Quotes & Sayings About Paper Waste

If you file your waste-paper basket for fifty years, you have a public library. — Tony Benn

BENDER: Dying sucks butt! How do you living beings cope with mortality? LEELA: Violent outbursts. AMY: General sluttiness. FRY: Thanks to denial, I'm immortal! BENDER: Damn it, I'm supposed to be perfect. Inspector 5 gave me his blessing! [He pulls out his scrap of paper and looks at it.] How could he bring me into this world knowing I'm gonna die? ZOIDBERG: So you wish you were never born, maybe? BENDER: Yes, anything less than immortality is a complete waste of time! ZOIDBERG: Then suicide it is. Step into my office. I'll give you a nice Kervorking. This — Courtland Lewis

Pandas and rain forests are never mentioned when it comes to the millions of people taking joyrides in their Range Rovers. Rather, it's the little things we're strong-armed into conserving. At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near the cream counter that read NAPKINS COME FROM TREES - CONSERVE! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading YOU WASTE NAPKINS - YOU WASTE TREES!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there's no mention of the mighty redwood when you order your four-dollar coffee. The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free. — David Sedaris

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. — H.G.Wells

The discovery of the telephone has made us acquainted with many strange phenomena. It has enabled us, amongst other things, to establish beyond a doubt the fact that electric currents actually traverse the earth's crust. The theory that the earth acts as a great reservoir for electricity may be placed in the physicist's waste-paper basket, with phlogiston, the materiality of light, and other old-time hypotheses. — William Henry Preece

These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 'Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.' ... If mathematics is indeed the science of self-evident things, mathematicians are a phenomenally stupid lot to waste the tons of good paper they do in proving the fact. Mathematics is abstract and it is hard, and any assertion that it is simple is true only in a severely technical sense - that of the modern postulational method which, as a matter of fact, was exploited by Euclid. The assumptions from which mathematics starts are simple; the rest is not. — Eric Temple Bell

If you're the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People's lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It's a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste. — Marc Andreessen

It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips?I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain. Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste. — Steve Wozniak

Management, a science? Of course not, it's just a waste-paper basket full of recipes which provided the dish of the day during a few years of plenty and economic growth. Now the recipes are inappropriate and the companies which persist in following them will disappear. — Leon Courville

Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site. — Holly Bourne

It's a huge Carthusian monastery, stuck down between rocks and sea, where you may imagine me, without white gloves or hair curling, as pale as ever, in a cell with such doors as Paris never had for gates. The cell is the shape of a tall coffin, with an enormous dusty vaulting, a small window ... Bach, my scrawls and waste paper - silence - you could scream - there would still be silence. Indeed, I write to you from a strange place. — Frederic Chopin

Are you deliberately trying to waste our time," Hal asked in an icy voice, "or are you just being petty?"

"A little of both," said Azrael. — Mirriam Neal

With frightening suddenness he now began ripping the pages out of the book in handfuls and throwing them in the waste-paper basket.
Matilda froze in horror. The father kept going. There seemed little doubt that the man felt some kind of jealousy. How dare she, he seemed to be saying with each rip of a page, how dare she enjoy reading books when he couldn't? How dare she? — Roald Dahl

Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper. — Dodie Smith

The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located. — Donald Knuth

He grabbed the legs and addressed their owner ... current owner anyway. "Hold still. I'll get you out in a second." Then he hissed at me "Trash goes in the garbage can, Zeke, not people."
It was clear to me this guy was trash, but Griffin probably wanted to sort him into paper, plastic, glass, and human waste of space. See? Psychotic. — Rob Thurman

I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient. — Deborah Eisenberg

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. — Cormac McCarthy

How happy is the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe. — W. H. Auden

Sometimes I worry about the amount of paper I waste. — Chris Raschka

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? — Virginia Woolf

The hungry kid smiles, as though the cascade of waste paper is a firework display. She squints into the sun to follow them as they fly. — M.R. Carey

One day the Constitution of Colorado is the highest law of the state. The next day it's waste paper. — Robert F. Williams

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket. — Samuel Beckett

My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow? — Sylvia Plath

But what I really long to know you do not tell either: what you feel, although I've given you hints by the score of my regard. You like me. You wouldn't waste time or paper on a being you didn't like. But I think I've loved you since we met at your mother's funeral. I want to be with you forever and beyond, but you write that you are too young to marry or too old or too short or too hungry
until I crumple your letters up in despair, only to smooth them out again for a twelfth reading, hunting for hidden meanings. — Gail Carson Levine

Computers may save time but they sure waste a lot of paper. About 98 percent of everything printed out by a computer is garbage that no one ever reads. — Andy Rooney

What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life. — Virginia Woolf

So you keep catching them words, you hear? Pluck them out of the wind. String them together like the finest set of pearls. Line them up on paper. And if it hurts too much to say them, then you sing them, or whisper them, or write them into a story. But don't waste them. Your words matter more than you know. — Natalie Lloyd

Harvard graduates just cannot shake the idea that they know better than everyone else what's best for us and that they're capable of running a mammoth, unwieldy government program providing each one of us with the precise health insurance we need, at a good price, with no waste or fraud. Trust them, they worked it all out on paper their junior year. — Ann Coulter

Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests. — John Cage

How can you worry about pleasing people [critics] and what they're going to think? How can you do anything creative if the whole thing is motivated by trying to please somebody else? To me, the whole idea of what I thought art, or music, or anything creative was about pleasing yourself and hoping that whatever you're creating will reach someone else who'll see it on that level. To worry about someone picking it apart and discussing it element for element, and trying to knock you down or weaken it in any way doesn't amount to anything but a waste of paper. — Elliot Easton

Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections; to how few is the old guide-book now a clew! Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones are used for waste paper. — Herman Melville

At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near the cream counter that read NAPKINS COME FROM TREES - CONSERVE! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading YOU WASTE NAPKINS - YOU WASTE TREES!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there's no mention of the mighty redwood when you order your four-dollar coffee. The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free. Were they to charge you ten cents per napkin, they would undoubtedly make them much thinner so you'd need to waste even more in order to fight back the piping hot geyser forever spouting from the little hole conveniently located in the lid of your cup. — David Sedaris

Please DO waste art materials. Use paper. Empty paint jars. Deplete pens. if it's teaching you stuff, it's not being wasted. — Danny Gregory

I wrapped my Christmas presents early this year, but I used the wrong paper. See, the paper I used said 'Happy Birthday' on it. I didn't want to waste it so I just wrote 'Jesus' on it. — Demetri Martin

If you felt like a smoke and couldn't find a pipe, a book was your man every time. Cohen realized people wrote things in books. It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper. — Terry Pratchett

P.S. Nothing personal, but I think this journal assignment is a waste of time. I know I have to do something to make up for all the work I'm missing at school, but I HATE busywork. And that's what this journal thing is. Half the teachers at school assign work they never read. When we get stupid assignments like that, I always write somewhere on my paper "blah blah blah" or "I bet you're not even reading this," are you? or "Give me a sign if you're reading this." They never are. — Kate Klise

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... — Virginia Woolf

Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, has launched a movement to convince people to not go to college.3 It's a waste of money. The return on investment isn't there anymore. School has gotten too expensive. . . If writing [computer] code is your deal and you're able to go to a trade school that enables you to write code, that's far better than a computer science degree from a four-year college or university that looks great on paper, but doesn't give you the skills you need when you graduate. — John Dearie

We need to address our Nation's mounting garbage problem by generating less garbage, particularly paper waste. — Wendell H. Ford

She glanced up at him, and in that moment he pulled his wet shirt over his head. She forced her mind blank. Blank as a new sheet of paper, blank as a starless sky. He came to the fire and crouched before it. He rubbed the water from his bare arms and flicked it in the flames. She stared at the goose and sliced his drumstick carefully and thought of the blankest expression on the blankest face she could possibly imagine. It was a chilly evening; she thought about that. The goose would be delicious, they must eat as much of it as possible, they must not waste it; she thought about that. — Kristin Cashore

From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all. — Jeffrey Eugenides

I walk across the park to her flat. It is over-heated and there is a great deal of pink. This used not to unnerve me. Now when I step into the bathroom I recoil.
Pink bath, pink basin, pink toilet, pink bidet, pink tiles, pink wallpaper, pink rug. Brushes, soap, tooth brush, silk flowers, toilet paper: all pink. Even the little foot-operated waste-bin is pale pink. I know this little waste-bin well. Every time I sleep here I wonder what I am doing with my time and hers. She is sixteen years younger than I am. She is not the woman with whom I want to share my life. But, having begun, what we have continues. She wants it to, and I go along with it, through lust and loneliness, I suppose; and laziness, and lack of focus. — Vikram Seth

You can't rush art." I crumpled another lost attempt and tossed it behind me. "Besides, patience is a virtue."

"It's a virtue until it's a waste of time," he pointed out.

The cello unleashed a few notes that sounded strangely bright for such an instrument, and Hal nodded in its direction. "See; even a musical instrument agrees with me. — Mirriam Neal

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation. — W.B.Yeats

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted" - "not permitted" - "this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.
-Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Words of war, on a piece of paper. Where peace is torn off, crumbled and toss in the waste basket. — Anthony Liccione

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Every month, about 20 tons of paper are wasted in restaurant menus alone, and so, you know, by that rationale, if you just ate your menu that was made from organic, local products, you could eliminate that paper waste. — Homaro Cantu

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that. — Kate Atkinson

My daughter Penelope has just looked over my shoulder to see what I have done so far. She remarks that it is beautifully written, and every word of it true. But she points out one objection. She says what I have done so far isn't in the least what I was wanted to do. I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond and, instead of that, I have been telling the story of my own self. Curious, and quite beyond me to account for. I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me? If they do, I can feel for them. In the meantime, here is another false start, and more waste of good writing-paper. What's to be done now? Nothing that I know of, except for you to keep your temper, and for me to begin it all over again for the third time. — Wilkie Collins

When I write I just keep a waste paper basket handy in case I am experiencing a block. — Ruskin Bond

It has been the sad experience of many that much of the best and the most beautiful is lost to those whose mental food consists exclusively of the sensational paper or the cheap novel, or of that frothy mass of waste material which is thrown up like scum upon the molten metal of life
novelettes, serials, and fragments of a type which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the weak, nor develop the immature. — Charles Webster Leadbeater