Borrowed

Famous quotes containing the word borrowed:

    “There was an old woman and she lived in a shoe,
    She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
    She crumm’d ‘em some porridge without any bread
    And she borrowed a beetle, and she knocked ‘em all on the head.
    Then out went the old woman to bespeak ‘em a coffin
    And when she came back she found’ em all a-loffing.”
    —Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe (l. 1–6)

    “A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials.... What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
    —George Steiner (b. 1929)