behind it, an' the run of prairie on the right, an' the little lake not a gun-shot off on the left? That's the spot I've sometimes thought of locatin' on when my gun begins to feel too heavy. There'll be cities there some day. Bricks and mortar and stone 'll change its face—an' cornfields, an'—but not in our day, lad, not in our day. The redskins and the bears 'll hold it as long as we're above ground. Yes, I'd like to ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... trading Universitas; when they associated for religious objects, they were a religious Universitas; when they associated for the promotion of learning, they were a learned Universitas. But the men came first, the bricks and mortar followed long after. The architectural history, in its merely technical and professional details, could only start at a point where the University, as an association of scholars and students, had already ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp |
