Miner Quotes & Sayings

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface. — Alan Bennett

Basically, I get paid to be crazy. I get paid to believe I'm someone else, live in a completely false reality, and believe it's real. And that's a little scary. And I do it to the best of my ability. But it's kind of like swimming out to sea. You have to leave enough energy to swim back, and sometimes you get scared you swam too far. — Rachel Miner

I've got the body of a model and the face of a coal miner. — Jason Flemyng

I was a little adult for my age as a teenager, and I didn't feel like I socially fit in with my peers. — Rachel Miner

I know I'm not a coal miner, but I do long hours and I never complain, and there is nowhere else I'd rather be. So, yeah, that's how I'd define myself. I want to do it right, and prove people wrong once and for all about the myth of child stars. — Daniel Radcliffe

There're three ways to get there from here, each one worse than the last. You can either hold your breath through the plague colonies, slip through Slaverville, or take the mountain route." Something flashed in his expression, something somber, which seemed out of place on his animated face. "That's where the cannibals really like to hole up."
"You've seen them?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah. And it's, like, totally worse than you can imagine. Their steady diet of grilled Homo sapiens really screws with their heads. And the miner cannibals in North Carolina? They're the worst! Dude. They don't even grill. — Kresley Cole

A lot of people will call me nuts or crazy, but I've always been pretty stable. By some people's standards, I might be crazy. But I realize that I'm not going to harm anyone, and the only place that I live is within my own universe, really - so it's O.K. — Rachel Miner

I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada in a tiny town called Searchlight. My dad was a hard rock miner. My mom took in wash. I grew up around people of strong values - even if they rarely talked about them. — Harry Reid

All creation is a mine, and every man a miner. — Abraham Lincoln

Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason - or at least they appeal to certain types of people. Just like you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart - or maybe we should say the work discovers you. Schubert's Sonata in D Major is sort of the same thing. — Haruki Murakami

I think my life is often more interesting in the tabloids than it is in real life - or less; it depends. But I'm curious. I just try and see what they're going to make up next, and I try to just have fun with it and not take it all too seriously, because otherwise you can't function. — Rachel Miner

It was at times like this that one of those waves of bestiality ran through the mine, the sudden lust of the male that came over a miner when he met one of these girls on all fours, with her rear in the air and her buttocks busting out of her breeches. — Emile Zola

Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world. — John McPhee

Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber, there lives a world. Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on feast days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love, inhabit that skull. By what are we to measure the value of a man? His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates. It stirs us, prolongs itself in us. Man's gestures are an eternal spring. Though we [may] die for it, we shall bring up that miner from his shaft. Solitary he may be, universal he surely is. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Time to put on your miner's hat and headed toward the bright light. — Megan Abbott

My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania. — Irwin Thomas

That must have been what I looked like to my doctor friend. That must be what I look like to anyone with a real problem - active-duty soldier, homeless person, Chilean miner, etc. A little tiny person with nothing to worry about running in circles, worried out of her mind. Either way, everything will be fine. — Tina Fey

The more government takes in taxes, the less incentive people have to work. What coal miner or assembly-line worker jumps at the offer of overtime when he knows Uncle Sam is going to take sixty percent or more of his extra pay? ... Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong. If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they'll be more industrious; they'll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all - and more revenue for government.4 — Donald J. Trump

the detective is usually standing making the suspect sit to given him a dominating height over the suspect Pacing — Steven Miner

One miner at Robinson Deep Mines, Daniel, [...] claims that as an induna or "boss boy", he had sought the company of a "girlfriend", that is, a young Basotho man, because he was not authorized to go in town to "see women". However, when he got special permission to leave the mining complex, he recalls with barely suppressed emotion that, during such leaves, he would soon long to be reunited with his "boy-wife". He and his peers claimed that "[they] loved them better" and preferred them over the experienced (female) city streetwalkers. — Chantal Zabus

Being me is a job - is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn't something people give away and then there's drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That's a full-time occupation: that's like being a miner, or a nurse. — A. L. Kennedy

The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist. — John Ruskin

They are closing the mine in two weeks, they say. Six days a week bumping down in the gondola, pecking out the rocks and hauling them back up, doing it again the next day for twenty-seven years, one cave-in, three thin raises, and a failed strike. Where am I going to go every day, what am I going to do with all that sunshine? — Lou Beach

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes. — Blaise Cendrars

Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners. — Jennifer Haigh

Writer is a miner; he works in the gloomy places like a miner to get the precious material. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'm not cool - quite the opposite. I'm a real geek. — Rachel Miner

That's the way mining is. You always find a way to cheat fate," he says. "That's what's beautiful about being a miner: Supernatural things always happen." Now — Hector Tobar

If there is one man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. — George Orwell

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory. — Aneurin Barnard

Despite their exhaustion and worries, Miner and Ennek made love that night, tracing fingers and tongues over one another's marks and scars. Their bodies were like books, Ennek thought, and their stories could be read inch by inch. He hoped fervently for happy endings. — Kim Fielding

One day work is hard, and another day it is easy; but if I had waited for inspiration I am afraid I should have done nothing. The miner does not sit at the top of the shaft waiting for the coal to come bubbling up to the surface. One must go deep down, and work out every vein carefully. — Sir Arthur Sullivan

I'm wearing pants, for f
's sake. Lay off. I mean, it's not like I'm a f
ing lead miner. There are harder jobs in the world. But when people feel the freedom to create Tumblr accounts about my c
, I feel like that wasn't part of the deal ... But whatever. I guess it's better than being called out for the opposite. — Jon Hamm

The obstinate miner
of the void
exploits
his fertile mine — Jean Cocteau

Bravery isn't something that you have. It's a choice you make, every day, to get the job done." Again, — Kathy Miner

Not exactly. You see, Portia and I think that the coal miner thing's very overdone. No one will remember you in that. And we both see it has our job to make District 12 tributes unforgettable,' says Cinna.
I'll be naked for sure, I think.
'So rather than focus on the coal mining itself, we're going to focus on the coal,' says Cinna.
Naked and covered in black dust, i think.
'And what do we do with coal? We burn it,' says Cinna. 'You're not afraid of fire, are you, Katniss?' He sees my expression and grins. — Suzanne Collins

Coal is not dear for the coal-miner who can use it there and then, nor is khadi dear for the villager who manufactures his own khadi. — Mahatma Gandhi

Letter 90


When I used to sit up late at night writing in our bed, I was calmed by the sound of your breathing. I would hold my breath and watch your chest rise and fall. I felt like a blind man soothed by the scents and sounds of a garden.

As I lie here in bed writing this letter, there is only the sound of my own breathing.

When I hold my breath, there is only silence.

Tonight I feel like a miner being lowered farther and farther into a dark mine shaft, longing for the scents and the sounds of a garden. — Gregory Colbert

I've got many different voices - I have a Southern girl, an Irish girl. I have a gibberish language that you'd have to decipher. I guess I try to never take myself too seriously. — Rachel Miner

As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.)
Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners - who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying - look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. "The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find," one miner told me wryly. — Amy Chua

A coal miner from Chongjin whom I met in 2004 in China told me, People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation. We all know we think that and we all know that everybody else thinks that. We don't need to talk about it. — Barbara Demick

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then. — Tim Murphy

Etho thought about the last ten orbits of the sun and looked at Guude, "I should have stayed in the forest. — Stampy Miner

I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does. — Vincent Van Gogh

No one knows why dwarfs, who at home in the mountains lead quiet, orderly lives, forget it all when they move to the big city. Something comes over even the most blameless iron-ore miner and prompts him to wear chain-mail all the time, carry an ax, change his name to something like Grabthroat Shinkicker and drink himself into surly oblivion. — Terry Pratchett

Competition is a moral problem and an emotional tangle and a political conundrum. — Valerie Miner

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew. — Robert W. Service

My parents were so proud when I got a scholarship to go to theatre school - it was unheard of that a coal-miner's son should go to drama school. — Brian Blessed

When judging modernity, it is all too tempting to take the viewpoint of a twenty-first-century middle-class Westerner. We must not forget the viewpoints of a nineteenth-century Welsh coal miner, Chinese opium addict or Tasmanian Aborigine. Truganini is no less important than Homer Simpson. — Yuval Noah Harari

All towns have their secrets, and Albany/Corvallis was no exception. But secrets are not secrets unless almost everybody knows something about them, and then they become accepted, if submerged part of everyday life, too familiar and mundane to be of lasting interest to anyone but a few gossips - and poor fare for them. — Mark Miner

Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen ... But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity. — Bertrand Tavernier

Peeta, you said at the interview you'd had a crush on me forever. When did forever start?

Oh, let's see. I guess the first day of school. We were five. You had on a red plaid dress and your hair...it was in two braids instead of one. My father pointed you out when we were waiting to line up."

Your father? Why?"

He said, 'See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner.'"

What? You're making that up!"

No, true story. And I said, 'A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?' And he said, 'Because when he sings...even the birds stop to listen. — Suzanne Collins

The reason I love teaching, it's like being a miner. I find all these undiscovered jewels and, with the right motivation, they're amazed at what they can do. I have to show them their capability. — Rafe Esquith

I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal. — Rachel Miner

The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town. — Christopher Bollen

Literature is a peculiarly public product of a particularly private endeavor. — Valerie Miner

It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once. To make progress is a kind of miner's work; it doesn't advance as quickly as one would like, and as others also expect, but as one stands before such a task, the basic necessities are patience and faithfulness. In fact, I do not think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much one would get stunned or disturbed. — Vincent Van Gogh

A society must create lots of sunshine for its miners as they need the sun most! And 'to be remembered, to be respected' is a good sunshine; 'safety in the mine' is a good sunshine! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

You'd rather own gold; not the miner — Kevin O'Leary

In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory? — Jamaica Kincaid

Who deserves more credit than the wife of a coal miner? Mother was one. — Merle Travis

Being a miner he sat on his heels more comfortably than on a chair — Ford Madox Ford

You'd rather own gold; never own the miner. — Kevin O'Leary

What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union. — Mary Harris Jones

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner. — Tom Jones

He that in ye mine of knowledge deepest diggeth, hath, like every other miner, ye least breathing time, and must sometimes at least come to terr. alt. for air. — Isaac Newton

He said, See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner."
-Peeta Mellark in The Hunger Games — Suzanne Collins

I think someone in the union has the right to a private vote, and that's why I'm anti-card check. I grew up in a union family. My grandfather was a coal miner; he was in the union. — Jim Renacci

Life is as the current spark on the miner's wheel of flints; While it spinneth, there is light; stop it, all is darkness. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

Rick Santorum is the grandson of a coal miner. His dad was the manager of a V.A. hospital. — Foster Friess

To be a good researcher is to be a good detective, and I enjoy ferreting out tidbits of information. For a diary book like 'A Coal Miner's Bride,' newspapers come in handy for small everyday details such as weather reports. — Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Genius is the gold in the mine, talent is the miner who works and brings it out. — Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith. — Felix S. Cohen

I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed. — Bernard Hill

For writers from working-class families, the making of art is cultural disenfranchisement, for we do not belong in literary circles and our writing rarely makes it back home. — Valerie Miner

African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham. — Douglas A. Blackmon

My father was a miner and he worked down a mine. — Kevin Keegan

Members of teams that tend to avoid conflict must occasionally assume the role of a "miner of conflict" - someone who extracts buried disagreements within the team and sheds the light of day on them. They must have the courage and confidence to call out sensitive issues and force team members to work through them. This requires a degree of objectivity during meetings and a commitment to staying with the conflict until it is resolved. Some — Patrick Lencioni

Part of the excitement of doing independent film is the complete unknown of what lies in store for the film's future. — Rachel Miner

It turned out plant collecting was a solitary occupation. In the past Robert had enjoyed being alone, or so he thought. Actually he had rarely been alone for long: working in hotels, in stables, on ranches and farms, and as a miner, he had always been around others. Now, out in the woods or up in the hills or out on the flat central plain, he could go for days without speaking to anyone. His throat seemed to close up and he had to keep clearing it, singing songs aloud or reciting the Latin names of plants, just to check that he still had a voice. 'Araucaria imbricata. Sequoia sempervirens. Pinus lambertiana. Abies magnifica'. He was surprised at how much he missed people.. — Tracy Chevalier

The CM stands for Cole Miner. — CM Punk

The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often,
a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose
in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;
chose "Angel Band" by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar,
ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks.
We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginia
knocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea.
No one asked why he was so solemn today.
It was warm. It was relatively quiet.
To anyone else, this place could feel sinister.
But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place.
No one was ever here long enough to know us.
And we liked it that way. — Taylor Rhodes

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity. — Steven Chu

The hardest thing I've had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none. — Thomas Jones

I didn't even watch the soaps when I was in them because it's like a coal miner coming home and staring at the coal scuttle - I was never a great lover of watching myself act. — Ross Kemp

Oh yeah, I would have been a coal miner, I would think, if I hadn't had tuberculosis when I was 12. — Tom Jones

My dad played for a coal-mining team in eastern Ohio; he was a very good pitcher. If he hadn't hurt his arm, he probably would have got a shot somewhere. He hurt his arm one spring, didn't warm up good enough, couldn't throw a fastball anymore. Another coal miner taught him how to throw the knuckleball. — Phil Niekro

A man's reputation is the opinion people have of him; his character is what he really is. — Jack Miner

So this was where lust was satisfied. If I'd been an old-time miner I'd have asked for my gold nugget back. — Ava Gardner

Deafness, though it be total and congenital, imposes no limits on the intellectual development of its subjects, save in the single direction of the appreciation of acoustic phenomena. — Edward Miner Gallaudet

I am a firm believer that every few years one needs to shake one's life through a sieve, like a miner in the Yukon. The gold nuggets remain. The rest falls through like the soft earth it is. — Amy Poehler

Don't matter if you care," the old miner said, "if you don't own what you care about. — Kurt Vonnegut

All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man, will have their lasting place in the history of mankind, and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for,-real nuggets of thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope. — Max Muller

I love to bake. There's something very ritualistic about it, kind of magic. — Rachel Miner

Reading. I know it's not a very active activity, but it is in my head. — Rachel Miner

My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough. — Neil Gaiman

Homo sapiens simonus, aka Simon Miner. Only one of his kind. Male. Predatory. Highly adaptable. Dark brown hair and deep blue eyes. 6'3. His well-muscled frame was agile and strong. His deadly smile incapacitated his victims. Voice promised safety. Sexual prowess compromised victim's intellect (temporarily). Yet he was intent on one vital organ - the heart. — Erin Kellison

I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape. — Dwight Yoakam

When we ask what ought to be the relative remunerations of a nurse or a butcher, or a coal miner and a judge at a high court, of the deep sea diver of the cleaner of sewers, of the organiser of a new industry and a jockey, of the inspector of taxes and the inventor of a life-saving drug, of the jet-pilot or the professor of mathematics, the appeal to 'social justice' does not give us the slightest help in deciding ... — Friedrich August Von Hayek