Sawdust Quotes

• All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the past together again. So let's remember: Don't try to saw sawdust.

  Dale Carnegie

  Time, Horse, Kings

  Dale Carnegie (2010). “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”, p.162, Simon and Schuster

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• I've had my best times when trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across a sawdust floor. I've always loved high style in low company.

  Anita Loos

  Style, Gowns, Evening

  60 Copy quote

• Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question.../ Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' / Let us go and make our visit"' 'I'm in love with you,' he said quietly.

  John Green

  Love You, Night, Oysters

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.90, Penguin

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• Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 5 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

  T. S. Eliot

  Night, Oysters, Talking

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 13 (1917)

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• The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them. That's all you need to know. Nothing more. Don't demand to know "why such things exist." Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Laughing, Demand, Cucumbers

  Marcus Aurelius (2002). “Meditations: A New Translation”, p.111, Modern Library

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• Have you ever tried to split sawdust?

  Eugene McCarthy

  Splits

  Response to accusations that he had split the US Democratic Party by campaigning for president, NBC TV, October 23, 1969.

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• It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry - school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general - but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.

  Melanie Thernstrom

  School, Unhappy, Firsts

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• [History is] that terrible mill in which sawdust rejoins sawdust.

  Edith Sitwell

  History, Mills, Terrible

  Edith Sitwell (2011). “Taken Care Of: An Autobiography”, p.68, A&C Black

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• It (suicide) became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead. Life was a cake that looked good on the bakery shelf but turned to sawdust and salt when I ate it.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Suicide, Growing Up, Cake

  Maggie Stiefvater (2014). “Shiver Series (Shiver, Linger, Forever, Sinner)”, p.817, Scholastic Inc.

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• He closed his eyes as she put her hand on his shoulder, and in that instant, nothing else mattered. Not the song, not the place, not the other couples around him. Only this, only her. He gave himself over to the feel of her body as it pressed against him, and they moved slowly in small circles on the sawdust-strewn floor, lost in a world that felt as though it had been created for just the two of them.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Song, Couple, Eye

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• I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually... Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures.

  Georges Braque

  Mean, Discovery, Substance

  "Cahiers d'Art" by Dora Vallier, p. 76, 1954.

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• Where once stood the steadfast pines, great, beautiful, sweet, my hand touched raw, moist stumps. All about lay broken branches, like the antlers of stricken deer. The fragrant, piled-up sawdust swirled and tumbled about me. An unreasoning resentment flashed through me at the ruthless destruction of the beauty that I love.

  Helen Keller

  Beautiful, Sweet, Hands

  Helen Keller (2012). “The World I Live In and Optimism: A Collection of Essays”, p.28, Courier Corporation

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• The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust - almost anything.

  Henry Ford

  Weed, Apples, Fuel

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• I've always loved high style in low company.

  Anita Loos

  Style, Gowns, Lows

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• All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Dolls, Trash

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.172, Modern Library

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• Some were scattered about the ring, one or two went in the sawdust tub, one I spat out as I fell, and I am thundering sure I swallowed a couple

  Johnny Basham

  Couple, Two, Boxing

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• If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable.

  Sheri Holman

  Mother, Baby, Children

  Sheri Holman (2007). “The Mammoth Cheese”, p.89, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky

  T. S. Eliot

  Sky, Evening, Muttering

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 1 (1917)

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• Hey, I can cook." "How do you know? You haven't eaten anything since before the Norman Conquest." "I've never had any complaints." "Given the infants you date, I'm not surprised. You could serve them sawdust and they'd eat it with a smile, dazzled by the swing of your broadsword." "What do you know about the swing of my broadsword?" "More than I care to. Women talk." Which shut him up, as he started wondering who'd said what.

  Angela Knight

  Swings, Hey, Care

  Angela Knight (2011). “Master of Shadows”, p.67, Penguin

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• I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky. . . . Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars.

  Jacqueline Cochran

  Stars, Cutting, Views

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• In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

  T. S. Eliot

  Women, Talking, Culture

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 13 (1917)

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• Humor is a hole that lets the sawdust out of a stuffed shirt.

  John McKeithen

  Humor, Shirts, Holes

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• If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Law, Ifs

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• The more subtle thing is more speculative. The world is well past its long-term carrying capacity for human beings living a European, much less an American, lifestyle predicated on planned obsolescence. International economic growth is largely a matter of accelerated movement of materials from mines and forests to the dump. Instead of saving and buying decent furniture we can pass on to our children, we charge our credit cards for shaped heaps of sawdust and glue that fall apart in less than three or four years.

  Denis Hayes

  Children, Fall, Past

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

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• Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway.

  James J. Kilpatrick

  Reading, Serious Person, Practice

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