Rags Quotes - Page 2

• Commend me to sterling honesty though clad in rags.

  Walter Scott

  Honesty, Sterling

  Walter Scott (1851). “The Waverley Novels”, p.60

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• There was a horrible smell in the kitchen the next morning when Harry went in for breakfast. It seemed to be coming from a large metal tub in the sink. He went to have a look. The tub was full of what looked like dirty rags swimming in gray water. "What's this?" he asked Aunt Petunia. "Your new school uniform," she said. Harry looked in the bowl again. "Oh," he said, "I didn't realize it had to be so wet.

  J. K. Rowling

  Morning, Dirty, School

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• Not to rag on myself, but when people say, 'What does it feel like to be an icon?' I'm like, 'My dog does not think I'm an icon, my cat does not think I am an icon, my cousin does not think I am an icon.' I have a really lovely group of friends, and I just don't think about it.

  Kathleen Hanna

  Dog, Cousin, Cat

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• Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little— crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand. - "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

  Mark Twain

  Laughter, Blow, Race

  The Mysterious Stranger ch. 10 (1916)

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• Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Princess, Gold, Triumph

  Frances Hodgson Burnett (2012). “A Little Princess”, p.146, Collector's Library

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• First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.

  Jean Genet

  Firsts, Mines

  Jean Genet (1994). “The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays”, p.31, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Is she become a rag doll? Are the wolves become children? It seems quite possible, there on the twilight fringes of dying. With some faint spark of herself, the little girl holds on to the idea. Even a rag doll has more life than does a dying child.

  Jane Lindskold

  Girl, Children, Twilight

  Jane Lindskold (2002). “Through Wolf's Eyes”, p.211, Macmillan

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• I must say, though, that a man who has staked his whole life on the card of a woman's love and who, when that card is trumped, falls to pieces and lets himself go to the dogs -- a fellow like that is not a man, not a male. You say he's unhappy -- you know best. But all the nonsense hasn't been taken out of him yet. I'm sure he really believes he's a smart fellow just because he reads that rag Galignani and saves a muzhik from a flogging once a month.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Dog, Smart, Fall

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• and nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old

  Jack Kerouac

  Growing, Forlorn, Nobody Knows

  Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.366, Penguin

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• Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Art, Rain, Weather

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.440, Pan Macmillan

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• Ah, Father! That’s words and only words! Forgive! If he’d not been run over, he’d have come home today drunk and his only shirt dirty and in rags and he’d have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been sousing and rinsing till daybreak, washing his rags and the children’s and then drying them by the window and as soon as it was daylight I should have been darning them. What’s the use of talking forgiveness! I have forgiven as it is!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Running, Children, Father

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (1999). “Crime and Punishment”, p.303, Modern Library

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• There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Together, Want, Way

  "Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia". Book by Marya Hornbacher, www.glamour.com. 1998.

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• Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite; Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now, as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.

  John Donne

  Fall, Heart, Thinking

  John Donne, Theodore Redpath (2009). “The Songs and Sonets of John Donne”, p.166, Harvard University Press

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• I don't buy these rag magazines that feed off of stolen, you know, press. They're basically stealing someone's image in order to make money for themselves... They wait at the end of my street in their cars. Every time I exit my home, I have company.

  Ashton Kutcher

  Home, Order, Car

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• The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait - I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.

  Anne Lamott

  Hate, Team, Daddy

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• The easiest thing to do is to rag on the media, because it isn't doing a very good job right now. It is so much easier to profit from celebrating the worst aspects of ourselves. Acting strikes me as the antithesis of that. We can examine the worst aspects of ourselves, but we don't have to celebrate them.

  Tom Hanks

  Jobs, Media, Acting

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• There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, east a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Honesty, Equality, Government

  Robert Green Ingersoll, Herman E. Kittredge (1909). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”

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• When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream? When, in my rags—without desires—shall I retire contented into the mountains? When, seeing that my body is merely sickness and crime, age and death, shall I—free, fearless, and blissful—retire to the forest? When? When, oh when?

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Dream, Joy, Fearless

  Nikos Kazantzakis, Carl Wildman (1953). “Zorba the Greek”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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• In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.

  Leonard Cohen

  Light

  Song: If It Be Your Will

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• Harry had the impression that even the barman was listening in. He was wiping the same glass with the filthy rag; it was becoming steadily dirtier.

  J. K. Rowling

  Glasses, Listening, Becoming

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• The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.

  James A. Baldwin

  Wall, Responsibility, Color

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• Content with poverty, my soul I arm; And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

  John Dryden

  Soul, Arms, Poverty

  John Dryden, John Mitford (1847). “The Works of John Dryden in Verse and Prose”, p.189

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• What children don't understand, and can't understand until they grow up some, is how much the whole fabric and process of human society depends on everybody agreeing to ignore, most of the time, the fact that all of us are, most of the time, inadequate, incompetent, pitiful, and, in fact, naked to our enemies. None of us really has very much in the way of spiritual, moral clothing. We dress ourselves in rags. And we agree to say nothing about it. To a very large extent, it is human charity that clothes us.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Spiritual, Children, Growing Up

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• Adam had once told Gansey, "Rags to riches isn't a story anyone wants to hear until after it's done.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Stories, Done, Want

  Maggie Stiefvater (2012). “The Raven Boys”, p.106, Scholastic Inc.

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• I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.

  Mark Twain

  Religious, Book, Reading

  Mark Twain, William Dean Howells (1967). “Selected Mark Twain-Howells letters, 1872-1910”

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