Shoebox Quotes & Sayings

THE OTHER DAY I HAD INSOMNIA AND I MADE MY CATS A WATER BED OUT OF A ZIPLOC BAG AND A SHOEBOX. THEY POPPED IT WITH THEIR CLAWS AND THEY ALMOST DROWNED. THEN I TRIED TO PUT BABY SOCKS AROUND THEIR FEET BUT THEY KEPT PULLING THEM OFF SO I TRIED WRAPPING RUBBER BANDS AROUND THE SOCK HEMS AND THEN MY HUSBAND WOKE UP WHILE I WAS PINNING ONE OF THE CATS DOWN TO PUT THE SOCK ON HIM AND HE WAS ALL, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY ARE THESE CATS ALL WET?" AND I WAS LIKE, "I'M TRYING TO HELP THEM ENJOY WATER BEDS," AND THEN VICTOR MADE ME GO TO SLEEP. IT WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT TO EVERYONE INVOLVED. — Jenny Lawson

Little things really belong to you," she said, folding the fan. "They don't have to be left behind. You can carry them in a shoebox. — Truman Capote

I hate living in a really small apartment, living in a shoebox, not being able to play the drums, not having space. It sucks. — Mac DeMarco

Our dreams are made of real things, like a shoebox full of photographs. — Jack Johnson

Every shoebox offers an opportunity to share the Good News of the Savior with a hurting child — Franklin Graham

Being crazy about someone isn't nice or passionate or deeply moving; it is, surprisingly enough, crazy. — Jaida Jones

Repeat after me, Mr. Black: I do believe in commas. I do, I do. — Jaida Jones

Going home in the trolley, Francie held the shoebox in her lap because Mama had no lap now. Francie thought deep thoughts during her ride. 'If what Granma Mary Rommely said is true, then it must be that no one ever dies, really. Papa is gone, but he's still here in many ways. He's here in Neeley who looks just like him and in Mama who knew him so long. He's here in his mother who began him and who is still living. Maybe I will have a boy some day who looks like Papa and has all of Papa's good without the drinking. And that boy will have a boy. And that boy will have a boy. It might be there is no real death.' Her thougths went to McGarrity. 'No one would ever believe there was any part of Papa in him. — Betty Smith

Under my bed, my shoebox of shame, and when I felt anxious or lost I would pull it out and touch all of my socks. All loners. All waiting to be reunited with their twin. I eventually outgrew the shoebox ... and by that I mean there were too many socks. — Tarryn Fisher

I had one year of struggle. My parents were always there, but I didn't want to rely on them. Now it's moving pretty fast. I'm not rich, but obviously this is fantastic. All I know to do with money is put it in a shoebox anyway. — Ben McKenzie

I earned my writing stripes with a large man's shoebox overflowing with rejection slips ... more than 100 before I got my first, 'Yes, we want this,' accompanied by a check. — Holly Lisle

Mario'd fallen in love with the first Madam Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M, stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way. The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. — David Foster Wallace

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox. — Janet Fitch

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas. — Brian Selznick

My parents had a sidewalk cafe: every Sunday there was an accordion player and apparently I went through the motions, squeezing a shoebox. One of the regulars in 'the cafe said to my father: "I think you should get your son an accordion-that's what he's trying to do, with that shoebox." So they got me a little cardboard diatonic accordion-I still have it. I started to play the National Anthem, and things like that. It seems I was musically gifted-but my parents just never pushed in that direction. — Toots Thielemans

You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you're going to autograph them and sell them at auction. — James Lee Burke

Old post cards, tin wind-up toys with rusted gears, buttons long out of fashion, ticket stubs found in a shoebox in the attic - these are the things Alice likes, not new stuff that comes sealed in plastic. — Jan Strnad

When you have no money in New York, you're living in a shoebox, and it's freezing. When you have no money in L.A., you're living in a slightly larger shoebox, and you can go outside and feel okay about your life for a minute. — Anna Kendrick

It's like when a kitten tries to bite something to death. The kitten clearly has the cold-blooded murderous instinct of a predator, but at the same time, it's this cute little kitten, and all you want to do is stuff it in a shoebox and shoot a video of it for grandmas to watch on YouTube. — Jesse Andrews

I cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest I used to keep them in is smaller than a shoebox now. Most of the time, I feel so ashamed about this that I do not own up to it unless someone else mentions it first. Then we find a quiet place where we can talk about what it is like to feel more and more devoted to a relationship that we are less and less able to say anything about. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit. — Shane Black

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox. — Rem Koolhaas

I've met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go - in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.
'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen.
No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.'
Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother. — Augusten Burroughs

The brain is not a shoebox that 'gets full,' but rather a muscle that expands its capacity with increased use. The more you know, the more you can know. — Douglas Wilson

If you want to be a theater actor, where do you live now? Young actors struggle on a Broadway salary. A lot of them live in shoe boxes; some of them are literally three to a shoebox. New York has gotten prohibitively expensive. — Stephen Spinella

Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were. — Anthony Marra

Like two r's trapped in a spanish songbook, tilli and max lurked in their shoebox castle, waiting to be rolled. — Tom Robbins