Quotes & Sayings About Salvage

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could
a look, a whisper, a moan
to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all. — Khaled Hosseini

We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair. — Guy Gavriel Kay

When historians look at the Obama presidency, they're likely to credit him especially for doing the politically unpopular things that were needed in 2009 to salvage the financial wreckage. — David Ignatius

Someday you'll understand. You'll have your own children, and they'll mean more to you than the world. A wife has to defend her children, even against her own husband. Not that I expect you to be easily cowed. But sometimes, despite all you say and do, your husband won't be dissuaded from folly. When that happens, as a mother you have to close ranks. Your first responsibility is to your children. To salvage what you can. Even if they hate you for it. — David Walton

We could not salvage our clothes; we threw them away and changed into fresh uniforms. We even abandoned our boots. Maggots had worked their way into nooks and crannies of our shoes and occasionally fell onto the floor. — William F. Sine

The guilt over his secret was eating him up alive, but hell, the feel of her in his arms threatened to override all of it. This was Maria, the woman he'd fantasized about for almost a decade. In his arms.
He shifted again and tried to pull his hips back, but Maria snuggled tighter against him, hooking one leg over his hip.
Fuck.
Yeah, he had to get out of here. It was still dark outside, so maybe he could salvage a few hours and get some rest in his own bed. She'd just asked him to stay until she fell asleep. Which he'd done. Now it was time to relocate.
Slowly he reached back and lightly grasped her wrist, moving her hand so that she wasn't wrapping her arm around him. Next, he tried to do the same with her leg. Grasping her silky-smooth thigh, he froze when she let out a tiny moan in her sleep. And when she practically ground against him, he groaned.
Couldn't help it. She felt so good the sound just escaped - and woke her up. — Katie Reus

When we would say 'No way,' he would say, 'My way.' Then the ones who doubted would scramble to salvage the blessing. And the one who gave it would savor the surprise. — Max Lucado

But I do know," he continued, "how to salvage an evening for a girl in a party dress." He stood up, bowed. Held out his hand. "May I have this dance?"
"Here? — Judy Blundell

I continue to wonder,' he said, glancing down at Min, 'why you all assume that I am too dense to see what you find so obvious. Yes, Nynaeve. Yes, this hardness will destroy me. I know.' ...
You all claim that I have grown too hard, that I will inevitably shatter and break if I continue on. But you assume that there needs to be something left of me to continue on ...
That's the key, Nynaeve. I see it now. I will not live through this, and so I don't need to worry about what might happen to me after the Last Battle. I don't need to hold back, don't need to salvage anything of this beaten up soul of mine. — Brandon Sanderson

Inch by inch, they chipped away until soon there would be nothing left to salvage. — Maya Banks

The Clockwork Commune were made of many things, and some of them were steamtruck wheels and landship tracks. They salvaged speed, and used it to help them salvage everything else. — Dean F. Wilson

I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. I — Erica Jong

Be prepared to see it all. If you want to create - God help you if you do, God help you if you can - don't you dare commit the immorality of stopping on the surface. Go deep and take your fair salvage. Do it no matter how much it hurts. — Stephen King

Grace to me is a little bit of extra help when you're feeling stuck or doomed or, probably, hopefully, out of good ideas on how to save yourself, and how to salvage the situation or the friendship or the whatever it is," Anne Lamott once told me. "I wish it was accompanied by harp music so you could know that's what was happening, but for me it's that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minute's patience against all odds." On that first trip to Ireland, grace - the kick-in-the-pants, clarifying, cosmic-pause-button kind of grace - didn't just have a harp. It had an entire soundtrack ... — Cathleen Falsani

I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone. — Ayi Kwei Armah

We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do. — Hermann Hesse

Elderly witches and wizards still use the saying 'I'll take Cadogan's pony' to mean, 'I'll salvage the best I can from a tricky situation'. — J.K. Rowling

When I look around at this world, we women need each other so badly, it breaks my heart. Sisterhood is dissipating, and we aren't doing nearly enough to salvage it. Eliminate the crazies in your life, yes. But also look again at those around you. — Grace Gealey

When you are deeply hurt, no person on this earth can shut out the innermost fears and deepest agonies. The best of friends cannot really understand the battle you are going through or the wounds inflicted on you. Only God can shut out the waves of depression and feelings of loneliness and failure that come over you. Faith in God's love alone can salvage the hurt mind. The bruised and broken heart that suffers in silence can be healed only by a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, and nothing short of divine intervention really works. — David Wilkerson

I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it's the fiction writer's job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in. — Wells Tower

As a privileged survivor of the First World War, I hope I may be allowed to interject here a deeply felt tribute to those who were not fortunate enough to succeed, but who shared the signal honor of trying to the last to salvage peace. — Rene Cassin

think maybe I only know one thing in this world. One thing for sure. And that is that the truth does not set you free. Not like I have heard it said and not like I have said it myself the countless times I sat in small rooms and jail cells and urged ragged men to confess their sins to me. I lied to them, tricked them. The truth does not salvage you or make you whole again. It does not allow you to rise above the burden of lies and secrets and wounds to the heart. The truths I have learned hold me down like chains in a dark room, an underworld of ghosts and victims that slither around me like snakes. It is a place where the truth is not something to look at or behold. It is the place where evil waits. Where it blows its breath, every breath, into your mouth and nose until you cannot escape from it. — Michael Connelly

The great challenge of the '90s ... is to salvage and improve the UN and to develop it into an agency capable of meeting the wide range of serious problems that are inherent in a world that has become a single geographic unit. — Norman Cousins

Spurred by Amy's death I've tried to salvage unwilling victims from the mayhem of the internal storm and am always, always just pulled inside myself. — Russell Brand

A pig has a plow on the end of its nose because it does meaningful work with it. It is built to dig and create soil disturbance, something it can't do in a concentrated feeding environment. The omnivore has historically been a salvage operation for food scraps around the homestead. — Joel Salatin

For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house, it was to salvage photos. — Aleksandar Hemon

I should probably get a stone. A stone would be good. A stone would save me, would salvage all the damage we had already done, all the things we had given up or lost. — Dave Eggers

Maggots are freaky hideous,' I say, getting up. I try to salvage some dignity, but I can't help but shiver and shake my hands in the air. It's an instinctive impulse, one I'm not up for resisting right now.
'You've fought off a gang of men twice your size, killed an angel warrior, stood up to an archangel, and wielded an angel sword.' Raffe cocks his head. 'But you scream like a little girl when you see a maggot?'
'It's not just a maggot,' I say. 'A hand burst out of the ground and grabbed my ankle. And maggots crawled out of it and tried to burrow into me. You would scream like a little girl too if that happened to you.'
'They didn't try to burrow into you. They were just crawling. It's what maggots do. They crawl.'
'You don't know anything. — Susan Ee

No one in their right mind would attempt to salvage it, but there were plenty of people not in their right mind. The world was full of them, more produced every minute. — Robert Ferrigno

What we must think about is an agriculture with a human face. We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes. — Wes Jackson

Nothing was worthless. Not if you knew who needed it. Not if you knew how to salvage it. — Rob Thomas

Making LDL the "bad cholesterol" oversimplified the science considerably, but it managed to salvage two decades' worth of research, and to justify why physicians had bothered to measure total cholesterol in their patients. — Gary Taubes

Millions of people have wrecked their lives in angry turmoil, because they refused to accept the worst; refused to try to improve upon it; refused to salvage what they could from the wreck. Instead of trying to reconstruct their fortunes, they engaged in a bitter and "violent contest with experience"- and ended up victims of that brooding fixation known as melancholia. — Dale Carnegie

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer. — Louise Erdrich

He took his time looking around for anything interesting to salvage, but found only broken bits of what once was. — A.B. Shepherd

Because no one dies without a feeding tube, they die with them. The elderly will stop eating when it's their time; forcing them to eat is a desperate attempt to salvage our time. — Louis Profeta

The reality of the human condition is such that, according to Porter (and I agree), we must "salvage our fragments of happiness" out of life's inevitable sufferings. — Gary L. Thomas

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane. — John Irving

We're so selfish that we talk about "after the war" and look forward to new clothes and shoes, when actually we should be saving every penny to help others when the war is over, to salvage whatever we can. — Anne Frank

As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she'd never become anyone else's property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable. — China Mieville

Shhh. Just listen. You, of all people. Listen to what Im saying. This ... tonight ... is the most wonderful thing you could have done for me. What you have told me, what you have done in bringing me here ... knowing that, somehow, from that complete arse, I was at the start of this, you managed to salvage something to love is astonishing to me. But ... I need it to end here. No more chair. No more pneumonia. No more burning limbs. No more pain and tiredness and waking up every morning already wishing it was over. When we get back, I am still going to go to Switzerland. And if you do love me, Clark, as you say you do, the thing that would make me happier than anything is if you would come with me. So I'm asking you - if you feel the things you say you feel - then do it. Be with me. Give me the end I'm hoping for. — Jojo Moyes

I know the world seems terrifying right now and the future seems bleak. Just remember human beings have always managed to find the greatest strength within themselves during the darkest hours. When faced with the worst horrors the world has to offer, a person either cracks and succumbs to ugliness, or they salvage the inner core of who they are and fight to right wrongs.
Never Let hatred, fear, and ignorance get the best of you. Keep bettering yourself so you can make the world around you better, for nothing can improve without the brightest, bravest, kindest, and most imaginative individuals rising above the chaos. — Cat Winters

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish. — Henry A. Kissinger

This may sound like a copout, but character and plot are equally important to me. I don't think the reader can engage uninteresting, compelling characters. Similarly, even interesting characters can't salvage a plot that's boring or that's riddled with holes. — Ed Duncan

Alex was a historian by education, a translator of centuries-old scripts by training, and a savant when it came to inane trivia, which she tended to offer up without encouragement and much to the annoyance of everyone around her. Three months ago, Bran, LT, Mason, and the other three guys from their SEAL Team - now the owners of the Deep Six Salvage Company - had hired her to translate the historical documents housed in the Spanish Archives that pertained to the hurricane of 1624. They'd hoped she could give them a leg up on their hunt for the Santa Cristina. — Julie Ann Walker

During normal cell metabolism, RNA is constantly being made and broken down. The purine and pyrimidine residues are reused by several salvage pathways to make more genetic material. Purine is salvaged in the form of the corresponding nucleotide, whereas pyrimidine is salvaged as the nucleoside. — Richard J. Roberts

I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the way that they move and in how their bodies work. That was foremost in my head when I was writing Salvage: I wanted every gesture, every little movement, to really carry meaning and communicate meaning to the reader. I was very conscious of that when I was writing. — Jesmyn Ward

Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. — John Irving

You know a relationship has deteriorated past the point of salvage when one person detests another's gestures. — Josephine Humphreys

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters ... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb. — Kenzaburo Oe

Given the realities of the U.S. criminal justice system, the prosecution may be unable to salvage this case. But just because that system fails victims on the regular doesn't mean we have to, too. French commentators are already calling for DSK to jump back into the country's presidential race and ride a wave of sympathy into office. Really, the stakes are greater than even that political prize. If we accept the narrative that only perfect women are raped, we risk sacrificing justice not only for this woman, but for victims of sexual assault everywhere. After all, nobody's perfect. — Jaclyn Friedman

Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

Because sometimes, even when you see someone headed for a collision, all you can do is step out of the way and let it happen, hoping there will be something left to salvage after the wreckage is cleared. — Mandy Hale

Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past. — Norman Borlaug

To know God, you must appreciate the salvaging will of His son. Through Christ, we become true leaders worthy of rewards! — Israelmore Ayivor

Cosmetic decoration, which frequently distorts the data, will never salvage an underlying lack of content. — Edward R. Tufte

Two Awesome Hours in the Morning After identifying your MIT, you need to turn it into a calendar item and book it as early in your day as possible. Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics, suggests that most people are most productive and have the highest cognitive functioning in the first two hours after they're fully awake. In a Reditt Ask Me Anything, Ariely wrote: One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours of their day on things that don't require high cognitive capacity (like social media). If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want. — Kevin Kruse

For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

Governments predicate the call for war upon very terrible lies: that it will restrain evil men, make honest and courageous men out of boys, and the outcome depends upon the moral virtuousness of the combatants. Warfare is obscene, an evil waste of life, and a destroyer of civilization. Society can salvage no virtue or rectitude from the larger waste of destroying cities and killing people. There is no moral message deduced from warfare. All warfare is barbaric and inhuman. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!"
" But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity ... — Kenzaburo Oe

It's what we're all trying to do, right? Remember a time that was better. Re-create a moment of that memory as we let the crisp Coke bubble down our throats. Riding bikes on a summer day. Sitting on the curb and watching the streetlights come on. Playing in the sprinklers with a group of neighbor kids. We're all trying to salvage a time when we dreamed beyond our reality and thought monsters were under our beds instead of peppering our family trees. We're trying to harness those fleeting moments that turned our ordinary lives into something extraordinary. In the sepia haze of those memories, we are beautiful. — Liza Palmer

Where recyling takes place only in response to political pressures and exhortations, it need not meet the test of being incrementally worth its incremental costs. Accordingly, studies of government-imposed recycling programs in the United States have shown that what they salvage is usually worth less than the cost of salvaging it. — Thomas Sowell

It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting. — John D. MacDonald

We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities ... Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted. — Lyndon B. Johnson

And we want to make sure that something is done to salvage what's left of this beautiful race called humans. — James Dashner

Such gratitude! It hurt me to see you lose your professional standing, McGee. Like you were going soft and sentimental. So, through my own account, I put us into Fletcher and rode it up nicely and took us out, and split the bonus right down the middle. It's short-term. It's a check. Pay your taxes. Live a little. It's a longer retirement this time. We can gather up a throng and go blundering around on this licentious craft and get the remorses for saying foolish things while in our cups. We had a salvage contract, idiot, and the fee is comparatively small but fair."
"And you are comparatively large but fair."
"I think of myself that way. Where did the check go? Into the pocket so fast? Good." he looked at his watch. "I am taking a lady to lunch. Make a nice neat deck there, Captain." And away he went, humming. — John D. MacDonald

Berkeley was the Capital of the Hand Dryers? I felt bad enough being locked out of the National Parks and Forests because of the Federal Shutdown, so the chance to salvage something uniquely interesting and culturally important as the hand dryer factory slipped by me. Not one sign on any exit ramp. — Patrick Egan

A sound man is good at salvage, at seeing nothing is lost — Laozi

Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. — Henry Ford

The times do not call for grassroots political activism, as if the next election might be enough to reverse a massive cultural earthquake. They do not call for working just a little bit harder: a few more speeches, another letter to the editor, another fundraiser, the next vote, the next committee meeting. These noble efforts aren't even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; they are tending the seaweed on its watery grave.
The times call for a new generation of book hunters. Like the book hunters of the Middle Ages, the new book hunters take it as their mission to uncover and salvage the best of what came before: to cherish it; hold it up for praise and emulation; study it; above all, to love it and pass it on. — Paul D. Miller

Salvage your smiles, Silence your goodbyes — Byron Graves

A person desires to leave a mark of goodness on earth before death arrives. All artists are creators in the face of death. All of life a person seeks to salvage something worthwhile and enduring from living a tragic life. We must eventually dance with death. A person begins on a road leading to personal enlightenment by giving up false beliefs, quelling destructive desires, overcoming fearfulness, and by seeking truth. In order to lead an evocative life full of truth, I must stop living a false life, conquer my fearfulness, and begin expressing love, wonder, and gratitude for all the beauty and splendor of the world. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Life is not salvage to be saved out of the world, but an investment to be used in the world. — Lettie B. Cowman

Purpose is not that far my child---
it's just a journey's walk.
It is the One at the end of the journey,
it is the end of the journey, and it is the journey
itself.
And when you thirst, do you not drink?
And when you are cool, do you not warm yourself?
and when you are weary, do you not rest?
And if you need meaning, should you not reach out?
I said out! My child, out!
In all simplicity those in need reach out and receive beyond
themselves.
He's at the end of the quench,
and the relief of the warmth,
the satisfaction of a rest, and the
salvage of a soul. — Quinesia Johnson

I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.

The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.

[from the introduction] — Dorothy Bussy

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell. — George Orwell

Because I believe, even in times of hardship, there's something positive to salvage, even if we have to sift, piece by tattered piece, through the scraps of our trials to find it. — Brenda J. Otto

Events and circumstances sometimes conspire against us; if we insist on inflexibility for the purpose of maintaining our beliefs, we end up compromising ourselves nevertheless. We salvage one set of principles only to forsake another. — Terry Brooks

And how to stop the rot? How to salvage something from time's passage? How long before the map makers decide to erase this structure completely? Before it becomes a nameless ruin? And then a mere pile of stones? Mossed over. Forgotten. How long before they lift its name from their charts and from our collective memory? The only thing I can do is fill the place with music. — Richard Skelton

I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes. — Jesmyn Ward

Like most people, I couldn't let go of the money we'd wasted. That's why so many people eat awful meals, watch horrible movies, read terrible books, and suffer through dreadful relationships. It's why I am far from the only woman who wasted her early thirties on a relationship that wasn't going anywhere. The psychological cost of conceding that you've made a huge mistake--worse, a mistake you can't fix--is too great. So you waste even more money, or time, or effort trying to somehow salvage what you've lost. — Megan McArdle

To salvage a society, it is necessary to aid, abet, raise and increase that state of mind. If you were to set up a perfect government out here which required the intervention of nobody, you would have destroyed the society. But by raising the individual ability of the persons in the society within the framework that they are able to view, raise their ability within the framework they are able to view, you would have achieved a marked advance for that society. — L. Ron Hubbard

It's hard to salvage jettisoned cargo and, if it is retrieved, it's usually irreparably damaged. And I fear that when you can afford to fish up the honor and virtue and kindness you've thrown overboard, you'll find they have suffered a sea change and not, I fear, into something rich and strange. — Margaret Mitchell

Craig Binky decided that to salvage his position he would bear any burden and pay any price, and find out exactly what was going on. He had to redeem his honor. He decided to ask a computer. He — Mark Helprin

With Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward has written the best sort of novel-a beautiful, important book that's both unflinching and tender, heartbreaking and triumphant. A lyrical and riveting testament to the strength of the human spirit, as well as the power of family and community. Ward's paragraphs are like songs, lifting us even as the authenticity of this world and these characters keeps the ground in clear sight. This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary writer. — Skip Horack

If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer. — Rosalynn Carter

Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who's trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimention and commenting on the fiasco itself. (p. 158) — David Foster Wallace

Dear 2600: I think my girlfriend has been cheating on me and I wanted to know if I could get her password to Hotmail and AOL. I am so desperate to find out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
And this is yet another popular category of letter we get. You say any help would be appreciated? Let's find out if thats true. Do you think someone who is cheating on you might also be capable of having a mailbox you don't know about? Do you think that even if you could get into the mailbox she uses that she would be discussing her deception there, especially if we live in a world where Hotmail and AOL passwords are so easily obtained? Finally, would you feel better if you invaded her privacy and found out that she was being totally honest with you? Whatever problems are going on in this relationship are not going to be solved with subterfuge. If you can't communicate openly, there's not much there to salvage. — Emmanuel Goldstein

He thought, that all men, trickled away, changing constantly, until they finally dissolved, while the artist-created images remained unchangeably the same. He thought that the fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. Perhaps the woman after whom the master shaped his beautiful Madonna is already wilted or dead, and soon he, too, will be dead; others will live in his house and eat at his table- but his work will still be standing hundreds of years from now, and longer. It will go on shimmering in the quiet cloister church, unchangingly beautiful, forever smiling with the same sad, flowering mouth. — Hermann Hesse

God undertook the most dramatic rescue operation in cosmic history. He determined to save the human race from self-destruction, and He sent His Son Jesus Christ to salvage and redeem them. The work of man's redemption was accomplished at the cross. — Billy Graham

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments. — Susan Sontag

The organizer of industry who thinks he has 'made' himself and his business has found a whole social system ready to his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order - a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and vermin. — Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse

Salvage what you can so you don't end up like me; bitter and hateful but disguising it with a smile, and then hide it away under the cover of wild nights and very early mornings. — J.C. Wickhart

Ross stared a moment at the piece of flotsam he had brought home and hoped to salvage. She was standing there in her ragged shirt and three-quarter-length breeches, her matted hair over her face and the dirty half-starved puppy at her feet. She stood with one toe turned in and both hands loosely behind her back, staring across at the library. He hardened his heart. Tomorrow would not do. — Winston Graham

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped "in a futile attempt to attract white residents," as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood's future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties. — Isabel Wilkerson

With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of absolute monarchy. It could mean both, one after the other. After ten years not a single one of our achievements will remain, and to your son liberty will be an old man's daydream. This is what will happen, Danton. No one can sincerely maintain the contrary. So if they do maintain it, they are not sincere, they are not patriots and their war policy is a conspiracy against the people. — Hilary Mantel

Truthful vs. Honest
To salvage our relationships we cannot always be truthful,
but we shouldn't be anything less than honest. — Beryl Dov

cross my mind," Marshall replies with a tone, still cold toward him. Mom tries to salvage the mood. "I think it's wonderful! You make a charming couple. I wish you both the best." My dad gives her a side-glance, which she ignores. Olivia stands there, an angry expression on her usually pretty face. She's glaring at me with such rage and gives Hunt a confused, wounded — Lena Black

Junior, stop being orner." It's what Mama used to say to us when we were little, and I say it to Junior out of habit. Daddy used to say it sometimes, too, until he said it to Randall one day and Randall started giggling, and then Daddy figured out Randall was laughing because it sounded like 'horny'. About a year ago I figured out what it was supposed to be after coming across its parent on the vocabulary list for my English class with Miss Dedeaux: 'ornery'. It made me wonder if there were other words Mama mashed like that. They used to pop up in my head sometime when I was doing the stupidest things: 'tetrified' when I was sweeping the kitchen and Daddy came in dripping beer and kicking chairs. 'Belove' when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in mid-swim in the pit. 'Freegid' when I was laying in bed in November, curled to the wall like I was going to burrow into another cover or I was making room for a body to lay behind me to make me warm. — Jesmyn Ward