Tunnels quotes
282 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside tunnels — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life."
"People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don't know where to go."
"The Internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't care if it's being used to peddle pornography, I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field of global society. It is creating de-facto an entirely new set of political realities. None of the constipated, oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the implications of it were for their larger agenda."
"He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower."
"We can see the light but we are still inside the tunnel, ... We have not been able to get to all the communities."
"I first met my wife in the tunnel of love. She was digging it at the time."
"THE TRAIN came out of the long tunnel into the snow country."
"Here is a hall without exit, a tunnel without end."
"When I'm writing it's as if I'm the observer. It's as if that computer screen there -it used to be the typewriter - just kind of dissolves and there's this whirling tunnel of mist and there's a kind of proscenium arch, and then there are my characters, and they say what they say, and I laugh sometimes in surprise at what they say."
"All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away."
"We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
"No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light."
"In certain areas I don't function well and in other areas I function very well. I'm very good professionally. I have good discipline, I'm able to write every day and do films and not go six times over the budget. I mean I'm a coherent person, but I also don't like to go through tunnels when I travel. I'm claustrophobic."
"What is it with you today?” says Christina on the way to breakfast. Her eyes are still swollen from sleep and her tangled hair forms a fuzzy halo around her face. “Oh, you know,” I say. “Sun shining. Birds chirping.” She raises an eyebrow at me, as if reminding me that we are in an underground tunnel."
"Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed."
"All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel - or if there was, it was an oncoming train."
"You may raise enough money to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business."
"I just kind of do my thing with sort of tunnel vision for the story and my role and how it fits together."
"I have emerged from the tunnel of grief into the light. Life is better. Not the same, but good and getting better all the time."
"People's belief in their own local reality-tunnels keep us all far stupider than we ought to be."
