Nightsoil Quotes & Sayings

And he, who servilely creeps after sense, Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence. — John Dryden

The grey of a bitter, starved-looking morning. The town like a mortally wounded creature, torn by shells, gashed open by bombs. Dead streets - streets of death - death in streets and their houses; yet people still able to sleep and still sleeping. — Radclyffe Hall

When you're held underwater, you think only of air. I remember how I felt about Shanghai in the days after our lives changed - how streets that had once seemed exciting suddenly stank of nightsoil, how beautiful women suddenly were nothing more than girls with three holes, how all the money and prosperity suddenly rendered everything forlon, dissolute and futile. The way I see Los Angeles and Chinatown during these difficult and frightening days couldn't be more different. — Lisa See

People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don't think that's limited to Haiti. — Edwidge Danticat

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. — Ernest Hemingway,

As there are none so weak that we may venture to injure them with impunity, so there are none so low that they may not at some time be able to repay an obligation. Therefore, what benevolence would dictate, prudence would confirm. — Charles Caleb Colton

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions - "Will you fade? Will you perish?" - scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain. — Virginia Woolf

That lazy servant next door was sloppy with the Tso family's nightstool and stunk up the street with their nightsoil," Mama says. "And Cook!" She allows herself a low hiss of disapproval. "Cook has served us shrimp so old that the smell has made me lose my appetite."
We don't contradict her, but the odor suffocating us comes not from spilled nightsoil or day-old shrimp but from her. Since we don't have our servants to keep the air moving in the room, the smell that rises from the blood and pus that seep through the bandages holding Mama's feet in their tiny shape clings to the back of my throat. — Lisa See

I don't have any shame. — Conrad Black

I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them. — Tom Stoppard

You have to have talent. You have to get the audition and then you have to nail the audition. — Joel McHale