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What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance?

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.

Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

The road to ruin is always in good repair, and the travellers pay the expense of it.

You have been trapped in the inescapable net of ruin by your own want of sense.

The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.

I've always been interested in the idea of people who fell through the cracks.

Success tempts many to their ruin.