castle-builder

If they have been years of careful training, if the eager, impetuous day-dreamer and castle-builder has been guarded and shielded, if she has been instructed by mother, teacher, or some wise sympathetic woman in all the knowledge that will help keep her safe and pure and fine, then she is ready for the wealth of emotion, the increase of the intellectual and spiritual power to be developed within her these next few years.

There might have been little to charm the lover of painting in the execution of the picture, and the mere castle-builder could scarcely have indulged his fancy in weaving a story from the countenance of the portrait, for the vizor was down, and he stood in all the unmoved sternness of his iron prison, with his glaived hands elapsed upon the cross of a long straight sword.

I was a great castle-builder once, but time has cured me of the habit, and I do not like, even by a pledge, to forestall the morrow.

A similar obsession-fueled castle-builder is Edward Leedskalnin, who used the coral from his Florida land in 1923 to begin what would become known as Coral Castle, a monument to the 16-year-old girl who left him the day before their wedding.

"I want it to be over with," says Wing, a self-described obsessive-compulsive castle-builder, "but I'm not going to walk away from it."