Rations Quotes & Sayings

It does seem to produce more creative results when there are limitations. It's like in wartime with rations - people became more inventive with cooking. — Laura Fraser

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

Even the distribution of rations leaves much to be desired; the fatigue party, well-intentioned and sympathetic though it be, often finds itself short of provisions. — Patrick MacGill

Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owner's servants, landsmen
being all that is left faithful of the ship's company
with stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owner's servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabin boy
'
And at the same time, I was wondering over poor Jim Hawkins' fate. — Robert Louis Stevenson

A diet of rations etched his figure, and the sea air and sun peeled back a layer of his essence ... It's as if he's passed through some cloud of aether, and he's come back to us with the outer reaches of the universe still clinging to him. — Adam McOmber

The world was cruel with its rations. — Min Jin Lee

Oh, let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,
Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations. — Charles Dickens

Things My Mother Does Not Do 1. Complain. 2. Dispose of almost anything, including years-old margarine tubs possibly hoarded for the dispersal of emergency rations. 3. Ignore a coupon. 4. Put anything away. 5. Allow me to talk "long distance" for more than three minutes without yelling in the background. 6. Give up without a fight. O — George Hodgman

That's it? That's all that happens after you topple from grace? We lose our rubies and rations?" Marshall smirked. "Woe is me. — Sophie Avett

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half. — George Orwell

Is one of those summer evenings, when it look like night would never come, a magnificent evening, a powerful evening, rent finish paying, rations in the cupboard, twenty pounds in the bank, and a nice piece of skin waiting under the big clock in Piccadilly Tube Station. The sky blue, sun shining, the girls ain't have on no coats to hide the legs.
"Mummy, look at that black man!" A little child, holding on to the mother hand, look up at Sir Galahad.
"You mustn't say that, dear!" The mother chide the child. — Samuel Selvon

The altimeter had been damaged along the way, but the few bottles that we brought along to wash down the ordinary expedition rations were fine. True, a bottle gives only a vague indication of altitude, but can you drink an altimeter? — Erhard Loretan

Monetary reform, if it is to be genuine and successful, must sever money and banking from politics. That's why a modern gold standard must have: no central bank; no fixed rations between gold and silver; no bail-outs; no suspension of gold payments or other bank frauds; no monetization of debt; and no inflation of the money supply, all of which have proved so disastrous in the past. — Lawrence Reed

Another bug hunt, boys. This one is a little different, as you know. Since they still hold prisoners of ours, we can't use a nova bomb on Klendathu --- so this time we go down, stand on it, hold it, take it away from them. The boat won't be down to retrieve us, instead it'll fetch more ammo and rations. If you're taken prisoner, keep your chin up and follow the rules --- because you've got the whole outfit behind you, you've got the whole Federation behind you; we'll come and get you. That's what the boys from the Swamp Fox and the Montgomery have been depending on. Those who are still alive are waiting, knowing that we will show up. And here we are. Now we go get 'em. — Robert A. Heinlein

When there is a world scarcity of any commodity, whether it's food or free speech, then the whole world must go on rations in order that eventually the whole world may have it again in plenty. — Jan Struther

There had never been a funeral in our town before, at least not during our lifetimes. The majority of dying had happened during the Second World War when we didn't exist and our fathers were impossibly skinny young men in black-and-white photographs - dads on jungle airstrips, dads with pimples and tattoos, dads with pinups, dads who wrote love letters to the girls who would become our mothers, dads inspired by K rations, loneliness and glandular riot in malarial air into poetic reveries that ceased entirely once they got back home. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The famous Babylonian "Code of Hammurabi" states that tavern owners must always pour a sufficient amount of beer or face the death penalty. Trade and travel then brought beer to Egypt, where it was again associated with the work of the gods. Workers at the Giza Pyramids were given beer rations several times a day and over a hundred medicines recipes included the beverage. The Egyptians believed beer to be healthier than water and shared it with their fellow men of all ages, young and old. — James Weber

Oh, lord. I was beginning to think like Neith. Soon I'd be huddled in an underground bunker eating army rations and cackling as I sewed together the pockets of all the boys who'd jilted me. — Rick Riordan

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. — Susan Sontag

I was in Yorkshire. We were a family of five and I used to be sent sometimes to get the rations for the week and I was easily able to carry them back. It was like one egg and a tiny bit of tea. — Judi Dench

At one stopover on the train journey home, Hans told his sister Inge later, he saw a young girl with the Star of David on her breast; she was repairing tracks on the line, along with other people with yellow badges on their clothes. Her face was pallid, sunken in; her eyes, beyond grief and terror. Impulsively, Hans thrust his rations in her hand. She looked up at him, then at his uniform. She threw the packet of food to the ground.
He scooped it up, wiped off the dust, and picked a daisy growing by the side of the tracks. He placed the package, with the daisy on top, at her feet. He said, "I would have liked to give you a little pleasure." He boarded the train.
When he looked back, the girl was standing there, watching the train disappear, the flower in her hair. — Jud Newborn

Anyway, here." He handed me a bag. "Thought you might be hungry. Since you're our guests, it would be impolite if we didn't share our food with you. That's your rations for the week. Try to make it last." At my surprised look, he rolled his eyes. "Not all of us live on oil and electricity, you know."
"What about Ash and Puck?"
"Well, I'm pretty sure eating our food won't melt their insides to gooey paste. But you never know." (Glitch)
Puck sat and gazed mournfully into the bowl I handed him. "Not an apple slice to be found," he sighed, picking through the gooey mess with his fingers. "How can mortals even pass this off as fruit? It's like a peach farmer threw up in a bowl."
Ash picked up the spoon, gazing at it like it was an alien life form. — Julie Kagawa

Food's the killer. The clock starts as soon as the troops are on the ground. You wouldn't believe how fast they consume what they're carrying, and then ... if I don't get them more, if I don't find them more ... they die. — Henry V. O'Neil

My youngest brother killed a lynx yesterday," Rose said.
"Apparently it came into his territory and left some spray marks. He skinned it, smeared himself in its blood, and put its pelt on his shoulders like a cape. And that's how he came dressed for breakfast."
Cerise drank some beer. "My sister kills small animals and hangs their
corpses on a tree, because she thinks she is a monster and she's convinced
we'll eventually banish her from the house. They're her rations. Just in case."
Rose blinked. "I see. I think we're going to get along just fine, don't you?"
"I think so, yes. — Ilona Andrews

No fundamentalist undercurrent ran through the national culture before the first war. Sufism had always been the predominant Muslim sect, and Wahhabism was a foreign, wartime import. A few times a year, Arab Wahhabis came through the village in search of recruits. They promised rations, shelter, an eternity in Paradise, and, until that day of glorious martyrdom, a monthly salary of two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars. Few young men followed the monochromatic Wahhabi faith, but many were quite willing to be radicalized for a monthly salary that eclipsed what they would otherwise earn in a year. The war of independence so quickly conflated with jihad because no one cared about the self-determination of a small landlocked republic. Arab states would gladly fund a war of religion, but not one of nationalism. And in this way it didn't matter who won the war between the Feds and fundamentalists: the notion of a democratic and fully sovereign Chechnya would be crushed regardless. — Anthony Marra

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Dubnus. Brother. I wouldn't have amounted to anything better than a rotting corpse in a ditch on the road south from Yew Grove without your help over the last few months. Nor can I pretend that I was responsible for turning the Ninth from a waste of rations to a fighting century, that was mostly you too. But trust me when I tell you this, these men will not respond to your style of leadership. They are lonely, frightened, but worst of all they feel worthless. They've sat here for the last month watching Gaulish farm boys in armour get snapped up like the last cake in the bakery while they, with all their abilities, are demeaned as incapable of fighting our war. — Anthony Riches

It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. — George Orwell

Gays have always been in the military. Alexander the Great was originally Alexander the Fabulous. A gay man invented C-rations. He claims he could never talk anyone into the cilantro garnish. Obviously, gays were not allowed to design the outfits, because we never would have stayed with the earth tones for so long. — Kate Clinton

To a Westerner the anomaly of this - a man under a life sentence for treason working in a prison on the most secret scientific developments - is almost too much to comprehend. In the Soviet Union it was an accepted practice. Korolev was immensely valuable, but because he was so valuable, he was also dangerous. He consented to work because this way, at least, he got some rations, he was with his colleagues, and he was doing what he loved most of all. — David Halberstam

Grocery shopping was intimidating...the aisles were filled with everything from jumbo to miniature travel-sized rations. Who could I call to ask, "Does the size even matter?" I dare not ask my ex-wife. — Tez Brooks

Today words like 'persevere' and 'hero's death' had been so ceaselessly bandied about that they had long since acquired an ironic sound - at least wherever there was actual fighting. . . . Once, before an attack, Sturm had heard an old sergeant say the following: 'Kids, we're going over there now to gobble up the Englishmen's rations.' It was the best battle address that he had ever heard. That was surely something good in the war - that it destroyed glorious-sounding phrases. Concepts that hung fleshless in the void were overcome by laughter. — Ernst Junger

World War II really fascinated me because it's the only time that everybody in this country sat down at the same table, because eating on rations was your patriotic duty. — Ruth Reichl

About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their lives. One of the infrequent rations of beer was given out the same night, and the men finished their three cans quickly, and sat about without saying very much. The beer had been far too inadequate to make them drunk; it made them only moody and reflective, it opened the gate to all their memories, and left them sad, hungering for things they could not name. — Norman Mailer

Give me four days so that my planes can fly, so that my fighter bombers can bomb and strafe, so that my reconnaissance may pick out targets for my magnificent artillery. Give me four days of sunshine to dry this blasted mud, so that my tanks roll, so that ammunition and rations may be taken to my hungry, ill-equipped infantry. I need these four days to send von Rundstedt and his godless army to their Valhalla. I am sick of this unnecessary butchering of American youth, and in exchange for four days of fighting weather, I will deliver You enough Krauts to keep Your bookkeepers months behind in their work. "Amen. — Bill O'Reilly

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

It is probable that two proposed unknown rations are incommensurable because if many unknown rations are proposed it is most probable that any [one] would be incommensurable to any [other]. — Nicole Oresme

Then came the matter of food. For ten hours he picked grains of rice off the floor and collected pasta, sugar, and individual tea leaves. He would not eat anything that had been tainted with blood, and was left with less than a third of his rations. Some things - powdered cocoa, for example - were uncollectible, or had risen on the wind. He had kerosene enough for one pot of boiling water and one hour of lamplight each day. Some of his blankets had bullet holes. — Mark Helprin

Pinole was a favorite treat of the Apache, and too many knew how they hungered for the sweet. By keeping the Indians on short rations, they were made vulnerable to attacks like this one, when white men came to the reservations — Raine Cantrell

The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls, and power-conservation rules. — Ayn Rand

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane's time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself - all those turn out to be as important to a child's development as all but the most basic food and shelter. — Gloria Steinem

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

The next morning, Louie was taken to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa, where many POWs were being collected before being sent home. Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn't have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore. Looking extremely pregnant, Louie boarded the plane. — Laura Hillenbrand

Recently, I spent eight days in a car with my co-host from Top Gear James May, who has a notoriously flatulent bottom. But because he was living on army rations the interior was always pine fresh and lemon zesty. — Jeremy Clarkson

We told each other every funny story we could think of. One of them stays in my mind. A German citizen wants to commit suicide. He tries to hang himself, but the rope is of such a poor quality that it breaks. He tries to drown himself, but the percentage of wood in the fabric of his pants is so high that he floats on the surface like a raft. Finally he starves to death from eating official government rations. — Edith Hahn Beer

Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy's knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a halfhearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly , there isn't much more she can do. Stripped of family and identity, fed meager rations, consigned to hard wooden seats until we are to be, as Slobbery Jack suggested, sold into slavery - our mere existence is punishment enough. — Christina Baker Kline

Jody said, "Ma, you're shore good."
"Oh, yes. When it's rations."
"Well, I'd a heap ruther you was good about rations and mean about other things."
"Oh, I be mean, be I?"
"Only about jest a very few things," he soothed her. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Abusive relationships exist because they provide enough rations of warmth, laughter, and affection to clutch onto like a security blanket in the heap of degradation. The good times are the initial euphoria that keeps addicts draining their wallets for toxic substances to inject into their veins. Scraps of love are food for an abusive relationship. — Maggie Young

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

When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations ...
The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the most of. The long-recognized blood-relations and connexions by marriage made already a goodly number, which, multiplied by possibilities, presented a fine range for jealous conjecture and pathetic hopefulness. — George Eliot

If what we're doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig - why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that? — Martin Amis

The Authority has said: Dream! But in truth , they mete out our destinies in tiny rations; they've said how far we can go, how long, and where. Aspirations are useless, because to aspire, is to reach. Dream, they say, but not too big. Laugh, they say, but not too loudly . Love, they say, but not too hard. When you find you cannot contain yourself any longer and you imagine things beyond the walls they've built for you, constructed to imprison your desires, and when your heart is filled with impossible things, then, I say, you have achieved true independence. Our Anarchy is not simply a battle of flesh and blood; it is a war of the mind. The time is always now to declare your freedom! — Logan Keys

All this. They have all this, and what do we get? Walls and tickets and concrete and stink. Rations and hopelessness and rage. I hate them, she said, the malice in her words like the lingering taste of a bad kiss. — Anna Silver

Their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we'd had was winter, all we'd had was rations. Just very good at keeping quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age. — Ali Smith

Let them get at the books themselves, and do not let them be flooded with diluted talk from the lips of their teacher. The less the parents 'talk-in' and expound their rations of knowledge and thought to the children they are educating, the better for the children ... Children must be allowed to ruminate, must be left alone with their own thoughts. — Charlotte Mason

Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map. — Julian Barnes

As boys going to sea immediately become nautical in speech, walk as if they already had their "sea legs" on, and shiver their timbers on all possible occasions, so I turned military at once, called my dinner my rations, saluted all new comers, and ordered a dress parade that very afternoon. — Louisa May Alcott

Another leading senator that I degraded was Caligula's horse Incitatus who was to have become Consul three years later. I wrote to the Senate that I had no complaints to make against the private morals of this senator or his capacity for the tasks that had hitherto been assigned to him, but that he no longer had the necessary financial qualifications. For I had cut the pension awarded him by Caligula to the daily rations of a cavalry horse, dismissed his grooms and put him into an ordinary stable where the manger was of wood, not ivory, and the walls were whitewashed, not covered with frescoes. I did not, however, separate him from his wife, the mare Penelope: that would have been unjust. — Robert Graves

Being deceived into thinking the perks of slavery are a good thing, we can easily aquire a preference for chains and a taste for the slaves rations. — Dennis Green

The man who did the shouting at the P.S.U.C. post down on our right was an artist at the job. Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Facists how much better we were being fed than they were. His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative. 'Buttered toast!' - you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley - 'We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!' I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a fascist mouth wattering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying. — George Orwell

Jenny lacked any sense of property - she was constantly apologising to Yevgenia and asking for her permission to open the small upper window in order to let in her elderly tabby cat. Her main interests and worries centered around this cat and how to protect it from her neighbors ... She fed her own rations to the cat, whom she called 'my dear, silver child' The cat adored her; he was a rough sullen beast, but would become suddenly animated and affectionate when he saw her. — Vasily Grossman

Rations were scarcely issued, and the men about preparing supper, when rumors that the enemy had been encountered that day near Gettysburg absorbed every other interest, and very soon orders came to march forthwith to Gettysburg. — Joshua Chamberlain

His very limbs feel different, as if they know that sometime soon there might be a little softness, a little love to spend like money, and the body's whole business won't be to keep itself alive on skinflint rations. Yes, she is a pleasant girl, intelligent. And under him, or inside him, spring is banging its little green drum. — Anna Keesey

If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means
from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath. — Margaret Halsey

It is a human circumstance that when we are born we have not yet come into existence. We are lured into our special human existence by a mothering presence that gratifies our innate urges to be suckled, held, rocked, caressed. But that same gratifying presence puts limits on desire and rations satisfaction. In this sense the mother is also the first lawgiver. — Louise J. Kaplan

Dogs really are perfect soldiers. They are brave and smart; they can smell through walls, see in the dark, and eat Army rations without complaint. — Susan Orlean

Through the lavender gloom clouding the entrance of the operations tent, Yossarian glimpsed Chief White Halfoat, diligently embezzling whiskey rations, forging the signatures of nondrinkers and pouring off the alcohol with which he was poisoning himself into separate bottles rapidly in order to steal as much as he could before Captain Black roused himself with recollection and came hurrying over indolently to steal the rest himself. — Joseph Heller

I can live on thin rations but not without hope — Michael O. Tunnell