Buildings and architecture - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man's inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

A dweller in a house may impress his personality upon the walls, but subtly the walls too, may impress their own shape upon the ego of the man.

- C. L. Moore, ''NoWoman Born'' (1944)

He looked down into a night that was alive with radiance. The streets and walls glowed, strings of colored lamps flashed and flashed against a velvet dark, fountains leaped white and gold and scarlet, a flame display danced like molten rainbows at the feet of a triumphal statue. Star architecture was a thing of frozen motion, soaring columns and tiers and pinnacles to challenge the burning sky.

- Poul Anderson, ''Ghetto'' (1954)

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

He had moved up a floor, and the sequence of identical rooms he had occupied were like displaced images of himself seen through a prism. Their common focus, that elusive final definition of himself which he had sought for so long, still remained to be found.

- J. G. Ballard, ''The Cage of Sand'' (1962)

Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

''Think of it [1930s architecture],'' Dialta Downes had said, ''as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams.''

- William Gibson, ''The Gernsback Continuum'' (1981)

Buildings were just the world's furniture, and he didn't care how it was arranged.

- John Varley, ''The Pusher'' (1981)

Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.

- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1986)

Do not look for revelations in the ancient ruins. You will find here only what you bring: bits of memory, wisps of the past as thin as clouds in the summer, fragments of stone that are carved with symbols that sometimes almost make sense.

- Pat Murphy, The FallingWoman (1986)

The walls and floor of the great room were hers to reshape as she pleased. They would do anything she was able to ask of them except let her out.

- Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (1987)

A ruin is a ruin, a toppled remnant, and its final statement is failure.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

There was something vampiric about the room, she decided, something it would have in common with millions of similar rooms, as though its bewilderingly seamless anonymity were sucking away her personality.

- William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)

Lammiela's house was the abode of infinity. The endless rooms were packed with the junk of a hundred worlds.

- Alexander Jablokov, ''The Death Artist'' (1990)

Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)