Clerks Quotes - Page 5

• Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners... If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything... Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.

  Neal Stephenson

  Thinking, Use, Goes On

  "Zodiac: An Eco-Thriller". Book by Neal Stephenson, May 1988.

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• Work should be personal. For all of us. Not just for the artist and entrepreneur. Work should have meaning for the accountant, the construction worker, the technologist, the manager and the clerk.

  Howard Schultz

  Artist, Construction Workers, Should Have

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• If Beethoven were sent to nursery school today, they would medicate him, and he would be a postal clerk.

  Leon Botstein

  School, Would Be, Today

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• Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm -- say on the twenty-second. None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not, and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on!

  Kate Douglas Wiggin

  Cutting, Sky, Weather

  Kate Douglas Wiggin (2016). “KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN – Ultimate Collection: 21 Novels & 130+ Short Stories, Fairy Tales and Poems for Children (Illustrated): Including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm & Penelope Hamilton Series: Rose o' the River, A Summer in a Cañon, The Birds' Christmas Carol, Timothy's Quest, The Arabian Nights, Golden Numbers & many more”, p.1409, e-artnow

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• Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.

  Rick Bragg

  News, Assistants, Rely

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• I’m no part time dilettante photographer, unlike the bartenders, shoe salesmen, floorwalkers plumbers, barbers, grocery clerks and chiropractors whose great hobby is their camera. All their friends rave about what wonderful pictures they take. If they’re so good, why don’t they take pictures full—time, for a living, and make floor walking, chiropractics, etc., their hobby? But everyone wants to play it safe. They’re afraid to give up their pay checks and their security they might miss a meal.

  Weegee

  Giving Up, Play, Shoes

  Weegee (2013). “Weegee: The Autobiography (Annotated)”, p.137, BookBaby

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• The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

  Mark Helprin

  New York, Careers, People

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• But now I see well the old proverb is true: That parish priest forgetteth that ever he was a clerk!

  John Heywood

  Forget, Priests, Wells

  John Heywood (1908). “Two Tudor "shrew" Plays - (1) John John the Husband, Tib His Wife, and Sir John the Priest, by John Heywood (c1533): And (2) Tom Tiler and His Wife, Anonymous (c1551)”

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• A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Country, Men, Police

  W. Somerset Maugham (1930). “Cakes and Ale”

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• If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Fire, Land

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.227, Xist Publishing

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• The aether: Invented by Isaac Newton, reinvented by James Clerk Maxwell. This is the stuff that fills up the empty space of the universe. Discredited and discarded by Einstein, the aether is now making a Nixonian comeback. It's really the vacuum, but burdened by theoretical, ghostly particles.

  Leon M. Lederman

  Science, Space, Vacuums

  Leon M. Lederman, Dick Teresi (1993). “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, what is the Question?”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Did you ever wake up with an erection...and find yourself in a massage chair at Brookstone? And you yell to the sales clerk "I'll take it!"

  Zach Galifianakis

  Funny, Humor, Finding Yourself

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• They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.

  Tom Wolfe

  Beautiful, Games, People

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.155, Macmillan

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• In the high school classroom you are a drill sergent, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.

  Frank McCourt

  Mother, Brother, Uncles

  Frank McCourt (2005). “Teacher Man: A Memoir”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

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• All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording, and ciphering. Thus, he declares that accounting and control are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society. . . . Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Atheist, Philosophy, Office

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• Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air. Should a clerk come out with the remark that All Young Mothers In This Day and Age (why can't they save their breath and say "now"?) insist on a yarn which can be machine-washed and machine-dried, come back at her with the reply that one day, you suppose, they will develop a baby that can be machine-washed and -dried.

  Elizabeth Zimmermann

  Mother, Baby, Knitting

  Elizabeth Zimmermann (2012). “Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac: The Commemorative Edition”, p.18, Courier Corporation

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• It's just like nurses in a hospital tend to know more than the doctors most of the time; if you really want to get the answers to a question about court, you should spend more time buttering up the clerks than the judges.

  Jodi Picoult

  Doctors, Nurse, Judging

  Jodi Picoult (2010). “House Rules: A Novel”, p.215, Simon and Schuster

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• At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Loneliness, Twilight, Night

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.40, e-artnow

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• Corporate types love to pretend their life is exciting. The whispers, fist-pumping and animated hand gestures are all designed to lift our job description from what it really is - that of an overpaid clerk

  Chetan Bhagat

  Jobs, Hands, Fists

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• Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

  John Sandford

  Rain, Flower, Dark

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• He looked as if he'd stepped straight off the cover of one of those romance novels she ordered from Amazon.com so she didn't have to be embarassed by some supercilious male clerk in the bookstore.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Romance, Males, Amazon

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• You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.

  W. H. Auden

  Beautiful, Eye, Expression

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• I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. The would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or, in this case, guardians of my peace.

  Marilyn Johnson

  Teacher, Community, Police

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• No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

  Edward Abbey

  Government, Gadgets, Demand

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.18, RosettaBooks

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• Consider Christmas - could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating - all in the name of the lowly Jesus?

  Upton Sinclair

  Religious, Jesus, Children

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