Ragged Quotes

• The line of life is a ragged diagonal between duty and desire.

  William Rounseville Alger

  Life, Desire, Lines

  98 Copy quote

• The sweet small clumsy feet of april came into the ragged meadow of my soul.

  e. e. cummings

  Sweet, Feet, Soul

  e. e. cummings (2014). “100 Selected Poems”, p.29, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

  Herman Melville

  Literature, Edges

  Herman Melville (2009). “Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales”, p.312, OUP Oxford

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• I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  T. S. Eliot

  Should Have, Sea, Pairs

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 73 (1917)

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• A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

  Walt Whitman

  Life, Women, Cities

  Walt Whitman “Annotated LEAVES OF GRASS with English Grammar Exercises: by Walt Whitman (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

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• I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.

  Jack Kerouac

  Sleep, Forever, Forget

  Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.179, Penguin

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• My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.

  Mark Twain

  Loyalty, Country, Real

  Mark Twain (1889). “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, p.100, Createspace Independent Pub

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• Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dirty, Wine, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Walden; Or, Life in the Woods”, p.15, Courier Corporation

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• There is one kind of charity common enough among us... It is that patchwork philanthropy which clothes the ragged, feeds the poor, and heals the sick. I am far from decrying the noble spirit which seeks to help a poor or suffering fellow being... [However] what advances a nation or a community is not so much to prop up its weakest and most helpless members, but to lift up the best and the most gifted, so as to make them of the greatest service to the country.

  Jamsetji Tata

  Country, Clothes, Sick

  79 Copy quote

• Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

  Gloria Naylor

  Hurt, Memories, Glasses

  Gloria Naylor (2005). “The Women of Brewster Place”, p.35, Penguin

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• Keep your words. This pain is no life." "You only feel pain because you're alive, boy!" the keeper thundered. "This is the mystery of it. Life is lived on the ragged edge of the cliff. Fall off and you might die, but run from it and you are already dead!

  Ted Dekker

  Running, Pain, Fall

  18 Copy quote

• Until quite recently dance in America was the ragged Cinderella of the arts . . .

  Shana Alexander

  Art, America

  Shana Alexander (2015). “Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album”, p.158, Open Road Media

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• He was drunk upon the average once a day, and penitent upon an equally fair calculation once a month; and when he was penitent, he was invariably in the very last stage of maudlin intoxication. He was a ragged, roving, roaring kind of fellow, with a burly form, a sharp wit, and a ready head, and could turn his hand to anything when he chose to do it.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Average

  Charles Dickens (1903). “The Works of Charles Dickens: Sketches by Boz : illustrative of every day life and everyday people. 1903”

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• I pull back, gasping for breath. Reeling. His breath is ragged, and I place my hands on his cheeks to steady him. "Is this okay?" I whisper. "Are you okay?" His reply is anguished. Honest. "I love you."

  Stephanie Perkins

  Love, Hands, Honest

  Stephanie Perkins (2014). “Lola and the Boy Next Door”, p.191, Usborne Publishing Ltd

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• A man is an island, but the water is deep
  And the shore on the other side is ragged and steep
  To look for perfection is a lonely old ride
  It takes a whole lot of courage and a whole lot of pride
  When you look for independence and you get what you want
  How come you look back, thinking what have I done?
  But time and again, it dawns on me
  It's the price we pay for liberty
  I should have know, we all need a place to call home

  Joey Tempest

  Song, Lonely, Home

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• Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray.

  Richard Wilbur

  Rain, Rivers, Water

  Richard Wilbur, “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the VILLa Sciarra”

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• Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!

  Alexander Blok

  Fun, War, Gun

  15 Copy quote

• The craftiest trickery are too short and ragged a cloak to cover a bad heart.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Heart, Deception, Too Short

  66 Copy quote

• Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.

  Cornel West

  Addiction, Seductive, Black History

  20 Copy quote

• The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.

  Jack Kerouac

  Beautiful, Hipster, Crazy

  Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “The portable Jack Kerouac”, Penguin Group USA

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• Depression is a death within, a knowledge - terrifying - that you cannot resurrect yourself. Depression is loss of the vision that lets leaves breathe and fall, that lets the air smell of seed and soil. And there must be rage, yes I think there is rage toward such a severing, such a ragged-deep rupture with the world.

  Lauren Slater

  Fall, Loss, Thinking

  Lauren Slater (2012). “Welcome to My Country”, p.129, Anchor

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• I went to bed hungry many nights as a child. It was a Dream that dressed me up when I was ragged, and it was a Dream that filled me up when I was hungry. Now it's my Dream to see that no child in this world ever goes hungry, certainly not here in America, the most bountiful country in the world. We can do better...we must!

  Dolly Parton

  Dream, Country, Children

  6 Copy quote

• I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike.

  Mother Jones

  Mother, Children, Men

  8 Copy quote

• Because it has such a ragged movement. It suggests something like that.

  Scott Joplin

  Movement, Jazz

  21 Copy quote

• I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.

  Peggy Noonan

  Love, Moving, Fog

  Peggy Noonan (1990). “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”, Random House (NY)

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