Rummage Quotes & Sayings

She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out. — Margaret Atwood

What cause then, Take me far forth and far hind,
Dare take me home faraway far and leave me far behind?
What tale told untold to my furthest mind?
A story I would rummage around and not find,
If stories consigned to me all on form defined,
What cause therefore, untruths familiar not to mankind
Will slay me gone as assigned? — Mpho Leteng

Very serious, very serious," the gateman said, shaking his head also. "You can't get in without a reason." He thought for a moment and then continued. "Wait a minute; maybe I have an old one you can use." He took a battered suitcase from the gatehouse and began to rummage busily through it, mumbling to himself, "No ... no ... no ... this won't do ... no ... h-m-m-m ... ah, this is fine," he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved — Norton Juster

[On New York City:] From a dating point of view, it's like a really large rummage sale - lots of strange items, but darned little that you'd want to take home. — Mary Jo Putney

If God was with you all along, why did you rummage around this whole time in search of Him? Because although it is a fact that He cannot be found by seeking, only those who seek can find Him. — Elif Shafak

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea.
Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries. — Chila Woychik

I rummage around in artistic things from the past. If you don't understand the context, they wouldn't make any sense. I rummage around in conceptual ideas of the future, but if you don't know the source of the thinking, [it] wouldn't make any sense. — Billy Corgan

I've always liked long, flowing clothes, ... I used to rummage around in my grandmother's trunks trying to find them. I love the feeling of chiffon and lace. — Stevie Nicks

I never dreamed I would so enjoy having a father. It is like having another interesting mind, somewhat similar to your own but also strangely different, to rummage through. — Alice Walker

She was asked why she was sending convoys to distant countries when there were Poles so poor that they had to rummage through the garbage to find something to eat. Ochojska's reply was to reject the idea that caring for people far away is in conflict with caring for people nearby; she believes that making people aware of the needs of others anywhere in the world will make them more aware of the needs of local people as well. — Peter Singer

Still feel like talking?" she murmured against his mouth.
In response, he tore her panties down with a speed and finesse that left her speechless. She heard him rummage in his pocket and a foil wrapper rip, then he tugged her back in his lap, her knees on either side of him. He kissed her while she felt between them, fumbling for his c#ck and finding it already sheathed in latex. The knowledge that it was in preparation to fuck her made her dizzy with want. — Lux Zakari

It is the custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on. — J.M. Barrie

My mother used to take me to flea markets in my stroller, and I would just rummage through the piles. You've got to dig through the overstuffed racks that everyone else just walks by. It's the only way to find the cool stuff. — Lily Collins

Hing hang hung! the words rang faintly through his daydream like echoes of Miz Cunningham's tart little doorbell. Then he looked again at the old woman herself. Why, she was really quite wonderful - this old fat woman! In the end, she got her hands on nearly everything in the world! Just look at her window! There by the pair of old overshoes were Jamey Hankins' ice skates. There was old Walt Spoon's elk's tooth. There - his mother's own wedding ring! There was a world in the window of this remarkable old woman. And it was probable that when Miz Cunningham like an ancient barn owl fluttered and flapped to earth at last, they would take her away and pluck her open and find her belly lined with fur and feathers and the tiny mice skulls of myriad dreams. — Davis Grubb

Do not rummage through your thought's drawer because you will be ever more disorientated than they are. — Sorin Cerin

College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to give your brain a vigorous workout and your soul a thorough investigation, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it. — Frank Bruni

Rummage around in the freezer. "Burritos?" "Hammer having a party tonight?" We look at each other and then the burrito. I toss it back into the freezer. "Right. Nothing says sexy like ripping one while you're trying to close the deal. — Jen Frederick

My hair looks like it had been purchased at a rummage sale after all the real hair was gone. — Haven Kimmel

He was dressed as if everything he wore had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined. — Beverly Cleary

(T)here was something in the timbre and inflection of his words that seemed to rummage through a clutter of ancestral fragments to remind me of the person I may have been born to be but had not become. If I didn't take his daily rants against America seriously, it was because it was never really America he was inveighing against, nor was his the voice of a bewildered Middle East trying to fend off a decaying and implacable West. What I heard instead was the raspy, wheezing, threatened voice of an older order of mankind, older ways of being human, raging, raging against the tide of something new that had the semblance and behavior of humanity but really wasn't. It was not a clash of civilizations or of values or of cultures; it was a question of which organ, which chamber of the heart, which one of its clear five senses would humanity cut off to join modernity. — Andre Aciman

The monkey liked most humans. They left food cans outside their homes for his family to rummage through in the morning
sun. Some yelled and threw sticks, but were slow and didn't bite. Humans were mostly harmless. — Cole Alpaugh

My obsession with gratefulness. I can't stop. Just now, I press the elevator button and am thankful that it arrives quickly. I get onto the elevator and am thankful that the elevator cable didn't snap and plummet me to the basement. I go to the fifth floor and am thankful that I didn't have to stop on the second or third or fourth floor. I get out and am thankful that Julie left the door unlocked so I don't have to rummage for my King Kong key ring. I walk in, and am thnkful that Jasper is home and healthy and stuffing his face with pineapple wedges. And on and on. I'm actually muttering to myself, 'Thank you ... thank you ... thank you.' It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day. — A. J. Jacobs

When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn't matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn't their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it's the fault of the fools who humour them. — Wilkie Collins

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical centre of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post - I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she's sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. — Zadie Smith

I decided to relinquish it many times. I thought, I cannot. I was a deserter but my mutinous ambitions kept knotted me. I still live by my that itch of procuring serenity but I don't know.. I'm in rummage of what?? I delve deep, many times, almost daily, within the walls of my chimeras and fizzle to cryptanalyze ... my perturbed pneuma ... — Himmilicious

That you I feel up in my brain, trying to rummage around inside my head, rearrange the furniture? I don't think that'll work. I taught you everything you know, but not everything I know. — Barry Lyga

She believed in public service; she felt she had to roll up her sleeves and do something useful for the war effort. She organized a Comfort Circle, which collected money through rummage sales. This was spent on small boxes containing tobacco and candies, which were sent off to the trenches. She threw open Avilion for these functions, which (said Reenie) was hard on the floors. In addition to the rummage sales, every Tuesday afternoon her group knitted for the troops, in the drawing room
washcloths for the beginners, scarves for the intermediates, balaclavas and gloves for the experts. Soon another battalion of recruits was added, on Thursdays
older, less literate women from south of the Jogues who could knit in their sleep. These made baby garments for the Armenians, said to be starving, and for something called Overseas Refugees. After two hours of knitting, a frugal tea was served in the dining room, with Tristan and Iseult looking wanly down. — Margaret Atwood

But I opened up each pale eye within me and inquired until I found enough to tell me to rummage some more, and then I tried to close all the eyes again at once, to seal each back - for their own good, for their safety. Each was already crisscrossed with darkness and scars and damage, and awakening them seemed only to damage them worse, so better to keep them asleep. — Brian Evenson

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature. — Al Gore

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Giving sacrificially also means giving the best. If we have two blankets and someone needs one of them, sacrificial giving hands over the better of the two. Sadly, much of our "giving" is merely discarding. Donating secondhand goods to church rummage sales — Randy Alcorn

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine ... While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.
It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing. — Charles Simic

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts. — Patricia Hampl

The young woman went to rummage in a sideboard and came back to the table with a stout cook's knife. But instead of using it to cut the fruit, she showed the point to each of the men in a meaningful way, then tucked the blade into her kirtle. They — George R R Martin

Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence,2 argues that we are undergoing the most recent of our every-500-year "rummage sales" - an upheaval in culture and worldview that will inevitably reshape our faith interpretations and institutions as surely as the Great Schism of the eleventh century and the Great Reformation of the sixteenth century. This tsunami of change is well under way, marked by the postmodern and post-Christian sensibilities of the millennial generation. — Marjorie, J. Thompson

It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. — J.M. Barrie

When you go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value? — Tim Berners-Lee

The future of the church is also about looking back and looking at where we see these wonderful renewals and what we can learn from the early church. I think it is a really exciting time where Phyllis Tickle said every few hundred years the church needs a rummage sale where we can get rid of some of the clutter. — Shane Claiborne

The last thing Farinoush did on several nights just before she went to bed was to rummage through her cardboard box of old things looking for him. And there he invariably remained, nestled forever between a copy of 'Jana Aranya' and 'The Hours'. She read about thirty pages of his still incomprehensible stage-directions before passing out from exhaustion and hoping that the morning would bring him back to her; yearning to be yanked out of bed by him, devoured by him again. But he never returned. — Kunal Sen

Toss your dashed hopes not into a trash bin but into a drawer where you are likely to rummage some bright morning. — Robert Breault

But Siegfried held up a restraining hand. "Just one moment," he slurred. "The windscreen is very dirty. I'll give it a rub for you." The ladies watched him silently as he weaved round to the back of the car and began to rummage in the boot. The love light had died from their eyes. I don't know why he took the trouble; possibly it was because, through the whisky mists, he felt he must re-establish himself as a competent and helpful member of the party. But the effort fell flat; the effect was entirely spoiled. He was polishing the glass with a dead hen. — James Herriot

Asleep to rummage in their minds — J.M. Barrie

I can sue you? Cool." I rummage around in my purse for a pen, wanting to write this down. "Under what? Medical malpractice? Assault with a deadly fang?" I look up. "How much you think the courts would award me for that?"
Rayne frowns. "Sunny, stop being a bitch. Can't you see poor Magnus is freaking out here?"
"I need to stop being a bitch? For Magnus's sake?" I stare at her, unbelieving. "Uh, hello? He's the guy who walked up and bit me for absolutely no reason whatsoever. — Mari Mancusi