Detritus Quotes & Sayings

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience ...
If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.
Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.
Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real. — Jaron Lanier

[The oyster] accepts algae and detritus in one end - and through this beautiful, glamorous set of stomach organs, out the other end comes cleaner water. — Kate Orff

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs. — Le Corbusier

I find my best writing time is actually 6 A.M., before the detritus of the day - the fish fingers and the school uniform and dogs and bills - have had a chance to clog up my brain. I can usually get 500 words done before 7 A.M. But it is difficult, and the Internet, and social networking, are terrible timesucks. — Jojo Moyes

The language of distinction ceases to be available; is no longer available. We must search CD Rom for meanings which once were clear, but now are obscure. The words are too big for the narrow column of the contemporary newspaper. We are all one-syllable people now, two at most. So we mumble and stumble into our futures. But it is still our task and our reward to scavenge through the universe , picking up the detritus of lost concepts, dusting them down, making them shine. Latin was the best polishing cloth of all, but we threw it away. — Fay Weldon

He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file's pages, but instead it was the ghost of Lula herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives. — Robert Galbraith

Clamboring over building detritus was not the lifestyle Karl Lagerfeld had in mind for this sweet little powder-blue suit. As he oversaw the hand stitching in his atelier he had probably imagined the suit living a life of tea parties and lunches with the girls at the Ivy — Tyne O'Connell

History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool, — William Gibson

In the end, what I love most about contemporary yoga is its ability to
synthesize the everyday with the extraordinary, the practical with the
visionary, the mundane with the sacred. I love that yoga can work to
release my tense muscles, negative emotions, and psychic detritus at the
same time. That it can connect me to my body in ways that create new
neural pathways in my brain. That it offers a practical tool for coping
with everyday stress, as well as an intuitive opening to the hidden magic
of everyday life. — Carol Horton

His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web-all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a dare-devil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night,an actress who ran away with a millionaire- the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned. — Michael Ondaatje

We are stripped of all that gave value and substance to our existence: power and love; in this naked final state, our last lover, our mate, death, comes. Bereft, without cover, we face the elements that will undo us. The winter breakers crash over and through us, flaunting their vigor and our nullity, as if the entire cosmos were now taking its ultimate revenge on the human creature who has lived too long: the dying sun mocks us from the west, for it will return tomorrow to die again, but we go down only once; the rising sun mocks us from the east, for we will not share in the rebirth of light and life; the noonday taunts us with its heat and vitality, for we are detritus; the north finally cloaks us in our last vestments: eternal night. That is how it ends. — Arnold Weinstein

Got to love a dude that says things like "kinetic" and "detritus. — Karen Marie Moning

I was about to leave when my flashlight caught something. A bright white envelope tacked on the board among the yellowed and faded detritus. It had my name on it in the child's printed hand, which was now familiar to me. I walked over quickly and grabbed it down. Instead of ripping it open, I stuck it inside my jacket. I suddenly had a strong urge to get the hell out of there. But as I moved toward the door, I saw a large dark form pass in front of the side window. There was someone outside. — Lisa Unger

The sound of running feet indicated that Sergeant Detritus was bringing some of the latest trainees back from their morning run. He could hear the jody Detritus had taught them. Somehow, you could tell it was made up by a troll: "Now we sing dis stupid song! Sing it as we run along! Why we sing dis we don't know! We can't make der words rhyme prop'ly!" "Sound off!" "One! Two!" "Sound off!" "Many! Lots!" "Sound off!" "Er ... what? — Terry Pratchett

Conviction is a fist of stone at the heart of all things. Its form is shaped by sure hands, the detritus quickly swept from view. It is built to withstand, built to defy challenge, and when cornered it fights without honour. There is nothing more terrible than conviction. — Steven Erikson

Even his voice had accrued a certain rancour as though the detritus of words long left unsaid inside the cave of his mouth had become rusty and scattered in tiny bits on the top of his tongue whenever he opened his mouth to speak. — Chigozie Obioma

In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself," said Detritus, awe and wonder in his voice. "Truly, this a land of opportunity. — Terry Pratchett

Our modern history begins in 1788 with the dumping of the human detritus of Britain ... Yet repositioned in the sunlight , they flourished. ...This was colonial Australia's great gift to the world: practical proof that, when it comes to human society, the soil is more important than the seed. — Richard Glover

WE ARE MADE OF STARDUST, THE SCIENTISTS SAY - THE iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, and the chlorine in our skin forged in the furnaces of ancient stars whose explosions scattered the elements across the galaxy. From the ashes grew new stars, and around one of them, a system of planets and asteroids and moons. A cluster of dust coalesced to form the earth, and life emerged from the detritus of eight-billion-year-old deaths. — Rachel Held Evans

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus. — Steven Johnson

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone. — Kim Edwards

Storms bring the detritus of other people's lives into our own, a reminder that we are not alone, and of how truly insignificant we are. The indiscriminating waves had brutalized the shore, tossing pieces of splintered timber, an intact china teacup, and a gentleman's watch - still with its cover and chain - onto my beloved beach, each coming to rest as if placed gently in the sand as a shopkeeper would display his wares. As I rubbed my thumb over the smooth lip of the china cup, I thought of how someone's loss had become my gain, of how the tide would roll in and out again as if nothing had changed, and how sometimes the separation between endings and beginnings is so small that they seem to run together like the ocean's waves. — Karen White

With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause. — Francine Prose

Vimes relaxed a little. Detritus's intelligence wasn't too bad for a troll, falling somewhere between a cuttlefish and a line-dancer, but you could rely on him not to let it slow him down. Detritus — Terry Pratchett

What did I tell you about Mister Safety Catch?' said Vimes weakly.
When Mister Safety Catch Is Not On, Mister Crossbow Is Not Your Friend,' recited Detritus, saluting. — Terry Pratchett

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Existentialism
"every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind," we have entered the familiar Wordsworthian Romantic territory in which nature is phenomena and spirit is noumena and the task of the human person is to draw his being from whatever inscrutable force produces, organizes, and infuses the phenomenal universe - an "ineffable essence which we call Spirit. Being as not being stable but forever in flux and transition. Even history, Which seems obviously about the past, has its true use as the servant of the present.' Emerson and Buddhism stand for spirituality purged of creed detritus.' the essence of Existentialism is that you find meaning in nature, wisdom, mind and body. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many ghosts might return to the promenade, haunted by the echoes of those promises, perhaps eager to catch a glimpse of what could have been? Would they laugh at the survivors shuffling about in this briny detritus? Or would they cry?"

Reid, A. J. (2012-11-08). A Smaller Hell (Kindle Locations 885-886). . Kindle Edition. — A.J. Reid

There was so much filth to clean up; so many broken pieces to fix; so many errors to correct. Every morning she left her house she let out a quiet sigh, as if in one breath she could will away detritus of the previous day.

--Three Daughters of Eve — Elif Shafak

Executives don't burn out and leave when they feel deep satisfaction. They don't create the human detritus that disgruntled managers do. — Srikumar Rao

We can't leave this world without leaving a lot of detritus behind. We never go out as cleanly as we come in; and even when we come in, there's the afterbirth. — Charlaine Harris

Now there are some people, not you of course, who would say we should go to the authorities, and this is because they have no grasp at all of the realities of London for the lower classes; no grasp at all of the rookeries and the detritus of decay and squalor that is their lot. Yes? — Terry Pratchett

She wanted a choice beyond: Housewife versus lawyer. Madonna versus whore. An option not mired in the lingering detritus of some Victorian-era dream. — Chuck Palahniuk

How many snapshots in the world were actually just-after shots, the moment that elicited the shooter to press the button never captured; instead, the detritus just following, the laughter, the reaction, the ripples. — Reif Larsen

Each man must administer his hatred cautiously. Mine is equitable. I distribute it evenly among those who are frozen in the past and those who perspire in the present. Because while the former are hemorrhoidal in their sensibility, the latter are constipated in the brain. And they complement each other by both betraying the law of life that demands the immediate defecation of all useless detritus, be it antiquated illusion or contemporary cowardice. — Juan Filloy

I love to vacuum. There's just something so satisfying about hearing detritus sucked up into a vacuum. Sand makes such a great sound when being vacuumed off a hardwood floor. — Rachel Nichols

The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death. — Nick Cutter

Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same. — David Rakoff

Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days, but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law. There are a whole quiverful of offenses available to a policeman who wishes to pass the time of day with a citizen, ranging from Loitering with Intent through Obstruction to Lingering While Being the Wrong Color/Shape/Species/Sex. It occurred briefly to him that anyone not making a dash for it when they saw Detritus knuckling along at high speed behind them was probably guilty of contravening the Being Bloody Stupid Act of 1581. But it was too late to take that into account. Someone was running, and they were chasing. They were chasing because he was running, and he was running because they were chasing. — Terry Pratchett

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life's legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Cynie Cory roams the outer reaches of the heart's territory, from the snowy winter of family life to the tropical jungles of love. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it is as big as the country she writes about. Is she the quintessential American girl? You bet she is, part Annie Oakley, part Emily Dickinson - sharpshooting poet of wild nights. She zooms in on the detritus of love - the broken fragments, the fallen leaves - and puts together a collage that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Watch out - she's driving down your street. — Barbara Hamby

Essex was just a shadow in the room, the shadow of a thing I wanted, which was itself a shadow of wanting. But it was unspeakably sweet to feel even that, and terrifying to know how quickly it would pass. A moment inscribed on water, a memory that would fade to grey. I was nothing but a ghost hunter, chasing the wraith of the man I used to be. A beachcomber of my own detritus. — Alexis Hall

Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed. — Harlan Ellison

She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone. She — Max Porter

The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner - the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques - inflict heartache on all who live among them. These — Orhan Pamuk

The ambition of 'Ten Thousand Saints,' Eleanor Henderson's debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus. — Stacey D'Erasmo

The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy - a process that reached its peak during the 1980s - and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling. — Angela Y. Davis

You're not just looking up into a curtain of black. You're looking into the eye of the universe. Stare for a while and you start to realize -- on a deep, gut level -- that the moon is a giant rock circling us in space. The sun is a violent, fusion-fueled ball of plasma and gas millions of miles away that destroyed the atmospheres of all of the inner planets (including Mars, which is farther away from it than we are) and would do the same to ours if we weren't lucky enough to have a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind. The cute little pinpricks of light you see out there are other giant, explosive, incredibly pissed-off balls of gas floating in an infinite void, most of which are far more impressive than our puny sun. And that smear of milky white through the sky? That's the center of our own galaxy -- a gigantic pinwheel circling a supermassive black hole like floating detritus around the vortex of a flushing toilet. — Johnny B. Truant

I was in a fast-food restaurant for the first time in my adult life, an enormous and garish place just around the corner from the music venue. It was mystifyingly, inexplicably busy. I wondered why humans would willingly queue at a counter to request processed food, then carry it to a table which was not even set, and then eat it from the paper? Afterward, despite having paid for it, the customer themselves are responsible for clearing away the detritus. Very strange. — Gail Honeyman

Where's my daddy?
Is that my daddy?
It goes, "I fink, derefore I am. I fink."
It is Sergeant Detritus the troll!
That's not my daddy! — Terry Pratchett

When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn't been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the riddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid, I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child's pull-tab book.
We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying. — Kevin Powers

It was like a child addressing a tidal wave, saying, I will not be moved - and before the words are out of his mouth, all is ocean, leaving no sign; not only no sign of the child, but no sign of his defiance, no sign that anything opposed the crushing sea in the least, no eddy, no swirl, no detritus, only simple, plain, indisputable nothingness. — Brent Weeks

Thrice damned she howls like Cerberus to the night
Guarding virtues that lie like forgotten stains
On oaken floors that pave the willow lined paths of the past
That lead to a meadow filled with the detritus of wasted love
Rotting under a forgotten sun that no longer shines
In a heart gone cold therein lies the haste of anger. — Neil Leckman

Actually, no. I won't ever go digital. I work with thirty-five or large format. I like the hand-jobs, you know. And I still do most of my own printing. I've developed such a profound distaste for touch-up and modern artifice - comes from snapping too many derelicts and detritus, perhaps, but I love it. Photo bloody Shop can go stuff it. A picture should be honest, even if the subject is contrived on the ground, you know; not dolled-up for advertising punch or sex appeal. — Pansy Schneider-Horst

The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time. — Fred Hoyle

Inside a barn is a whole universe, with its own time zone and climate and ecosystem, a shadowy world of swirling dust illuminated in tiger stripes by light shining through the cracks between the boards. Old leather tack, lengths of chain, rope, and baling twine dangled from nails and rafters and draped over stall railings. Generations of pocketknives lay lost in the layers of detritus on the floor. — Carolyn Jourdan

It had always been a part of his job which he found difficult, the total lack of privacy for the victim. Murder stripped away more than life itself. The body was parceled, labelled, dissected; address books, diaries, confidential letters, every part of the victim's life was sought out and scrutinized. Alien hands moved among the clothes, picked up and examined the small possessions, recorded and labelled for public view the sad detritus of sometimes pathetic lives. — P.D. James

The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God's detritus. — Julian Barnes

Some dreams matter, illuminate a crucial choice or reveal some intuition that's trying to push its way to the surface. Other, though, are detritus, the residue of the day reassembling itself in some disjointed and chaotic way ... Frantic dreams, they left me tired, and I woke grouchy to another rainy day, the sky so densely gray and the rain so thick that I couldn't that I couldn't see the opposite shore [p, 166] — Kim Edwards

This is nothing personal, you understand," said Charley to Nobby. "It's just a wossname. Had a wizard in here the other night talking about it. Sort of bendy educational thing, you know?" He appeared to think for a moment. "Learning curve. That was it. It's a learning curve. Detritus, get your big stony arse over here for a moment. — Terry Pratchett

Vimes walked forward to the other carriage, poked his head inside and said, "We're going to be ambushed, lads." "Dat's interestin'," said Detritus. He grunted slightly as he wound the windlass of his crossbow. "Oh," said Cheery. "I don't think they'll try to kill us," Vimes went on. "Does dat mean we don't try to kill dem?" "Use your own judgment. — Terry Pratchett

(A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and ... all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for. — Valerie Martin

The footprints go this way," said Cuddy, "and then they return. But the ones coming back aren't so deep as the ones going. You can see they're later ones because they're over the top of the other ones. So he was heavier than he was coming back, yes?"
"Right," said Detritus.
"So that means ... ?"
"He lose weight? — Terry Pratchett

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt. — China Mieville

After centuries of silence, someone or something was lying outside on the stone step . . .

"Are you deaf?" Death asked arriving abruptly with screams and cries and a fetid smell of rotting matter filling the room.

"Why are you here?" the Old Crone asked, knowing the answer before she asked the question. "Go away."

"When someone knocks you're supposed to open the door!" Death said, coughing as though she had swallowed a lot of water.

"What are you doing here?" the Old Crone asked again "and why are you amorphous? Show yourself! I don't like it when you look like nothing at all."

"Open the door!" Death rasped, appearing as a drowned cat coughing up minnows and river detritus. "Our future depends upon it! — Denny Taylor

When you have a family, even though you might move a lot, you collect all of these things. It's the detritus of your family and they become the symbols of your family life, and your unit out in the world. In that moment I wanted to allude to the fact that the way my parents' relationship was falling apart was impacting me and my brother, my parents, but also our symbols. — Jesmyn Ward

This Is Not a Novel memorializes the treasures and detritus of one man's singularly cultured mind. ( ... ) If you don't know Writer's work at all, try This Is Not a Novel. There may be some doubt about exactly what kind of book it is, but not that it's altogether wonderful. — Michael Dirda

But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence. — JY Yang

There is mud everywhere, slicking the asphalt and piling up in corners along with the detritus of daily life: pop cans, cigarette butts, used condoms and bullet shells. — Isaac Marion