Cardboard Quotes & Sayings

Nudge threw her arms around my neck. 'I love you Max! I love all of us too!'
Yeah, me too,' Said the Gasman. 'I don't care if we have our house, or a cliff ledge, or a cardboard box. Home is wherever we all are, together. — James Patterson

The supermarket is still open; it won't close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware - when you get back to your empty room, you'll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry. — Christopher Isherwood

Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated - but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down. — Dan Brown

My breakdancing crew used to go to the mall and squat a piece of cardboard there; we had our jam box, and I'd spin on my head and make about forty bucks a day, which was pretty good back then. I was only 14 years old, so I would chase the girls around the mall and eat some pizza and have some change left over. — Vanilla Ice

I'm very crafty! One time I made a television set out of a cardboard box - Everybody thought it was a lark! This was the beginning of a love affair with the arts. — Emma Watson

of a lady cutting off some guy's head, a cardboard box, a one foot — C.R. Trolson

By handling each sentimental item and deciding what to discard, you process your past. If you just stow these things away in a drawer or cardboard box, before you realise it, your past will become a weight that holds you back and keeps you from living in the here and now. Pg.116-117 — Marie Kondo

I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells. Father would generally return — Amos Oz

Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench. — Gene Spafford

I drove through the suburbs, where all the houses looked identical, one variation of another of the same thing. I said to myself, I'd rather fire myself from a cannon, pick up the shit of elephants and eat it, suffocate inside Houdini's water tank, lie beneath the running horses, or sodomise a big cat in a cage and pay the consequences than get trapped in these suburbs of cardboard, gossip, and conformity. — Rawi Hage

Boxes
We built walls of cardboard
thinking they would keep us safe.
And they did.
Until the flames
came. — Carolee Dean

She heard Thorne say something about freeze-dried cardboard and Iko accuse him of being insensitive to those without any taste buds at all. — Marissa Meyer

Honestly, I would eat cardboard rather than go back to eating animals. — Ellen DeGeneres

The most common way to identify a soldier is by the disc around his neck. But these were made of compressed cardboard and so they've all but disappeared. — Chris Roberts

My first playpen was a cardboard box. — Michael Lee-Chin

Shooting hell out of a piece of cardboard doesn't prove anything' was his single-line introduction to the Small-arms Defence Manual. — Ian Fleming

You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross. — Jacqueline Woodson

I live in Vegas, and I see people by the side of the road with cardboard signs who seem like they might have tried that spending their way out of debt thing. — Penn Jillette

The boxes stood there, judging her. Who came up with the names for these things? Early Pregnancy Test was fine, but First Response? What was she, a 911 call? Little cardboard soldiers of doom, ready to deliver a message from the front lines that she had lost, and it was time to surrender to the truth. Never surrender! And now she was quoting cheesy 80s songs in her mind. This was how far she had fallen. — Julia Kent

She breathed deeply and smelled water-logged books, the perfume of rotting cardboard and paper that had dried beneath the furnace of the July sun. If a single breath could summarize an entire life, she supposed that would do. — Joe Hill

On Wednesday, for variety, he accosted Andrew as Andrew went out to check the state of the garden walls and presented a further cardboard box containing ten kilos of tomatoes and a squash like a deformed head of a baby. — Diana Wynne Jones

Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber. — Nicholson Baker

He'd make her work so hard that a job as a cardboard-box presser at the margerine factory would seem like paradise. — Jussi Adler-Olsen

Faint traces of other black churches are tucked away in handwritten ledgers at the state archives at Morrow; in the collections at the University of Georgia in Athens; even in the basement of the Forsyth courthouse, where a cardboard box atop a metal filing cabinet still holds deeds for the land on which black residents once founded Mt. Fair, Shakerag, and Stoney Point - about which nothing is known but names and approximate locations. All that can be said for certain is that, again and again in the fall of 1912, white men sloshed gasoline and kerosene onto the benches and wooden floors of such rooms, then backed out into the dark, tossing lit matches as they went. All over the county, beneath the ground on which black churches stood, the soil is rich with ashes. — Patrick Phillips

His characters may be cardboard, but each has a clear, uncomplicated purpose. Every moment of the story contributes to building conflict. — Donald Maass

Say, it's only a paper moon, Sailing over a cardboard sea, But it wouldn't be make believe, If you believed in me. — Billy Rose

I don't think I've seen that sort of character in a long time in this genre because again, there was a time when you could have quirky, strange characters that you grew to love, you didn't quite understand, you know, and then all of a sudden they became almost cardboard cutouts for awhile. You kind of know the guy, what his deal is - this guy's hard to figure out. He has some strange habits, but, you learn to love him and you discover more about him, where it comes from. — Antoine Fuqua

I HAVE MADE THIS FOR YOU.
She reached out and took a damp square of cardboard. Water dripped off the bottom. Somewhere in the middle, a few brown feathers seemed to have been glued on.
'Thank you. Er ... what is it?'
ALBERT SAID THERE OUGHT TO BE SNOW ON IT, BUT IT APPEARS TO HAVE MELTED, said Death. IT IS, OF COURSE, A HOGSWATCH CARD.
'Oh ... '
THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN A ROBIN ON IT AS WELL, BUT I HAD CONSIDERABLE DIFFICULTY IN GETTING IT TO STAY ON.
'Ah ... '
IT WAS NOT AT ALL COOPERATIVE.
'Really ... ?'
IT DID NOT SEEM TO GET INTO THE HOGSWATCH SPIRIT AT ALL. — Terry Pratchett

Even the best educational computer programs and games, devised with the help of the best educators, contain a tiny fraction of the outcomes of a single child equipped with a crayon and paper. A child's limitless imagination can only do what the computer allows them to, and no more. The best toys, by contrast, are really 10 percent toy and 90 percent child: paint, cardboard, sand. The kid's brain does the heavy lifting, and in the process it learns. — David Sax

Wednesday is pizza day at Chadham High. The lunchroom smells like a cross between a sewer and a dead skunk. Chadham High pizza consists of a cardboard crust and sauce made of mud, topped with some kind of fungus that looks suspiciously like phlegm pretending to be cheese. — Huston Piner

People say we can't do anything about the way the world is; they say it's set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it's mostly paint and cardboard. — Katherine Rundell

You never realize how much your mother loves you till you explore the attic - and find every letter you ever sent her, every finger painting, clay pot, bead necklace, Easter chicken, cardboard Santa Claus, paperlace Mother's Day card and school report since day one. — Pam Brown

When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time - at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I'm the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I broke the mold under my heel. — Laird Barron

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?" asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air.
My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, "Disgusting cardboard it is! — Daniel Amory

It's what's on the record not what labels on it. You know, that's like getting a box of cornflakes and eating the cardboard. — Elvis Costello

So Tumpty tried hiding upside down, behind a pot plant, under a large cardboard box, with his eyes tightly closed. — Polly Dunbar

People in south Manchester overwhelming want to be able to recycle more than they currently can - especially cardboard and plastics - and want more frequent and accessible collections, particularly for those living in flats. — Lucy Powell

I don't care if you eat worms and cardboard; if you eat 35% fewer calories, you will lose weight and your cholesterol levels will improve50 in the short run, but that is not to say that worms and cardboard form a healthy diet. — T. Colin Campbell

A number of visitors called this morning,' Finchley announced with some pride. He took a tray from a waiting footman and displayed it as if it were a baby. Sure enough there was a little heap of cardboard bits, embossed with the names of nobility, acquaintances, friends and the purely curious. — Eloisa James

The first thing I see is the gluten-free section, filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. I skip this aisle because I'm not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. — Anonymous

I could have lived like that. For a long time. People do it. Like a piece of cardboard, walking around tall and flat in the world, without nerve endings, sinews stiff enough to keep any weakness they're holding safely twined up. It keeps the good things from getting in, too. But you barely register emptiness when you only have two dimensions. People do it, keep their constriction mostly intact; except for the moments when they don't. — Mac McClelland

I used to cut guitars out of a piece of cardboard to copy the Strat look. I used a backwards tennis racket for a while and graduated to the cardboard cutout. — Rick Springfield

You're killing me because I want to taste you, everywhere."
I stop chewing the now-cardboard chocolate in my mouth and swallow hard.
"Excuse me?" I whisper.
"I want to slowly undress you and taste every delectable inch of you. I want you squirming and wet."
"Mission accomplished," I mutter and then slap my hand over my mouth as he laughs. — Kristen Proby

Nancy carried a cardboard boxes loaded with books toward the moving van that Saturday morning. Our eyes met and we shared a smile. "You didn't have as much stuff when you moved in," she pointed out wryly. "How many boxes of books is this? Seriously. It's like you're living in a freaking library." I shrugged. "You know me. I have a bit of a book fetish." "I wouldn't mind the books if you'd join us in the 21st century and get an e-reader already. Then when you move a thousand books from place to place, I don't risk throwing my back out. — Anonymous

You can't cure people of their character,' she read.
After this he had crossed something out then gone on, 'You can't even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else. A forty-year-old woman holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces; works tenderly its loose arm. The expression that trembles on the edge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain that to you? — M. John Harrison

Then, finally, the third year, begging the parents, I got the Superman Halloween costume. Cardboard box, self-made top, mask included. Remember the rubber band on the back of that mask? That was a quality item there, wasn't it? That was good for about 10 seconds before it snapped out of that cheap little staple they put it in there with. — Jerry Seinfeld

Then slowly, as his erratic shape approached the next guttering aura he would begin by degrees to become a silhouette, until immediately before the candle he would for a moment appear like an inky scarecrow, a mantis of pitch-black cardboard worked with strings. — Mervyn Peake

I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The projector is giving you exactly what your body needs. Your air sacs are opening up at a slower pace now. This is the amount of oxygen you require to better regulate your system. It's amazing that this is just a piece of cardboard, yet it can have such an effect on you. Why? Because of the power of thought - there is nothing more powerful than the ability to control and send thought. Whenever a new medicine is discovered, I am able to distill its essence and create a projector for it. This — Philip Smith

Johnny shot a glance first at the cardboard cup which she held before then looking at the — Philip Musson

And of course,Addie."
What did he mean by that-"of course, Addie?" Did he mean "Of course you remember this airheaded chick who attacked the mayor with cardboard and had to be bailed out of jail?" That's not what really happened,but how was I supposed to know what he remembered of the incident? — Tristi Pinkston

And just like in your house, your flat, or your cardboard box, if you put too much in there, you can't close the door anymore... Two — Tom Trott

I don't live for stuff and things, and if I had to live in a cardboard box, I would put curtains on it. — Carmen Dell'Orefice

Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became the opposite of east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking in the streets like cardboard cutouts. — Haruki Murakami

My uncle Shawn used to stay with us when we were really young, and I used to come downstairs and see him break dancing on this piece of a cardboard. I probably always thought they were cool since then. I never knew his comedy, but I used to always see him break dancing. And he was terrible at it. — Damon Wayans Jr.

Parents who daily read Robert Lewis Stevenson to their children and surrounds them with blocks, plastic animals, and some cardboard boxes or kitchen pots and pans are going to produce a qualitatively different child from those who spend that time on TV or videos, even if their choices ARE only Winnie the Pooh and Mr. Rogers. — Diane Medved

I pulled out the manuscript [from the envelope] and a great big stiff cardboard finger sprung up. This is someone that was so certain they would be rejected, they would be getting their revenge in advance. I was lucky - it could have been a pipe bomb. — Gardner Dozois

Like everyone, I am formed by my background, and mine was - well, we didn't have a lot of money. I didn't live in a cardboard box, but I did live in a place where, at the end of the week, the money was gone. — Cherie Blair

Mary lifted her own steno book. Only about six pages old, it still had its cool, slim heft and straight cardboard covers. By the end of the month, its pages would be bloated with the pencil strokes of her shorthand, its back would be cracked and its edges softened. And then she would begin another. The march of time. Pauline's eyes — Alice McDermott

Women should look like women. A piece of cardboard has no sexuality. — Alexander McQueen

Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark. — Jo Walton

It's neat how money smells nothing like anything in the world except money, just like cardboard. — Augusten Burroughs

The negative way [of describing God] is a cardboard prop of Christianity to conceal its unknowable God. When this prop collapses, theistic agnosticism emerges, complete with its package of contradictions and non-sensical utterances. — George H. Smith

To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, 'PIZZAS' in inverted commas suggests these might be pizzas, but nobody's promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can't say you weren't warned. — Lynne Truss

He asked my aunt, said, 'Hon, could you get your guitar out and sang us a purty song?' Aunt Faye was a' fanning herself with a big old flap of cardboard and told him, 'I'm too hot to move,' and he picked up his shotgun and blowed her right off the porch and up to Jesus. — Susan Reinhardt

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. — Terry Pratchett

Oliver, we've got something to tell you," Dad says, dumping a cardboard box full of garden waste into a toad green mangler.
Unlike the doctor, when Dad says we, he means we because Mum is omnipotent.
"Who's dead?" I ask, shot-putting a bottle of Richebourg.
"No one's dead."
"You're getting a divorce?"
"Oliver."
"Mum's preggers?"
"No, we - "
"I'm adopted."
"Oliver! Please, shit up! — Joe Dunthorne

I am killed them quick, but they are killing me slow. [Jim Browner in 'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box'] — Arthur Conan Doyle

It's funny how love can fit inside a brown cardboard box. With relationships, people often think that things pile up. But when it ends, they're surprised how few these things turn out to be. Or at least, how few things they are willing to let go of. — Juan Miguel Sevilla

I carry a knife with me so I can cut images out of cardboard boxes. I'm always cutting cardboard. Especially every Thursday, which is recycling day. — Micah Lexier

I feel that I see John Lennon now as not a celebrity. I did then. I saw him as a cardboard cutout on an album cover. — Mark David Chapman

I love science fiction, and one of the things I love about it is that it's so very different. You can read stuff that's just fast-paced adventure, and the characters are cardboard, but who cares, because they're heroes, and we love it. And you can read stuff that's really deep character, and everything in between. — Ann Leckie

She lifted the book to her nose and inhaled the scent lingering in its cardboard bones: a hint of rosewater and Lysol that instantly genie-summoned the Blue Moon Lodge. It was Winnemucca condensed, this book, the only thing she owned that could still predictably take her from here to there. — Armistead Maupin

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. — John Updike

Everything is silent again: but it isn't the same silence. It's raining: tapping lightly against the frosted glass windows; if there are any more masked children in the street, the rain is going to spoil their cardboard masks. — Jean-Paul Sartre

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] — Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own. — Bill Bryson

I don't like that the government is going to manipulate the information to try to convince me that what I'm eating is not what I'm really eating. If people choose to eat cardboard because it's ten cents cheaper, then let them. That's at the root of freedom. But in the reverse, I'd like to know if what I'm eating or consuming or buying is somehow hurting or exploiting someone in another part of the planet. — Billy Corgan

I love when people walk into my house and start grinning: "This is too much - this is so you!" Why give people brown cardboard when you can give them embroidered, crystal-flecked organza? — Kimora Lee Simmons

At times we would have these whole cities that would take up rooms and stretch out all over the house. But they were also very abstract, like 'this piece of cardboard is a pool' and so forth. — Ellen Gallagher

Good with languages," she murmured. With everything she learned about him, he got more and more interesting. Or more mysterious, depending on how you looked at it. "So, good with languages, shovels, and igloos. Anything else?"

The smug look he tossed at her was so wicked it shivered right down her spine. Walked right into that, hadn't she. She shook her head and, looking away to hide her blush, moved her cardboard forward one spot. Without a doubt, he would be good at...other stuff. Jesus. — Laura Kaye

I flapped open the lid of my cardboard guitar case and whipped out my old Martin. Mr. Killen seemed a little taken aback. I think he wasn't sure whether I was going to play the guitar or brain him with it. He breathed a sigh of relief when I went into a song. Bill hustled his guitar out as fast as he could and joined in. I sang loud and strong with the security that comes with knowing that one way or another, it'll be over soon. — Dolly Parton

His trees were now hung all over with scrawled pieces of paper and bits of cardboard with maxims from Seneca and Shaftesbury, and with various objects; clusters of feathers, church candles, crowns of leaves, women's corsets, pistols, scales, tied to each other in certain order. The Ombrosians used to spend hours trying to guess what those symbols meant: nobles, Pope, virtue, war? I think some of them had no meaning at all but just served to jog his memory and make him realize that even the most uncommon ideas could be right. — Italo Calvino

Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style. — James Wolcott

And so we find Fussell living alone in a flat unfurnished except for an exercise machine and 'A cardboard cut-out of Arnold with loin cloth and sword as Conan the Barbarian'. Thus the heterosexual bodybuilder's relationship to homosexuality is revealed as a sad kind of insubstantial shadow of it, a kind of mourning, a ghostly kind of love. — Mark Simpson

Looking down, she became aware of the water, which was covered with a film of calcinous hard-water particles of dirt and soap, and of the body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle. — Margaret Atwood

Once upon a time there was an island named Blogosphere, and at the very center of that island stood a great castle built of stone, and spreading out from that castle for miles in every direction was a vast settlement of peasants who lived in shacks fashioned of tin and cardboard and straw. — Nicholas G. Carr

He was right. Without God at the center, it is hopeless; it is empty; and it was designed by God to be so. The theme of Ecclesiastes could be stated, Life is supposed to taste like cardboard if you insist on eating the box! — Jim Berg

All ye young people now take my advice
Before crossing the ocean you'd better think twice
Cause you can't live without love, without love alone
The proof is round London in the nobody zone

Where the summer is fine, but the winter's a fridge
Wrapped up in old cardboard under Charing Cross Bridge
And I'll never go home now because of the shame
Of misfit's reflection in a shop window pane. — Christy Moore

I've lived here ... my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident. — Jennifer McMahon

The Cat Dancer is a 30-inch piece of wire with some little cardboard cylinders on the end. My cats go crazy for it. I stuck it on the wall with the adhesive mount, but I ended up taking it off so I could hold it and play directly with my cats. — Mark Frauenfelder

And thus Charles found himself wandering around a hotel, trailing federal agents as he held a cardboard coffee cup holder in each hand, instead of out killing misbehaving werewolves. — Patricia Briggs

I've found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours are preparing for writing: pacing around the house, collapsing cardboard bxes for recycling, reading the DVD extras pamphlet from BBC Pride & Prejudice, getting snacks lined up for writing, and YouTubing toddlers who learned the 'Single Ladies' dance. I know. Isn't that horrible? So, basically, writing this piece took me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. — Mindy Kaling

Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum ... We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it's a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk. — Roberto Bolano

In order to keep liking Nick (as opposed to loving him which was completely non-negotiable) Alice sometimes had to look at him obliquely or with her eyes half closed or through a pin hole on a piece of cardboard. Straight on would burn her retinas. — Carol Anshow

One evening, at the time of the Six-Day War, I [Christopher Hitchens] had my wicked way with a lovely lady, who had earlier intimated that she did not perhaps find me entirely repulsive. We procured a decent room, as I remember, at the Cadogan Hotel. Perhaps a little flown with wine, I asked her to don a Martin Amis face mask which I had - with a combination of sticky tape, elastic bands, cardboard, and a much-treasured photograph - prepared earlier. The fair damsel was happy to oblige, and thus attired she permitted me to embark on the hugely agreeable pathway to libidinous fulfillment. — Craig Brown

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box. — Ellen Goodman

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books. — Frank Gehry

He tried to remember the feel of her hand when she'd shaken his. "I'm Livia McHugh. It's nice to meet you."
Smoke poured from the cardboard as he remembered his response. "Blake Hartt. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance." He'd said his name, but what he'd been thinking was: She touched me. I am someone. I count. — Debra Anastasia

I think the more
she has failed at things like relationships
and parenting, the more she has cut
herself off from feeling bad about those
things. And if you don't let yourself feel
bad, sooner or later you stop feeling
good, too. You insulate yourself. Build
up layers, like stacking paper, everything
growing heavier. And when the weight
becomes too much, those layers compress.
Become hard. Sad, really, to think that
Kristina has turned herself into cardboard. — Ellen Hopkins