Blacking Quotes & Sayings

It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him. — Harry Lloyd

Nobody gets through life without facing challenges. What's important is how we handle them. Tough times can be excellent opportunities to grow and become a better person. — Sandra Vischer

Fucking, drinking, smoking, loving, living, freebasing, spending, laughing, crying, working, falling apart, kissing, writing, blacking out. — Jardine Libaire

Most of the time, particularly with this record, 'The Light of the Sun,' I really just been standing in front of a microphone and blacking out musically, you know. I'd come back a couple hours later and there's six songs from beginning to end, you know? I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know how I'm going to say it. — Jill Scott

I have a stand-up routine I do about masturbation and the unwanted thoughts that go through women's heads when they put their hands under their sheets. I need a story to think about. I need a fantasy that makes sense. I can't just finger myself and picture Johnny Depp's face. It needs a sense of realism, like how did I meet Johnny Depp? He lives in France. I don't have a work visa. Besides, he has children and I've made it quite clear that I don't want to be a mom and I don't want to be stepmom either. — Jen Kirkman

Here he lies like something melting away. His mother's blood comes quaking howling brassing bawling blacking down his mad little veins. — Aeschylus

Tshikona is lwa-ha-masia-khali-i-tshi-vhila, "the time when people rush to the scene of the dance and leave their pots to boil over." Tshikona "makes sick people feel better and old men throw away their sticks and dance." Tshikona "brings peace to the countryside ... " It is an example of the production of the maximum of available human energy in a situation that generates the highest degree of individuality in the largest possible community of individuals. — John Blacking

We must ask why apparently general musical abilities should be restricted to a chosen few in societies supposed to be culturally more advanced. Does cultural development represent a real advance in human sensitivity, or is it chiefly a diversion for elites and a weapon of class exploitation? — John Blacking

Don't rush to spend time by yourself. Don't hurry to alienation. It's an inevitable destination. Time will eventually shroud you like velvet curtains, blacking out everything. — Joshua Mohr

You do not get to pick and choose which parts of her to love, Dorian had once said to him. He'd been right. So painfully right. Nesryn — Sarah J. Maas

I look. At the two-thirty spot I see a group of men watching two women kiss. I've never entirely understood why men like watching two women, or having two women at once. To me it just seems potentially confusing: four breasts, two whoosits, a lot of work to do ... I imagine blacking out from overload. — A.M. Homes

One reason I'm such a wayward prognosticator of rightwing trends is that I'm incapable of blacking out enough neural sectors to see the world through reptilian-brained eyes, a prerequisite for any true channeling of the mean resentments and implanted fears that drive hardcore conservatives. — James Wolcott

If you want guarantees in life, then you don't want life. You want rehearsals for a script that's already been written. Life by its nature cannot have guarantees, or its whole purpose is thwarted. — Neale Donald Walsch

Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. — Armistead Maupin

I'm for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them the individual comes out banged on her head. The artist is nothing. It's really tragic. — Marilyn Monroe

Never surrender...never give up! Keep walking down the roads of life that will lead you to your dreams and happiness — Timothy Pina

The ultimate aim of dancing is to be able to move without thinking, to be danced. — John Blacking

Thus, if a composer wants to produce music that is relevant to his contemporaries, his chief problem is not really musical, though it may seem to him to be so; it is a problem of attitude to contemporary society and culture in relation to the basic human problem of learning to be human. — John Blacking

In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,
if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,
and they are themselves so much the better morally for it. — Henry David Thoreau

As I reach my thirtieth year of service as a butler in a gentleman's household, I find myself looking back. Between my secret recipe for boot blacking (an indispensable tool for a butler), and a vastly superior method to remove wine stains from velvet (which some will erroneously hold to be an impossibility), I find my memories salted with some faint wisdoms, a few tested experiences, and many, many interesting stories. — Karen Hawkins

We may be able to prove conclusively that all men are born with potentially brilliant intellects ... and that the source of cultural creativity is the consciousness that springs from social cooperation and loving interaction ... the majority of us live far below our potential, because of the oppressive nature of most societies. — John Blacking

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.
Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it. — Armistead Maupin

Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer? — Elena Ferrante

It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue. — Bill Taylor

When you're lonely and blacking out in strange places, you let other lonely people do what they want to you. You call it free love. — Melissa Broder

I was coming so hard I literally saw stars. My orgasm seemed to go on forever, blacking out my vision and tearing through my body so violently I felt it had to leave a scar - and God, I'd wear that scar with pride. — J.L. Merrow