quotations about Xanadu
The old road to Xanadu is hard to find and we turned onto a rough gravel road that passed through impoverished villages where Chinese migrants settled in recent times hoping to eke out a living from stony and windswept fields. Then all at once we arrived on the steppe land and were bouncing along a grass track to the Blue Sky Banner Township. The air smelt richly of wild herbs. Skylarks and orioles tumbled and twittered under the azure sky. We drove into the small town with growing excitement as horsemen herded their cows along the central boulevard. The journey had taken nearly ten hours, but we were now close to the fabled Xanadu.
JASPER BECKER
City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China
Xanadu is a case study in Derrida's will to totality. It would be a miniuniverse of words that remember where they have been and where they might yet be.
TED NELSON
attributed, Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
I have made my list
Of all the places I have been, and the ones I hope to get to
And so far I have found many near perfect Xanadu
But no Eden.
BETSY ORLANDO
"A Prayer", A Field of Flowers: Poems and Essays From a Diplomat
What Xanadu is, however, is a universal dataspace for everything, everywhere, all at once.
MICHAEL FRAASE
Macintosh Hypermedia
How many miles to Babylon, porter, porter?
How many stations more to Xanadu?
RALPH NIXON CURREY
"Evacuation", Collected Poems
I make no apology for writing in nature's age-old and unaging language, of whose images we build our paradises, Broceliande and Brindavan, the Forest of Arden, Xanadu, Shelley's Skies, or even Wordsworth's Grasemere, which can be found on no map.
KATHLEEN RAINE
Selected Poems
Today, Xanadu is just another abandoned place left behind in the dust of progressing technology.
CHARLIE CARLSON
Weird Florida
No
secrets--only perhaps
a hint that
once, in a parallel
life, lissom
in Xanadu,
we may have danced
away our innocence
and the night.
C. K. STEAD
"Xanadu", Collected Poems
Of course there are elements of what Xanadu promises that are utopian, nostalgic. But if Xanadu is a phantasm, and if time will not turn backward because we touch a floating hourglass with a magic cursor, it is equally true that our futures make no sense unless we reckon with our longing for such possibilities.
DANIEL ROSENBERG
"Welcome to the Xanadu Millennium", Cabinet, 2004
Xanadu for you forever,
Forever and always.
Just like a dream,
Waterfalls and white roses.
Xanadu forever it would seem.
Fruit trees growing tall,
Where everyday is fall.
The grass is always green
In Xanadu forever.
BRANDON HODGE
"Xanadu", The Man from Misery and Other Poems
A place where nobody dared to go
the love that we came to know
They call it Xanadu
And now, open your eyes and see
what we have made is real
We are in Xanadu
A million lights are dancing and there you are, a shooting star
An everlasting world and you're here with me, eternally
Xanadu
JEFF LYNNE
"Xanadu"
But caught in the throes of unrequited hunger, he turned
To poetry, to writing lyric poems that sang of life
And love and beauty, of Xanadu, Byzantiam, and Eden.
ESTON E. ROBERTS
Poems of Purpose
Secret Instructions for Reaching Xanadu:
Go eastward from the Bewildered-Dragon Lake
Until you see the Monastery of the West
Tower straight and high above your head.
Then take Those charms which, as I told you, in the breast
Of your most inner robe you have hidden, and follow
Their clear instruction.
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
Selected Poems
Modern-day Xanadu is fragile and contingent on political and economic forces outside of as well as within Asia. Accordingly, the preservation of this miracle presents the need for new international arrangements (ideally, institutions) that will facilitate the creation of a new community in the Pacific and provide a framework within which the unique complexities and challenges of Asia can be integrated viably into the modern global system.
DONALD C. HELLMANN & KENNETH B. PYLE
introduction, From APEC to Xanadu: Creating a Viable Community in the Post-war Pacific
Xanadu is the epic discretionary story. It's the epicenter of "not needed."
HOWARD DAVIDOWITZ
Time, Volume 173
To venture an opinion on Xanadu is to take on the obligations of a medieval exegete: legions have been there before.
FREDERIC STEWART COLWELL
Rivermen: A Romantic Iconography of the River and the Source
There have been many Xanadus over the years, none of them up to Kubla Khan standards.
PETER APPLEBOME
"Xanadu, Perhaps a Folly for Our Times", New York Times, February 21, 2009
Xanadu is fiction. Xanadu is real. Xanadu is a state of mind.
DWAYNE DESYLVIA
3D Presales: A Critical A-Z Field Guide for Technology Presales Professionals
Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself.
HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ & ORSON WELLES
Citizen Kane
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
"Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream", The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge