Quotes & Sayings About Cardboard Boxes

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

Wallace and Gromit's contraptions are created purely for gags, but we all have the urge to invent - especially children. If they're bored, kids will make something from cardboard boxes, yoghurt pots, tape and elastic bands. Often, those constructions are the best. — Nick Park

The outside of the building was covered with faded poster advertising what was sold, and by the eerie light of the half-moon, the Baudelaires could see that fresh limes, plastic knives, canned meat, white envelopes, mango-flavored candy, red wine, leather wallets, fashion magazines, goldfish bowls, sleeping bags, roasted figs, cardboard boxes, controversial vitamins, and many other things were available inside the store. Nowhere on the building, however, was there a poster advertising help, which is really what the Baudelaires needed. — Lemony Snicket

Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years. — Bill Bryson

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

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180 Departed, have left no addresses. — T. S. Eliot

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

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. — Bono

I could find David Beckham naked in a cardboard box on my doorstep and I would drop him off at the pound. — Olivia Wilde

Secure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armoured cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and cheques written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver can control the traffic lights, and there are no police. — Gene Spafford

Kenneth was a sitting duck. In fewer than three years he would kneel alone in this very room, on the exact spot where he now stood, emptying the contents of his desk into cardboard boxes from the liquor store while his gaunt bitter wife reviled him in the Goldbergs' living room and choked the Goldbergs' big brass ashtray with with unfiltered cigarette butts, and if anyone were then to ask him for the secret of a happy life, he would answer: Stasis. — Jincy Willett

What sorts of books are placed by garbage cans on garbage night in the town of Sterns? Mainly they're old class books, the kind people carry around in boxes in their basements for twenty years and then one day think: I will never again in my entire life open this book and there is no sense in its taking up valuable space in my basement, and they throw them out. Right out by the garbage cans they put them, in cardboard boxes with the bottoms falling out.
Books should not ever be treated that way. It's a sin to treat a book that way. That's what I believe to be true. — Alison McGhee

Kugel didn't like attics, he never did. The roofing nails overhead like fangs, waiting to sink into his skull; the cardboard boxes and plastic crates and leather trunks - tombs, sarcophagi - full of ghosts and regret and longing and loss; worse yet was the implication in all this emotional hoarding that the past was preferable to the present, that what came before bests whatever comes next, so clutch it to your chests in mourning and dread as you head into the unknowable but probably lousy future. — Shalom Auslander

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago. — Erma Bombeck

The very concept of home has become tarnished, misty, elusive. As never before, we are living in a rootless age. So many of us are refugees, living out of suitcases, car trunks, cardboard boxes, desperate to go back to a home that no longer exists. — Chris Atack

Most of the matchbooks and little boxes were made of paper, and even if the matches dried out, the containers were split, torn, and shriveled. The damp cardboard dripped with water, discolored and broken. — Penelope Douglas

My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books. — William Nicholson

I do not want to heap coals of fire on anyone's head, but I would like to advise those who keep the living thought of the dead hidden away in cardboard boxes, to pass on as quickly as possibly such explosive material, whose only legitimate heir is the whole world, that is to say, my neighbor. — Pierre Schaeffer

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

Therapies administered included but were not limited to: turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this and other rooms; removing lids and wiggling circuit boards; extracting small contaminants, such as insects and their egg cases, with nonconducting chopsticks; cable-wiggling; incense-burning; putting folded-up pieces of paper beneath table legs; drinking tea and sulking; invoking unseen powers; sending runners to other rooms, buildings, or precincts with exquisitely calligraphed notes and waiting for them to come back carrying spare parts in dusty, yellowed cardboard boxes; and a similarly diverse suite of troubleshooting techniques in the realm of software. — Neal Stephenson

One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are. — Hugo Hamilton

Old tires and large clay conduit pipes make excellent, safe obstacles and tunnels for the pups to explore. They will play for hours with big cardboard boxes; clean, used, large gallon plastic bottles; old tennis balls; and squeak toys. — Monks Of New Skete

We regarded each other sitting around the breakfast table with its big cardboard boxes of "Fear," "Chix," and "Rats. — Donald Barthelme

Rose worked and played so hard that kids all across the country - not just in Cincinnati - were emulating him on sandlots everywhere, proud to dirty their jerseys doing a headfirst "Pete Rose" dive into cardboard boxes used for bases ... whether they needed to slide or not. — Tucker Elliot

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

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

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

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

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