Secondhand Quotes & Sayings

The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, "letting your freak flag fly" is both self discovery and self defense. You cry for this bunch at the mandatory pep assemblies. Huddled together, miserably, in the upper reaches of the bleachers, wearing their oversized raincoats and their secondhand Salvation Army clothes, they stare down at the school-sanctioned celebration of the A list students. They know bullying, these kids
especially the ones who frefuse to exist under the radar. They're tripped in the hallway, shoved against lockers, pelted with Skittles in the lunchroom. For the most part, their tormentors are stealth artists.
The freaks know where there's refuge: I the library, the theater program, art class, creative writing. — Wally Lamb

To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store ... To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight
and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth. — Lionel Barrymore

My life has taught me that true spiritual insight can come about only through direct experience, the way a severe burn can be attained only by putting your hand in the fire. Faith is nothing more than a watered-down attempt to accept someone else's insight as your own. Belief is the psychic equivalent of an article of secondhand clothing, worn-out and passed down. I equate true spiritual insight with wisdom, which is different from knowledge. Knowledge can be obtained through many sources: books, stories, songs, legends, myths, and, in modern times, computers and television programs. On the other hand, there's only one real source of wisdom - pain. Any experience that provides a person with wisdom will also usually provide them with a scar. The greater the pain, the greater the realization. Faith is spiritual rigor mortis. — Damien Echols

For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces ...
And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit. — Hjalmar Soderberg

I decided to travel to Vancouver, British Columbia, which I had heard was a "happening" place for young people. I bought a secondhand Volkswagen stationwagon with some money my father had given me. — Paul Ford

A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience. — Thomas Gilovich

My favorite place in the world is this store called My Sister's Closet in Arizona and it's the greatest secondhand shop in the world. — Chelsea Kane

That world seemed to have vanished, but for a long
time the image I had of my father, which I still preserve today, was that of a thin man wearing an old suit that was too large for him and a secondhand hat he had bought on Calle Condal for seven pesetas, a man who could not afford to buy his son a wretched pen that was useless but seemed to mean everything to him. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

When Jesus finished teaching in a synagogue one day, a woman called out from the audience, 'God bless your mother
the womb from which you came, and the breasts that nursed you!' Yet Jesus replied to this common blessing with 'But even more blessed are all who hear the word of God and put it into practice.' Women aren't simply or only blessed by giving birth to greatness; no, we are all blessed when we hear the Word of God
Jesus
and put it into practice. We don't rely on secondhand blessings in Jesus. — Sarah Bessey

When other girls had tea parties on the playground, I brought out my secondhand Ouija board and attempted to raise the dead. While my classmates gave book reports on The Wind In The Willows or Charlotte's Web, I did mine on tattered, paperback copies of Stephen King novels that I'd borrowed from my grandmother. Instead of Sweet Valley High, I read books about zombies and vampires. Eventually, my third grade teacher called my mother in to discuss her growing concerns over my behavior, and my mom nodded blithely, but failed to see what the problem was. When Mrs. Johnson handed her my recent book report on Pet Sematary,, my mom wrinkled her forehead with concern and disapproval. "Oh, I see,"she said disappointingly, as she turned to me. "You spelled 'cemetery' wrong." Then I explained that Stephen King had spelled it that way on purpose, and she nodded, saying, "Ah. Well, good enough for me. — Jenny Lawson

He smells of secondhand cigar smoke and a brew of perfumes from his bachelor party, but it would be enticing foreplay to shower him fresh before sullying him anew. — Valentine Glass

But kids like us grow up and need our own relationship with God, forged in the heart through time and experience, not draped around us by the church we attend. We need to know God for ourselves, not secondhand. — Frank E. Peretti

I was told to hand over my disposable lighter, to prevent, I suppose, any threat of "Do what I say or I'll light this Marlboro and you'll all die - in thirty years due to inhalation of secondhand smoke." — P. J. O'Rourke

We have a responsibility to protect public housing residents from the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, especially the elderly and children who suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases. — Julian Castro

All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman's leather easy chair--not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front. — Helene Hanff

I design a lot of things that I wear onstage, but I'm always looking for unique stuff. I like creative things, so anything I can find at a secondhand costume shop to a Helmut Lang store, it doesn't matter - just unique stuff. — Amy Lee

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence. — James Surowiecki

How can dreams be secondhand?" Lissie asked, sounding both skeptical and intrigued.
Addie flipped on the headlights, watched the snowflakes dancing in the beams. "Sometimes people give up on them, because they don't fit anymore. Or they just leave them behind, for one reason or another. Then someone else comes along, finds them, and believes they might be worth something after all. — Linda Lael Miller

I was getting Monkees Monthly and there was a competition to draw a Monkee. I did a caricature of Micky Dolenz and won 10 pounds-a fantastic sum of money for me then. I bought a secondhand tape recorder, which further launched me. They've been very responsible for me getting started. — Andy Partridge

It's drugs, isn't it? Tara was so innocent. She got pulled into that glamorous lifestyle with all her rich friends ... all that cocaine dust floating around, she probably inhaled some by accident, and then -'
'There's no such thing as secondhand cocaine snorting, Mom. — Lisa Kleypas

I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urban legend that's been handed down to these teenagers over the years. — Robert Englund

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit
a twenty-second best. — Robertson Davies

The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames at the Metropole.' So that those who prefer the false view of the world presented in cheap novels will never find refuge again. — Mariusz Szczygiel

Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact. — Calvin Trillin

Look, what could possibly be harmful, yeah? It's Cyber Unit. We're up against people who's living in their parent's basement, covered with potato chips and peanut butter while wearing cheap secondhand headphone. — Rea Lidde

Secondhand booksellers and binder's shops ran in uneven rows on either side of me, jumbled and jostled together like an ill-kept bookshelf. — Douglas Hulick

Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better. — Frank McCourt

Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel. I could make out about a dozen human figures scattered among the library's corridors and platforms. Some of them turned to greet me from afar, and I recognized the faces of various colleagues of my father's, fellows of the secondhand-booksellers' guild. To my ten-year-old eyes, they looked like a brotherhood of alchemists in furtive study. My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

That in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Spirituality is natural, personal, and rooted in direct experience. There is no such thing as secondhand spirituality. No one else's spirituality can serve as substitute for your own. — David Cowan

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out. — Warren Bennis

I'm not a big drinker and I've had enough secondhand smoke for this decade and the next, so ... "
Great. All she had to do was complain about the deafening volume of the music, and she might as well slap a sticker on her forehead saying old next to the one that already said nerd.
"Band's good, though," she added. "Country's not my thing, but the players are ... proficient." And great, now she sounded like a professor. Proficient. God.
But he was nodding. "Country's not my thing, either."
"But you have a cowboy hat," she said, and as soon as the words left her lips, she realized how stupid she sounded, no - not that she sounded, but that she was. — Suzanne Brockmann

Before the camera, you only had secondhand takes - someone had to tell you what they saw or draw a picture of it or sing a song. Because of the camera, sometimes to our horror, we now know everything that happens in the world - things that before we were sheltered from. — D. A. Pennebaker

The world so clamors for action that men and women devote little time to thinking. Many believe in secondhand thinking. They find it easier to ascertain and adopt the thoughts of others than to think for themselves. — James F. Byrnes

All it takes is to pick up that one piece of trash you pass everyday on your way to work. Or to turn the water faucet off when you're brushing your teeth from afar. Or to compost. Or to buy 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. Or to utilize vintage stores and secondhand markets. Or to fully devote yourself to only buying vegetables from local sources. It is remarkably easy to incorporate sustainable choices into our everyday, busy lives. — Shailene Woodley

The little people parted and two of them carried a tray with the head of an animal Wiggley Charlie didn't recognize down an aisle. (It was the head of an opossum, but the o was silent, as often happens with the decapitated.) — Christopher Moore

We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom's golden retriever that she bought two years ago secondhand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she's too affectionate. It's a flaw we don't mind. — Douglas Coupland

Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is presents. And in the real world, Santa's not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa's lap. — Holly Black

I got a job as soon as I could - 11 or 12. I started babysitting and then I got a part-time job at a pharmacy in England. I just remember loving the feeling of going out and buying my own clothes! I'd go bargain-hunting and get secondhand vintage stuff. — Natasha Bedingfield

stocked was almost gone. Then she brought the print over to his old couch, a hideously ugly piece of furniture he must have bought secondhand. — Noelle Adams

Once, when I was a child, I dreamed that Grimbeard the Ghastly, on the deck of his ship The Endless Journey, threw the sword Endeavor up into the air. Up and up it spun, through the inky blackness, across the cavernous span of a hundred years, until, entirely of its own accord, my own left hand sprang out of space and stars and never-ending time and caught it. Now that I am so very old, I am dreaming once again. And in my dream, I am the one throwing the sword. It is spinning now, in the black starlit waters of my dream, right above your head, dear reader. A sword that may look second-best, and secondhand, but but carries the memories of a thousand lost fights, a history lesson in itself. Reach out, and catch it by the hilt. Swear by its name, Endeavor, to do your utmost to make the world a better place than when you arrived in it. For look! There will be dragons all around you, as camouflaged as a Stealth Dragon. — Cressida Cowell

Any criticism heard secondhand sounds worse than it would face to face. Words spoken out of our presence strike us as more powerful, just as people we know only by reputation seem larger than life. — Deborah Tannen

Jay's mom was a lot of great things that Violet admired, technologically savvy was definitely not one of them. She was one of those people who were loath to move into the twenty-first century and embrace all things modern. She was the only adult woman that Violet knew of who didn't own a cell phone, and she refused to buckle beneath the pressure to pay good money for high-speed internet, so Jay was forced to plug his secondhand laptop into the phone line and use dial-up. Not because they couldn't afford such luxuries, but because Ann Heaton wasn't going down without a fight. — Kimberly Derting

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer. — Cornelia Funke

You got to get out into the field. Secondhand information in this world only takes you so far. — Sally J. Pla

Reathing secondhand smoke, being subject to unfair dairy pricing, and not being able to mime (or lap dance), though they are all tragic, tragic injustices, are not quite as bad as the systematic segregation of public transportation based on skin color. And while fighting for your right to lap dance and mime and breathe just regular pollution is a very fine, very American idea, it is not quite as brave as being middle-aged black woman in Alabama in 1955 telling a white man she's not giving him her seat despite the fact that the law requires her to do so. — Sarah Vowell

Rich widows are the only secondhand goods that sell at first-class prices. — Benjamin Franklin

Used" is such an odd word, so much stranger than "secondhand." A prefix for condoms, and there's a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those. "Used books," as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn't the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There's no such thing as a used book. Or there's no such thing as a book if it's not being used. I — Deborah Meyler

The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. — C.S. Lewis

You're in a bar - grow up. You're drinking poison. You're trying to have sex unsafely with someone you don't know. Is secondhand smoke really the chiefest of your health concerns at this point? — Greg Proops

All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently. — Heyward Bruce Ewart III

You deserve more than a secondhand I love you. — Colleen Hoover

The year is now 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.

Camille Desmoulins, 1793: "They think that gaining freedom is like growing up: you have to suffer."

Maximilien Robespierre, 1793: "History is fiction. — Hilary Mantel

Self-centered people try to keep their lives unruffled and undisturbed, safe and secure. Our temptation is to give our time and effort to the goals of this world. Then, when we are successful in the world's eyes, we seek to bring God into our world by honoring Him with our success. We may say, "Now that I have succeeded in business [or sports, or politics, or with my family, or even Christian ministry], I want to give God the glory for it!" God is not interested in receiving secondhand glory from our activity. God receives glory from His activity through our lives. The world will entice you to adopt its goals and to invest in temporal things. Resist the temptation to pursue your own goals, asking God to bless them. Rather, deny yourself and join the activity of God as He reveals it to you. — Henry T. Blackaby

I have a lot of vinyl, but I only buy old records on vinyl. Like secondhand. It's too expensive otherwise. — Caitlin Rose

Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state. — Daniel Goleman

Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, there were thirty cartons to be packed from the shelves no longer his; in 1965, when he was divorced from Virginia, there were just under sixty to cart away; in 1969, he left Bank Street with eighty-one boxes of books. — Philip Roth

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

Also risks of taking statins. To be sure, seeing a person in front of you has a greater impact than hearing about side effects secondhand. But even secondhand stories affect the way people think. We have also observed in — Jerome Groopman

When I started running, a gadget was a wristwatch with a secondhand on it. — Don Kardong

What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale. — Soren Kierkegaard

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos ... — Anne Fadiman

I secondhand-smoke know him. It's like we've got shared custody of you. — Rainbow Rowell

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out. — Warren G. Bennis

Of course we did other things too. We walked. We talked. We rode bikes.
Though I had my driver's license, I bought a cheap secondhand bicycle so
I could ride with her. Sometimes she led the way, sometimes I did. Whenever
we could, we rode side by side.
She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.
She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh.
My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid
introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I
threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life — Jerry Spinelli

Toxins love to get you while you're young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it's mature and comparatively fixed. — Jeffrey Kluger

As the theologian Alan Jones has said:

One of our problems is that very few of us have developed any distinctive personal life. Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. In many cases we have to rely on secondhand information in order to function. I accept the word of a physician, a scientist, a farmer, on trust. I do not like to do this. I have to because they possess vital knowledge of living of which I am ignorant. Secondhand information concerning the state of my kidneys, the effects of cholesterol, and the raising of chickens, I can live with. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive. — M. Scott Peck

I ache for the body of Christ in our generation to learn how to tarry before God and expectantly wait for Him to speak. I'm desperate to learn it for myself. If we do, what revelation we would receive! We cannot have a drive-thru relationship with God and expect to behold His glory. Like the children of Israel, much of the body of Christ still stands back and watches those they consider truly anointed draw near to God's glory. Dear One, you are anointed! Never settle for a secondhand relationship. Never be satisfied with distant glory. — Beth Moore

My lord," she asked softly, "have you ever wanted someone you couldn't have?"
"Not yet. But one can always hope."
She responded with a puzzled smile. "You hope to fall in love someday with someone you can't have? Why?"
"It would be an interesting experience."
"So would falling off a cliff," she said sardonically. "But I think one would rather learn about it from secondhand knowledge."
-Lillian & Sebastian St. Vincent — Lisa Kleypas

The people that set one animal against another haven't the guts to be bullies themselves. They're just secondhand cowards. — Cleveland Amory

Whenever anyone grows tired of the secondhand sort of existence that depends on purchased products, and wants to resume the intimate relationship with nature that man once enjoyed, the kukui-nut stands ready to furnish him with food, flavor, tannin, oil, paint, varnish, medicine, and magic. — Euell Gibbons

Lignin, an organic polymer found in trees, is chemically similar to vanillin, the primary extract of the vanilla bean. So when trees are made into books and kept for long periods of time, the lignin in the paper breaks down and starts to smell like vanilla.
This is why antiquarian books, and secondhand bookshops, smell so damn good. — Jen Campbell

I would browse for half an hour or so in the secondhand bookstores in the neighborhood. Owning my own 'library' was my only materialistic ambition; in fact, trying to decide which two of these thousands of books to buy that week, I would frequently get so excited that by the time the purchase was accomplished I had to make use of the bookseller's toilet facilities. I don't believe that either microbe or laxative has ever affected me so strongly as the discovery that I was all at once the owner of a slightly soiled copy of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity in the original English edition. — Philip Roth

You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future. — Karl Lagerfeld

If there is anything I want you to understand at the end of this book, it's this: don't settle for a secondhand relationship with God. That's not the life of passion He is calling you to. Knowing God will keep you stable in hard times. It will make you secure and enable you to press past fear. It will cause you to know He is always with you whether you feel His Presence or not. You can know His forgiveness and mercy, His restoration and favor; truly knowing God will fuel your passion for life. When we see how beautiful and wonderful He really is, and realize all He has done for us in love, how can we not pursue Him and His will passionately? — Joyce Meyer

If you do not follow somebody you feel very lonely. Be lonely then. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty and anxious - a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Face the fact; look at it, do not run away from it. The moment you run away fear begins. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

In the '80's my gut feeling was that airlines were crap. I hated spending time on planes. I thought we could create the kind of airline I'd like. So we got a secondhand 747 and gave it a go. — Richard Branson

You want to draw your readers into the world you've created, make them feel a part of it, make them forget where they are. And you can't do this effectively if you tell your readers about your world secondhand. You — Renni Browne

The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer. — Oscar Handlin

The world was full of dangers now that she was pregnant: mercury in tuna, hot tubs, beer, secondhand smoke, over-the-counter medicine. Not to mention crazy baby-abducting fairy kings. — Jennifer McMahon

When I was 10 years old, I loved - I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan. — Jane Goodall

The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched. — Hilary Mantel

One generation's pleasure became a burden for another. Hence, entire collections from father to son were sold for a song, and the vendors, knowing nothing about literature, would place a price on the books. (about secondhand literature book) — Murzban F. Shroff

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving. — Robertson Davies

I looked at the place on my finger again. This time it really was an empty space. And silent. It was big. For the first time I faced a loss with a sense of curiosity. What would come to fill up this space? Would I make another ring? Or would I find another ring in a secondhand shop, or even in another country? Perhaps someday someone I had not even met would give me a ring because he loved me. I was thirty-five and I had never trusted life before. I had never allowed any empty spaces. I had believed that empty spaces remained empty. Life had been about hanging on to what you had and medical training had only reinforced the avoidance of loss at all costs. Anything I had ever let go of had claw marks on it. Yet this empty space had become different. It held all the excitement and anticipation of a wrapped Christmas present. — Rachel Naomi Remen

The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages. — Don DeLillo

The wooden shelves were tall and packed with worn covers of books read many times over. Pages were yellowed and paperbacks had arched spines like old sway-backed horses. It was an old folks' home for secondhand books, with that smell of old newsprint and slightly musty wood smell. — Nathan Fillion

And I love the beret. Just glad that it wasn't raspberry." "Or from a secondhand store," he deadpanned. "Although I would love to see you in it. And if it was warm ... — Emily Giffin

A cheap, utilitarian clock hung on the wall; its secondhand clicked inconsistently - slow, fast, fast, slow - as if it were spitting out Morse code. — Anonymous

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit. — Barbara Kingsolver

But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.25 — M. Scott Peck

I love to find a great vintage secondhand shop. — Bridget Hall

I got my heroes secondhand, from television and movies, to a certain extent. — Brad Bird

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"?
Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear.
The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops. — Hari Kunzru

Those dull, unmusterious city unemployables, dressed in their grey, secondhand suits. — Anthony J. Carson

There are just a number of documents within the company and the industry that clearly indicate that secondhand smoke is just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than mainstream smoke
and the documents date back into the 70s. — Jeffrey Wigand

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me. — Helene Hanff

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being "politically conscious" - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty. — Ta-Nehisi Coates