Ration Quotes & Sayings

Love is horribly stable, and each of us is only allotted a certain portion of it, a ration. It is capable of appearing in an infinity of forms and attaching itself to an infinity of people. But it is limited in quantity, can be used up, become shopworn and faded before it reaches its true object. For its destination lies somewhere in the deepest regions of the psyche where it will come to recognize itself as self-love, the ground upon which we build the sort of health of the psyche. I do not mean egoism or narcissism. — Lawrence Durrell

I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader? — Adam Johnson

Good. Drink your tea," he ordered. "It will make you feel better."
Nothing will make me feel better, she thought, but she drank it down. It was hot and sweet. Mr. Humphreys must have put his entire month's sugar ration into it.
She drained the cup, feeling ashamed of herself. She wasn't the only one who'd had a bad night. — Connie Willis

Jupiter, not wanting man's life to be wholly gloomy and grim, has bestowed far more passion than reason
you could reckon the ration as twenty-four to one. Moreover, he confined reason to a cramped corner of the head and left all the rest of the body to the passions. — Desiderius Erasmus

If you develop 10 things, and you can get two or three made, that's a very high ration. — Judd Apatow

I guess law was always interesting to me because you deal with constants. I like to deal with constants, abstracts, constants and reason and ration, rational approaches to things. I don't know, I never really thought why I wanted to study law. But if you ask me whether I would do it again, absolutely. — Mohamed ElBaradei

new technologies are going to make the airwaves "so abundant that there would be no justification for the government to ration access to spectrum or to give some services priority over others."46 In the near future, everyone will be able to share Earth's abundant free air waves, communicating with each other for nearly free, just as we will share the abundant free energy of the sun, wind, and geothermal heat. — Jeremy Rifkin

Keep mashin' for your ration. — Pimpin' Ken

The same glucose ration was scrupulously administered to all the flasks equally. — Richard Dawkins

You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? ... We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone. — Antonin Artaud

It appeared that there had
even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising
the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only
yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ra-
74
1984
tion was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it
possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four
hours? Yes, they swallowed it. — George Orwell

In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We looked the other way. We spoke of everything but. But we've always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only. — Jamie O'Neill

For an instant she felt his touch on her cheek then he stepped back. There that was my ration for all eternity. People have died for less I dare say. — Eva Ibbotson

I must ration my tendons when people near me. — Sean Kilpatrick

At my age, one must ration one's excitement — Julian Fellowes

If we are to keep democracy, there must be a commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice. — Learned Hand

Inside accounts of Presidential advisory groups make it clear that the failure to express dissent can have direct, immediate, and severe consequences ... Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do. Bolstered by such a false sense of social support, our beliefs strike us as more resistant to subsequent logical and empirical challenge. — Thomas Gilovich

There is no question that managed care is managed cost, and the idea is that you can save a lot of money and make health care costs less if you ration it. — Charlie Norwood

Johnny had killed four mountain-sheep and a caribou while we were gone, and not only had fed the dogs well, but from time to time had put aside choice portions expecting our return. But what was most grateful to us and most extraordinary in him, the boy had saved, untouched, the small ration of sugar and milk left for his consumption, knowing that ours was all destroyed; and we enjoyed coffee with these luxurious appurtenances as only they can who have been long deprived of them. There are not many boys of fifteen or sixteen of any race who would voluntarily have done the like. — Hudson Stuck

Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks. — Pat Barker

The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual. — Michel De Certeau

I'm after a woman who likes sex but doesn't put the lust part above the intelligence part. She could have a hundred partners for all I care, just as long as they've been vetted for psychopathic tendencies. I have four rules. Number one: don't invite a person into your body if you wouldn't invite her into your kitchen. Number two: the act needs to take place in a clean environment. Number three: precautions need to be taken to protect from disease and pregnancy. And Number four: don't ration the passion, i.e. put you best fuck forward. — Penny Reid

The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough. Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There's more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn't benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who's going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I'm a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us. — Brene Brown

Vincent knew he was dying. A horrendous fever overwhelmed him with intolerable pain throughout many sleepless hours. It came as a result of a malaria epidemic that erupted in his hometown during early nineteenth century Europe. The disease spread so fast, physicians had to ration their stocks of quinine only to use it on patients who weren't declared "hopeless". Vincent was one of the unlucky ones. Speculating his time on Earth may be short, he requested spiritual guidance, even if he wasn't a faithful man, nor did he believe in forgiveness. He appealed to the Church as a "just in case" like many other petrified atheists. — Don Luis Zavala

The glamorous side is all they want to hear, the real part of war isn't believed or [is] listened to with a bored feeling, such as: the constant waiting, baking in the sun all day the flies all day & the mosquitoes all night, the hr. on & hr. off all night, the rain & shivering all night, the thirst & the same canned ration all the time till it becomes tasteless paste that you spit out, the always incomplete "word" never being told what the situation is. Furthermore an admission of fear is either regarded as weakness or modesty in a combat veteran. They don't realize that without fear there can be no courage. — Dan Levin

Perhaps, she thought, that's what love does. It's not there to make you feel special. It's to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood. Love and courage, thought Sophie - two words for the same thing. — Katherine Rundell

She had moved to Los Angeles from the Midwest, lured by a job with a publisher. But the publisher was bought by another soon after, and she was left without a job. Turning to freelance writing, an erratic marketplace, she found herself either swamped with work or unable to pay her rent. She often had to ration phone calls, and for the first time was without health insurance. This lack of coverage was particularly distressing: she found herself catastrophizing about her health, sure every headache signaled a brain tumor, picturing herself in an accident whenever she had to drive somewhere. She often found herself lost in a long reverie of worry, a medley of distress. But, she said, she found her worries almost addictive. Borkovec — Daniel Goleman

Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There's more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn't benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who's going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I'm a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us. 8. — Brene Brown

In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty. — William Odom

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct. — David Foster Wallace

Time is money, every moment is costly,
So I ration emotion, 'cause existence exhausts me. — Slug

Cigarette, flipped it on the table, and began on another. "Just like this." That was when Mama finished her soup with a clank, suppressed a cardboard burp, and answered for him. "That Saukerl," she said. "You know what he did? He rolled up all of his filthy cigarettes, went to the market when it was in town, and traded them with some gypsy." "Eight cigarettes per book." Papa shoved one to his mouth, in triumph. He lit up and took in the smoke. "Praise the Lord for cigarettes, huh, Mama?" Mama only handed him one of her trademark looks of disgust, followed by the most common ration of her vocabulary. "Saukerl." Liesel swapped a customary wink with her papa and finished eating her soup. As always, one of her books was next to her. She could not deny that the answer to her — Markus Zusak

As I remember, the worst result of a World War II block was a flood of Argentine Gin. Sensitive martini-boys and Gibson-girls still shudder ... — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith. — William F. Buckley Jr.

One day, many years after the siege was lifted and the war was over, two nutritionists met by chance. They introduced themselves. One, Alexei Bezzubov, had worked at Leningrad's Vitamin Institute, seeking out new sources of protein for the hungry. The other, as it turned out, was Ernst Ziegelmeyer, deputy quartermaster of Hitler's army, the man who'd been assigned to calculate how quickly Leningrad would fall without food deliveries. Now these two men met in peace: the one who had tried to starve a city, and the other who had tried to feed it. Ziegelmeyer pressed Bezzubov incredulously: "However did you hold out? How could you? It's quite impossible! I wrote a deposition that it was physically impossible to live on such a ration." Bezzubov could not provide a scientific, purely nutritive answer. There was none. Instead, he "talked of faith in victory, of the spiritual reserves of Leningraders, which had not been accounted for in the German professor's — M T Anderson

The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80% of the total health care bill out there. There is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. — Donald Berwick

Government has every incentive to ration care for the sick and lavish attention on the healthy. — Regina Herzlinger

The season was waning fast
Our nights were growing cold at last
I took her to bed with silk and song,
'Lay still, my love, I won't be long;
I must prepare my body for passion.'
'O, your body you give, but all else you ration.'
'It is because of these dreams of a sylvan scene:
A bleeding nymph to leave me serene ...
I have dreams of a trembling wench.'
'You have dreams,' she said, 'that cannot be quenched.'
'Our passion,' said I, 'should never be feared;
As our longing for love can never be cured.
Our want is our way and our way is our will,
We have the love, my love, that no one can kill.'
'If night is your love, then in dreams you'll fulfill ...
This love, our love, that no one can kill.'
Yet want is my way, and my way is my will,
Thus I killed my love with a sleeping pill. — Roman Payne

I was a good lawyer , and most days that was enough. I was aware, however, that I took refuge in my profession, as unlikely as that seemed considering the amount of human suffering I dealt with. It offered me a role to escape into, from what I no longer knew; perhaps nothing more significant than my own little ration of suffering. — Michael Nava

For the next several years, they gathered critical intelligence on German troop movements, blew up fuel depots, stole Nazi uniforms, and sabotaged lorries. Once, Avi and Jacob were ordered to attack a police station and grab any uniforms they could. They captured two police uniforms, two pistols, a small box of ammunition, and a money box with over ten thousand francs inside. What's more, they escaped with a bonus neither of them had expected - a stash of six thousand food-ration coupons, which they promptly gave to Morry to distribute among the various Jewish Resistance members scattered throughout the country. — Joel C. Rosenberg

Truth is the most precious thing. That's why we should ration it. — Vladimir Lenin

Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even you father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations ... — Elie Wiesel

When we fight wars, money is no object. When we choose peace, we ration every penny. — Joel Berg

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one — Marcel Proust

Israel gives the West Bank water twice a week! One way of promoting good would be not to ration water. — Zubin Mehta

Desjani pulled out a ration bar. 'Hungry?' she asked Geary.
'I had something earlier. Is that a Yanika Babiya?'
'No. It's ... ' She squinted at the label. 'Spicy chicken curry.'
'A chicken curry ration bar? How are they?'
Taking a small bite, Desjani chewed slowly, pretending not to be aware that everyone on the bridge was watching her instead of staring at the representation of the alien hypernet gate. 'It's definitely got curry in it. Spicy, not so much. Some of the other stuff tastes like chicken.'
'That doesn't narrow it down too much, does it?' Geary said.
'Every kind of meat in a ration bar tastes like chicken, Captain,' Lieutenant Castries suggested. 'Except the chicken.'
'You're right, Lieutenant,' Desjani said. 'Real chicken in ration bars tastes like, what, mutton?'
'Ham,' Yuon tossed in. 'Bad ham.'
'So this can't be chicken because it tastes like chicken,' Desjani concluded. — Jack Campbell

The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision will be whether we ration care with our eyes open. — Donald Berwick

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm always reading books - as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply. — Ernest Hemingway,

He had what he called just a small ration of tools:
A painted book.
A handful of pencils.
A mindful of thoughts.
Like a simple puzzle, he put them together. — Markus Zusak

We had been here often before as tourists, desperate for our annual ration of two or three weeks of true heat and sharp light. Always when we left, with peeling noses and regret, we promised ourselves that one day we would live here. We had talked about it during the long gray winters and the damp green summers, looked with an addict's longing at photographs of village markets and vineyards, dreamed of being woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window. — Peter Mayle

I've been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I've formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door
Isn't that what friends are for? — Bruce Cockburn

It quickly became apparent that the Germans were interested in using our strength but not in preserving it. We received a ration of "flower coffee" - made not from coffee beans but from flowers, or maybe acorns. We each had half a loaf of bread, which had to last us from Sunday to Wednesday. At midday, we had a cold soup made from broken asparagus that couldn't be sold, or a mustard soup with potatoes, and maybe a hard-boiled egg. At night, we had a milk soup; on lucky days, it contained some oatmeal. — Edith Hahn Beer

The reality is that we are all economists. We all deal with scarcity as we make choices and calculate how to ration various items and resources that we consume, produce and utilize. — Kurt Bills

Raul did was to allow the Cuban people to be able to purchase electronic goods, use tourist hotels and beaches and rent cars. He also lifted certain restrictions for farmers. Things are still hard for most Cubans though. Did you know most taxi driver's earn more than doctors. I earn considerably more than a doctor. Cuban people still have rations and ration books that allow them to purchase items at national prices. — Julian Noyce

He found several thick chocolate bars - probably Hershey's military-issue Ration D bars - divided into segments and packaged in wax-dipped containers to resist gas attack. Designed to be unpalatably bitter so soldiers would eat them only in dire circumstances, they were formulated to be highly caloric and melt-resistant. — Laura Hillenbrand

During World War II, the University of Minnesota's Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene conducted what scientists and relief workers still regard today as a benchmark study of starvation. Partly funded by religious groups, including the Society of Friends, the study was intended to help the Allies cope with released concentration-camp internees, prisoners of war, and refugees. The participants were all conscientious objectors who volunteered to lose 25 percent of their body weight over six months. The experiment was supervised by Dr. Ancel Keys (for whom the K-ration was named). The volunteers lived a spare but comfortable existence at a stadium on the campus of the University of Minnesota. — Nathaniel Philbrick

R u ration yet?"
"What language is that?"
"R U AWAKE"
"Much to my extreme dismay. The sun is no friend to my fragile complexion."
"Poor baby. Come to my room asap."
"It's too early to proposition me, Ellie."
"GET OVER HERE?"
"So frisky. Give me a minute to get some clothes on. Or should I not ... ? — Courtney Allison Moulton

Nobody can be lucky all the time, / so when your luck deserts you in some fashion / don't think you've been abandoned in your prime, / but rather that you're saving up your ration — Piet Hein

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

Talking to himself was, depressingly, the only way to achieve an intelligent and engaging conversation these days. Carnac tried to ration himself, because it really was not a positive sign of mental stability. "But do you suppose it's better or worse to talk to wildfowl?" he wondered aloud.
The ducks ignored him utterly. — Manna Francis

I took her to bed with silk and song
'Lay still, my love, I won't be long,
I must prepare my body for passion.'
'O, your body you give, but all else you ration ... — Roman Payne

cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man's beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what? - opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man's last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child's. — Alice McDermott

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows ... — Aldous Huxley

Beer for breakfast, ale for lunch, stout with dinner and a few mugs in between. The average Northern European, including women and children drank three liters of beer a day. That's almost two six-packs, but often the beer had a much higher alcoholic content. People in positions of power, like the police, drank much more. Finnish soldiers were given a ration of five liters of strong ale a day (about as much as seven six-packs). Monks in Sussex made do with 12 cans worth. — Stewart Lee Allen

Blimey, thought Kelvin, what an eye-to-face ratio. When you want to say something delicate, you don't want that eye-to-face ration staring up at you. Big eyes, like a child's or a baby seal's; the physiognomy of innocence
looking at Archie Jones is like looking at something that expects to be clubbed round the head any second. — Zadie Smith

Thou shalt not ration justice. — Learned Hand

Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. — George Orwell

Cubans were getting a monthly ration of five pounds of rice, three pounds of beans, five eggs, one chicken, half a pound of coffee, milk for children up to age seven, one bar of soap, two rolls of toilet paper, three packs of cigarettes. — Tony Mendoza

People don't realize where unsweet tea came from. During the war they had to ration sugar, so then everybody just had to drink bitter tea, or unsweet. — Si Robertson

Half-ration for dinner. All I accomplished today was thinking up a plan that'll kill me, and that doesn't take much energy. — Andy Weir

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. — Mavis Gallant

fact, all the other war news was almost disregarded and the population had no way of getting any other news reports, since radios were unavailable. My Russian boss, for whom I prepared all the lists and bread ration cards, was a blond, slim Northerner from Leningrad. When sober, he was distant and quite proper; but when he was drunk, one had a hard time fighting him off. He was very demanding and we were forever writing. In the entire section there was not a single typewriter. Everything was written longhand. The bookkeepers were using the abacus, the only available calculator. — Pearl Fichman

I didn't read children's books when I was a child. The only books in our house were ration books. — Michael Foreman

How, voters will ask, can we cover 50 million new people without any new doctors or nurses? The answer is to ration health care, with the U.S. government deciding whom will get hip and knee replacements, heart bypass surgery and all manner of medical treatments. And what does rationing mean? It means that the elderly will be denied care, which they can now get whenever they want it. — Dick Morris

No, we love war.
War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.
"It's the mark of a very, very young soul," Mr. Whittier used to say, "to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery."
We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers. — Chuck Palahniuk

The way people behave depends on the basic moral tests and norms in a society. Naturally, the Khmer Rouge, Al-Qaeda terrorists, respectable middle-class Europeans, and, say, members of the Komosol in the 1930's, would behave quite differently in identical situations. But that wouldn't change the essential point. The ration of altruists and egoists, even among Benedictine monks and members of the Gestapo, is the same. It's just that their altruism and egotism are expressed differently. — Sergei Lukyanenko

A wise man once told me- he's a muslim by the way- that he has more in common with a jew than he does a fanatic of his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or a Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic of his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a ration, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic of his own religion — Gregory David Roberts

Any meal at the front was an exercise in war-time ingenuity and devotion of the lower classes for their officers. The Petite Marmite a la Thermit was from beef-broth cubes, the tinned Canadian salmon was called Saumon de Tin A & Q Sauce. The Epaule d'Agneau Wellington, N.Z. was army ration lamb, and the terrine of foie gras aux truffes was a can of foie gras that I had bought from the French commanding general. There was a salad of fresh lettuce from somewhere (no one asked in what or whose fertilizer it had been grown in since we would all soon be dead anyway) and the Macedoine de Fruits a la Quatre Bas was a can of mixed fruit. Then fresh strawberries soaked in Cognac. All the usual wines starting with an amontillado, Pommery Extra Sec, Chateau Steenworde Claret, Graham's Five Crowns Port, Bisquit Dubouche Grande Champagne Cognac, Brandy and a Waterloo Cup. — Jeremiah Tower