Rome Wasn't Built In A Day Meaning Novels & Stories

"Because if the foundation is rotten, nothing you build on it will stand." The words hit harder than Elias thought they would. They were not the words of a teenager chasing a pat on the back. They were not inexperienced. They were weighted with the knowledge of someone who had seen a collapse. Someone who had been young once, and lived to see the wreckage of something built poorly.

You build it for people who will not know your name either, because the building is the thing that matters, not the builder. He wrote: We are building for people we will never meet. The quince grove is for them. The foxgloves are for them. The east wing is for them. The south wall roses are for them. Everything we have built is for people we will never meet. This is not a sad thing. This is the thing that makes the building worth doing. The building is for the future. The future is for people we will never meet. We build for them. We build for them with the same care we would build for ourselves, because the building is the building, and the building must be correct.

I thought about two people who had built something carefully over the course of ten days and had watched it begin to turn against them in the space of forty-eight hours. They were not done. Neither were we.

A gust of wind. And suddenly, Rome was gone.

He poured two glasses of wine, setting one in front of me. “To survival,” I teased, raising my glass. He smirked, clinking his against mine. “To more than survival.” We drank, and for a long moment, simply existed in silence. Then Roman leaned closer, his gaze burning into mine. “Do you know what I think every time I look at her?” I shook my head. “What?” “That I don’t deserve either of you.” My chest squeezed. “Roman…” He lifted a hand, brushing hair from my face. “I’ve built empires, crushed men, lived in shadows. But her? You? This is the first thing I’ve ever created that isn’t destruction.”

They forgot something simple. Buildings fail from foundation cracks. Not from the top.

"This is what you built." "I built it with help." "Of course you built it with help. But you built it." Elijah looked at the room. He looked at the people eating, the servers moving between tables, the kitchen visible through the pass, Jerome at the stove. He had built this. He had built it from nothing — from a dream and a loan and a lot of work and the specific stubbornness of someone who had been told he couldn't do something and had decided to do it anyway. The loan had been from a bank that had taken a chance on him. The dream had been his. The work had been his and Jerome's and everyone else who had joined along the way.

“I told you the thing was a piece of rubbish.” My best mate, Azazel, mutters when the vehicle’s engine fails for the millionth time today. We’ve been working on rebuilding this vehicle for months, and the bloody thing won’t start. Reaching for a towel, I wipe the oil from my hands. “You need to stop being so negative, mate. It will start. We just need to continue working. Rome wasn’t built in a bloody day, you git.”

Katie's face went stiff. She couldn't find a comeback, so she just looked up at Ryan with those pitiful eyes. "Emily—" I didn't even let him get a word out. "Save it. I don't want to hear it from you either." And with that, I walked out without looking back. … Three days passed in a blink. Soon it was the one-week mark—the deadline Ryan had set. My phone would not stop ringing all day. Text after text poured in from our mutual friends.