Trash Quotes - Page 6

• It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

  John Updike

  Book, Smell, Giving

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• I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I'd been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion...well, surely there was a way to learn that trick.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Beautiful, Stress, Years

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• Though you did eat all the pizza." "I only had five slices," Simon protested, leaning his chair backward so it balanced precariously on its two back legs. "How many slices did you think were in a pizza, dork?" Clary wanted to know. "Less than five slices isn't a meal. It's a snack." Simon looked apprehensively at Luke. "Does this mean you're going to wolf out and eat me?" "Certainly not." Luke rose to toss the pizza box into the trash. "You would be stringy and hard to digest.

  Cassandra Clare

  Mean, Thinking, Snacks

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.530, Simon and Schuster

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• My room is cleared. My head is cleared. Earlier, around dawn, I took out the last load of trash. I look around and see what's left. Nothing. There is no more Daelyn Rice. As I was. As I am. Or will become. I'm a blank slate

  Julie Anne Peters

  Dawn, Looks, Lasts

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• As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

  W. H. Auden

  Perseverance, Book, Believe

  "A Certain World: A Commonplace Book". Book by W. H. Auden, 1970.

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• I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Regret, Book, Reading

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• It's a truth universally acknowledged that an FBI special agent in possession of great skill and talent is likely to engage in trash talk every now and then.

  Julie James

  Skills, Special, Agents

  Julie James (2011). “A Lot Like Love”, p.50, Penguin

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• Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.

  Roger Ebert

  Law, Giving, Asking

  Roger Ebert (1997). “Roger Ebert's Video Companion”, Andrews McMeel Pub

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• There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the
  toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your
  eye by the checkout: corn.

  Michael Pollan

  Eye, Shine On, Average

  Michael Pollan (2006). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, p.31, Penguin

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• With a chuckle, Jack mumbled under his breath to Nick. 'It's like watching the preppy, well-bred versions of you and me trash-talking.

  Julie James

  Talking, Preppy, Wells

  Julie James (2011). “A Lot Like Love”, p.41, Penguin

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• But it does no good--solves nothing--to distance myself from the front lines of human need by using the mail as a safe shelter. I believe that serving the best ends of humanity means getting out in the middle of it just as it is, not staying home writing checks and thinking hopeful thoughts. The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are. And you're damned right that's idealistic. No apology. When idealism goes into the trash as junk mail, we're finished.

  Robert Fulghum

  Distance, Believe, Mean

  Robert Fulghum (2010). “Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door”, p.173, Ivy Books

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• Oh, it's just a trash can. Chill out." (Marco) BAM! BAM! BAM! "Okay, so it's four trash cans," (Marco) " BAM! BAM! BAM! "Do you hate trash cans? Is that your problem? Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?!!" (Jake)

  Katherine Applegate

  Hate, Jake, Four

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• You can talk about strategy all you want, but what really matters is resilience. On the last nine holes of the Masters or the Open, there's going to come at least one point when you want to throw yourself in the nearest trash can and disappear. You know you can't hide. It's like you're walking down the fairway naked. The gallery knows what you've done, every other player knows and worst of all, you know. That's when you find out if you're a real competitor.

  Hale Irwin

  Real, Golf, Player

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• The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on.

  Stephen King

  Real, Years, Scary

  Stephen King (2016). “It”, p.79, Simon and Schuster

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• Leigh did what any sane female faced with such an e-mail would do: deleted it to resist the temptation of replying, cleared her trash to resist the temptation of recalling it, and then called tech support to restore all her recently deleted e-mails. (Chasing Harry Winston)

  Lauren Weisberger

  Support, Temptation, Female

  Lauren Weisberger (2009). “Chasing Harry Winston: A Novel”, p.269, Simon and Schuster

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• I skip the introduction. If the book goes in the trash, I want it to go because of my thoughts on it, not because of some Asshole's thoughts who wrote the introduction.

  James Frey

  Book, Want, Introduction

  James Frey (2004). “A Million Little Pieces”, p.249, Anchor

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• She didn't even notice right away that a small animal had come out from behind a nearby car and was slowly making its way toward the trash can she was standing near. She flipped through some old files in her mind, trying to come up with what this thing might be, and after a few seconds decided that--impossible as it seemed--it was a fox.

  Maureen Johnson

  Animal, Car, Mind

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• The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health--congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.

  Calvin Trillin

  Baseball, Stars, Ambition

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• The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary meritto the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.

  Susan Sontag

  Book, Literature, May

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• We can’t have landfills forever and we can’t ask others to accept our trash.

  Jaime Lerner

  Forever, Accepting, Landfills

  "Curitiba: An Environmental Showcase". Interview with Roberta Brandes Gratz, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 6, 2013.

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• There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at random. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we "can't bear to throw away.

  Russell Lynes

  Brother, Moving, Feet

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• I wasn't even aware of the Year of the Family. I couldn't give a toss. These things - the year of the family, the year of the three-legged dog. I think it's all trash.

  Roddy Doyle

  Family, Dog, Thinking

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• When the riots happened in L.A., they didn't go to Beverly Hills to trash Rodeo Drive. They trashed their own neighborhoods. It's one of those tragedies that we always see in riot situations, where the only thing that they can lash out against is the stuff that's right there in their own communities. They destroy the very things that help them survive in their own community. There is a level of futility in that.

  Samuel L. Jackson

  Community, Tragedy, Beverly Hills

  "The Freedomland Interview with Kam Williams". aalbc.com.

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• Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.

  Saul Bellow

  Media, Political, Racist

  "Bellow in his own words". www.theguardian.com. April 6, 2005.

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• I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash.

  Bernard Goldberg

  Years, White, News

  "O'Reilly and Bernie Goldberg Respond to Jon Stewart's Criticism of Fox News". "The O'Reilly Factor" with Bill O'Reilly, www.foxnews.com. April 19, 2010.

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