Shabby Quotes - Page 4

• A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

  Willa Cather

  Shoes, Matter, Rooms

  Willa Cather (2002). “The Professor's House”, p.59, U of Nebraska Press

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• Humor is widely used by Indians to deal with life. Indian gatherings are marked by laughter and jokes, many directed at the horrors of history, at the continuing impact of colonization, and at the biting knowledge that living as an exile in one's own land necessitates. . . . Certainly the time frame we presently inhabit has much that is shabby and tricky to offer; and much that needs to be treated with laughter and ironic humor.

  Paula Gunn Allen

  Laughter, Land, Impact

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• Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state-that is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation.

  Mikhail Bakunin

  War, Passion, Views

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• It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

  Alice Munro

  Book, Reading, Dust

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.587, Vintage

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• Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

  T. S. Eliot

  New Beginnings, Feelings, Venture

  Four Quartets "East Coker" pt. 5 (1940)

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• The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

  Murray Kempton

  Sacrifice, Reality, World

  Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.16, New York Review of Books

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• We stayed in some pretty shabby places in Europe.

  Phil Collins

  Europe

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• Snot is running down his nose, greasy fingers, smearing shabby clothes.

  Jethro Tull

  Running, Clothes, Low Self Esteem

  Song: Aqualung, Album: Aqualung

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• There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

  William Winwood Reade

  Father, Believe, Angel

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.395

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• ... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in.

  Alice Walker

  Mother, Flower, House

  Alice Walker, Barbara Christian (1994). “Everyday Use”, p.47, Rutgers University Press

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• All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand.

  Hermann Hesse

  Suicide, Fall, Mean

  Hermann Hesse (1983). “Steppenwolf”, Bantam

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• I’m not interested in changing either my suit or my car or whatever with every change in fashion. That’s irrelevant. I don’t judge myself or my friends by their fashions. Of course, I don’t approve of people who are sloppy and unnecessarily shabby or dishevelled… But I’m not impressed by a US$5,000 or US$10,000 Armani suit.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Fashion, Judging, Car

  Lee Kuan Yew (2013). “The Wit & Wisdom of Lee Kuan Yew”, p.148, Editions Didier Millet

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• Tanya Ward Goodman, writing with a big heart, clear eyes, and a light touch, allows us a privileged glimpse into the shabby, enchanted world of traveling carnivals, roadside attractions, and a beloved, eccentric father’s descent into Alzheimers. Just as her dad animated the handcarved, miniature western world of Tinkertown from coat hangers, inner tubes and old sewing machine motors, Tanya Ward Goodman has fashioned her complex and often hilarious memories into a beguiling, wry, and moving work of art.

  Michelle Huneven

  Art, Dad, Memories

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• One of the shining moments of my day is that when, having returned a little weary from an afternoon walk, I exchange boots for slippers, out-of-doors coat for easy, familiar, shabby jacket, and, in my deep, soft-elbowed chair, await the tea-tray.... [H]ow delicious is the soft yet penetrating odour which floats into my study, with the appearance of the teapot!... What a glow does it bring after a walk in chilly rain!

  George Gissing

  Rain, Doors, Shining

  George Gissing (2016). “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft”, p.205, The Floating Press

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• Wisdom often exists under a shabby coat.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Coats

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• In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Country, Art, Writing

  'Babbitt' (1922) ch. 14

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• Love makes the world go 'round, it's true, but lust stops the world in its tracks; love renders bearable the passage of time, lust causes time to stand still, lust kills time, which is not to say that it wastes it or whiles it aimlessly away but rather that it annihilates it, cancels it, extirpates it from continuum; preventing, while lasts, any lapse into the tense and shabby woes of temporal society, lust is the thousand-pound odometer needle on the dashboard of the absolute.

  Tom Robbins

  Track, Lust, World

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• By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

  Murray Kempton

  Mother, Children, Real

  Murray Kempton (2012). “Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties”, p.14, New York Review of Books

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• Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

  Edward Dahlberg

  Genius, Neglected

  Edward Dahlberg (1964). “Alms for oblivion: essays”

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• The question is, when so many others cut corners, shave the truth, self-deal, believe in the fast buck, and follow the crowd along the low road of least resistance, can we even afford to travel the high road of ethical behavior? Frankly, we can't afford anything else. Any other competitive angle is a pure crapshoot in today's business world. Companies with shaky ethics and shabby standards will be crippled as they try to compete in our changing world.

  Price Pritchett

  Business, Believe, Cutting

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• Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

  Randall Jarrell

  Country, Confused, Passion

  "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality" (p. 89), 1980.

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