Raggedy Quotes & Sayings

The prescription for spiritual transformation has often been too individualistically oriented. We are encouraged to engage in spiritual disciplines so that we might have the power to do what we can't do by will power alone. But what happens when people don't have the "will power" to engage spiritual disciples on a consistent basis? Our character is left untended. "In a wild world like ours, your character, left untended, will become a stale room, an obnoxious child, a vacant lot filled with thorns, weeds, broken bottles, raggedy grocery bags, and dog droppings. Your deepest channels will silt in, and you will feel yourself shallowing. You'll become a presence neither you nor others will enjoy, and you and they will spend more and more time and energy trying to be anywhere else."[1] So what are we to do? — J.R. Woodward

My life has often been described as 'from rags to riches,' but in fact, the Rosses were never raggedy. — Diana Ross

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. — Rick Bragg

Something quite close sounded like a cow giving birth. It turned out to be an old hurdy-gurdy organ, hand cranked by a raggedy man in a battered top hat. She sidled away as politely as she could, but as noise went, it was sticky; you got the feeling that if you let it, it would try to follow you home. — Terry Pratchett

Are you a good human being, Gerry? I mean good in the sense that if you put everything in the scales, they'd tip that way?" It startled her. "I don't know. I haven't thought of myself that way. I think I like the lush life a little too much. That's why I married George. I'm vain. I like men to admire me. I've got a coarse streak that comes out at the wrong times. But I do try to live up to ... some kind of a better image of myself. And I try to improve. I came from nothing, Trav, from a little raggedy-ass spread in the Panhandle with too many kids and too few rooms. — John D. MacDonald

But I was kind of surprised that God would send a saver to me in such raggedy clothes. — Christopher Paul Curtis

But I saw the pair of them, along with everyone else. Hard to miss. Him towering like a raggedy scarecrow in that flapping black scholar's gown, and the sword always quiet next to him, sweet as honey, and poison with it. — Ellen Kushner

Writing this now, God, how I miss the cultural side of the eighties - the rhetoric, the raggedy clothes, the politics, gigs you were frightened to go into, Radio 1 when it had weird bits, Channel 4 when it was radical, the NME when it had writers, and the thrill of discovering underground music and new comedy for yourself. — Stewart Lee

I had to came to tell you how beautiful you look. Really, Jay, you look amazing. Hard to believe the raggedy little girl who punched me in the face could grow up to look like this. — Jillian Dodd

[The militia experts] accuse antigoverment agitants of paranoia, yet they spin around and claim that militias speak in coded phrases, have underground bunkers, and are secretly conspiring to take over the world and enslave minorities. They say it's lunacy that men at the pentagon can conspire, yet they're certain that farmers out on the plain are plotting as we speak.

They depict the United Nations as weak und ineffectual, yet they portray raggedy-ass backwoodsmen as the world's biggest organized military threat. — Jim Goad

Dear Humanity; we regret being alien bastards. We regret coming to Earth. And we most definitely regret that the Corps just blew up our raggedy-ass fleet! — Avery Johnson

Reese Witherspoon is as cute as a button on Raggedy Ann's overalls, but irresistible raw sex appeal is not one of her qualities. — Roger Ebert

I like things clean, and I have a biannual clean-out of my apartment. I throw out raggedy things and things I never wear, and there's a Goodwill around the corner for anything worthwhile. — Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann

Tupper, I think in The Victor. Alf was a working class, whippet-thin runner known as the Tough of the Track who won all his races despite having been up all night making briquettes to save a friend's business, missing his bus to the stadium, being knocked over mid-race by a poncy upper-class twit and losing one of his raggedy running shoes. — Douglas Skelton

The original suit was designed by a guy named Mr. Jay from Hollywood. But nowadays I'm having the suit duplicated. At this point I have about three good suits and about three really raggedy ones. — Paul Reubens

Cyrus floats away from the glowing entrada entrance; there's a swooshing sound like an invisible rocket just blew past and then a flood of old African souls comes surging forth. They pour out into the tunnel, thousands and thousands of them, and barrel through the COD goons without stopping. They're wearing head scarves and raggedy clothes, carved jewelry and beaded necklaces; a few even have chain links around their arms and legs. I feel the wind of hundreds of years of pent up rage and frustration release across my face. Riley's screaming as loud as he can beside me and we're both laughing hysterically and crying at the same time. Everything — Daniel Jose Older

About novel Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott.
Q: What does the title "Imperfect Birds" mean?
It's a line from a poem by Rumi. The line is "Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds", and it's really about how these kind of scraggly, raggedy nests that are our lives are the sanctuary for other people to step into, and that if you want to see the divine, you really step into the absolute ordinary. When you're at your absolutely most lost and dejected ... where do you go? You go to the nests left by other imperfect birds, you find other people who've gone through it. You find the few people you can talk to about it.
from Writer's Digest May/June 2010 — Anne Lamott

Behind the building was a field and when the potpourri scent of her cleaner made me sneeze, I went outside. There were calves there, these sweet things that watched me with less interest than I watched them. There was this raggedy one, sitting in the middle of the field, its mother nearby. I didn't realize it was sick until it tried to get up and it couldn't. It kept trying and it couldn't and then, eventually - it didn't. After a while, a truck drove in. A man and a boy got out, looked it over while its mother stood close. It was dead, the calf. Dead and too heavy to load into the truck bed, so they tied a rope around its neck, tied the other end to the truck and dragged it off the field like that. Its mother watched until it disappeared and when it was out of view, she called for it. Just kept calling for it so long after it was gone. Sometimes I feel something like that, between my mom and me. That I'm the daughter she keeps calling for so long after she's been gone. — Courtney Summers

DAD, MAX THE ROACH, AND OUR RAGGEDY OLD VAN WERE BACK WHERE THEY BELONGED! — Rachel Renee Russell

My first four roles were all nice guys, Raggedy Man being one of them. — Eric Roberts

I've always loved dogs and have had one since I was three. We bought her from a kid selling puppies out of a cardboard box on the street where we lived in New York City. Great dog. We named her 'Marcella' after a Raggedy Ann character. She grew up with us. — Bob Peterson

I see you've sent another group of raggedy ship's boys off to sea ... All that batch lacks is a tomboy girl to go with them to put them straight. — L.A. Meyer

Emma felt like a Raggedy Ann doll accidentally mixed in with the Barbies. — Meg Gray

Still, I'm not convinced that you were right, Dai
that it's such a bad thing, a useless enterprise to reel and reel out my memory at night. Some part of me, the human part of me, is kept alive by this, I think. Like water flushing a wound, to prevent it from closing. I am a lucky one, like Chiyo says. I made a terrible mistake. In Gifu, in my raggedy clothes, I had an unreckonable power. I didn't know it at the time. But when I return to the stairwell now, I can feel them webbing around me: my choices, their infinite variety, spiraling out of my hands, my invisible thread. Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. It's become my sanctuary here in Nowhere Mill. A threshold where I still exist. — Karen Russell

It was a summer shower but didn't appear to know it, and it was pouring rain as fast as a winter storm. Miss Perspicacia Tick sat in what little shelter a raggedy hedge could give her and explored the universe. She didn't notice the rain. Witches dried out quickly. — Terry Pratchett

Does Raggedy Ann have a cotton crotch? — John Sandford

I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty lists to see if by some chance anybody form his home town had been killed. He didn't even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. I mean, can you just see *two* guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam? — Michael Herr

Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don't push me, and I won't push you. Dong le ma? — Joss Whedon

Virginia," Billy said urgently. "Don't do this."
"Shut up,Billy."
"Think of the people in San Francisco."
"I don't know any of the people in San Francisco," Virginia answered, then paused. "Well,actually I do,and I don't like them. But I do like you,Billy, and I'm not going to allow you to end up as lunch for some raggedy lion-monster-thingy."
"A sphinx," Machiavelli corrected her. He was standing at the bars again. "Mistress Dare," the Italian said carefully. "I absolutely applaud you for what you want to do for your friend. But I urge you to think of the bigger picture. — Michael Scott

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness. — Jack Kerouac

You know... the word "homeless", gives you this very negative image. A filthy raggedy hobo... it's no good. It's too demeaning of a word if you ask me. It's just not politically correct enough... If it were up to me, I'd rather we be called "residentially challenged — Nobuyuki Fukumoto

I came back to work when my children were two months old. At that early age, they seem to have little awareness of anybody but their Raggedy Ann dolls, so it wasn't a matter of them missing me. I was missing them. — Jane Pauley

Bill Mitchell said he really liked it. But when he asked the other four their opinions, we all took one look at ourselves in our raggedy long winter coats and cracked up. We knew we weren't likely to tempt anyone or anything, but what the hell, it was as good a name as any. — Otis Williams

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. — Roy Blount Jr.

What happened, man? Gerry and Ginsberg are cold, and dead, in the ground. Kesey's stoned, and out of town. We've come to the end of the brotherhood song. The children brandish knives upon each other's throats, and their loaded 45's sit snug in lunch boxes nestled safely between Oreo cookies and a ham sandwich. Where are you now, oh ancient hipsters? Raggedy Beats beat down and broken wheel raggedy wheelchairs down ghostly geriatric wards. Where are you now, oh day-glow dreamers? Have you gotten off the bus and into your Mercedes? Did you get that second mortgage, and bear your fattened little babies? Where is that girl with flowers in her hair? Where is the man with revolution in his veins? We ask ourselves "where did we go wrong?" But there is no we. There is you, and then there is I. You do what you need to survive, And I do what I must to stay alive. We stand here Bleeding, slicing each other's wrists With the icy ridges of hardened jagged hearts, Cassandra's — Bearl Brooks

Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. — Jack Kerouac

But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said ... but you said ... and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me? — Toni Morrison

They talk to kids in their regular voices and say things that they would say in their own living rooms. Their bulletin boards are always a little raggedy, and their desks are always a little messy, and their libraries are always a little out of order, but kids love them because they talk about real things with real voices and they always tell the truth. — Matthew Dicks

She is often the broken-winged one, who does everything all wrong until people realize she's been doing it ... pretty right all along. She's the poor girl who never dressed right, who had torn hose, and they were all baggy around her ankles. She's the Raggedy Ann of the sophisticated world, who pulls it out at the last minute, flies by the seat of her pants, cackling all the way home. She is the late bloomer, the late start, the autumn bush, the winter holly. She is Baubo, all the classical Greek goddesses. She is the old girl who still blushes, and laughs, and dances. She's the truth teller, maybe that people hate to hear, but they learn to listen to. She is not dumb and in some ways is not shrewd. She works on passion, and the doll in her pocket, and the intuition that leads her into and through all the world. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The what?"
"Lone Wolves." He turned to show me the back of his raggedy jacket. Sure enough, a snarling wolf face stared back at me from the leather.
"Wait a second," I said. "Isn't it supposed to be 'Lone Wolf' as in, you know, one? If there's more than one, then it kind of defeats the purpose of being 'lone', doesn't it?"
The leader squinted hard, as if trying to follow my logic and getting lost. — Jaye Wells