Soiled Quotes & Sayings

Do you often make meals for outlanders, Miss Click?" There was teasing in his tone and in his astonishing eyes. Scarlet, she looked down at her apron, now soiled by three spots of coffee, a bit lost in the richness of his speech. "You've yet tae call me Doctor, which I dinna mind in the least. But it tells me you are questioning my credentials. And those eyes of yours demand I must somehow prove myself, pass a test. Like your faither did when he ran the Shawnee gauntlet." "You read that in the papers, I reckon." "Aye. Is it true?" She nodded. "He carried the scars to his grave." "So he passed the test. Will I? — Laura Frantz

(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography - which refutes the first - makes worse the mess he has made. — George Will

Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She'd swallow everything - her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there'd be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made. — Marie Rutkoski

Let us be today's Christians. Let us not take fright at the boldness of today's church. With Christ's light let us illuminate even the most hideous caverns of the human person: torture, jail, plunder, want, chronic illness. The oppressed must be saved, not with a revolutionary salvation, in mere human fashion, but with the holy revolution of the Son of Man, who dies on the cross to cleanse God's image, which is soiled in today's humanity, a humanity so enslaved, so selfish, so sinful. — Oscar A. Romero

Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again. — Dag Hammarskjold

People, her people at least, were always chasing shattered hopes. A father gazing down on dead soil, with a brood of hollow-cheeked children sitting around a barren table. A lonely maid cleaning grates and waiting for a lover who by now wouldn't even recall her name. A weary labourer trudging miles between the hiring fairs, carrying his spade, clothes soiled from sleeping in damp fields. They held candles to storms, her people. They saw their lights extinguished as cruel winds of fate blew. — Paul Reid

I have a different idea of elegance. I don't dress like a fop, it's true, but my moral grooming is impeccable. I never appear in public with a soiled conscience, a tarnished honor, threadbare scruples, or an insult that I haven't washed away. I'm always immaculately clean, adorned with independence and frankness. I may not cut a stylish figure, but I hold my soul erect. I wear my deeds as ribbons, my wit is sharper then the finest mustache, and when I walk among men I make truths ring like spurs. — Edmond Rostand

First the fact that the only items on open display seem to be tampons, breast pumps, and douches, making one feel as a female more soiled and wretched than even two thousand years of Catholic catechism could do. — Belle De Jour

The first pages of memory are like the old family Bible. The first leaves are wholly faded and somewhat soiled with handling. But, when we turn further, and come to the chapters where Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, then, all begins to grow clear and legible. — Max Muller

Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed. — Kevin Powers

A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality? — Jack Valenti

...she lives for God imagining that she lives for men..One good deed - a cup of water given without the thought of reward - is worth more than any benefit I imagined I was bestowing on people. ..My share of sincere desire to serve God was there, but it was all soiled and overgrown by desire for human praise.. — Leo Tolstoy

At the time of Holy Communion I sometimes picture my soul under the figure of a little child of three or four years, who at play has got its hair tossed and its clothes soiled. These misfortunes have befallen me in battling with souls. But very soon the Blessed Virgin hastens to my aid: quickly, she takes off my dirty little pinafore, smoothes my hair and adorns it with a pretty ribbon or simply with a little flower ... and this suffices to render me pleasing and enables me to sit at the Banquet of Angels without blushing. — Therese Of Lisieux

Her diaper is soiled. A.J. has never changed a diaper in his life, though he is a modestly skilled gift wrapper. Back when Nic was alive, Island used to offer free gift wrap at Christmas, and he figures that diaper changing and gift-wrapping must be related proficiencies. — Gabrielle Zevin

Any more bitching from the geriatric crew? What a bunch of old women. Should I hire another crewmate to change your bed diapers while I'm at it? Next time I'll let The League have you. Vik, I'm relinquishing control back to you. (Devyn)
It's what I live for. By the way, ye organic life forms aren't the only ones who've soiled themselves. Can I have a minute to attend my needs, Captain Asshole? (Vik) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. — David Mitchell

A broom sweeps clean, and itself becomes soiled; cleanse yourself of those offenses of which you may feel guilty. — Baal Shem Tov

Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it passed.
Right under the city and out into the suburbs and fields these tunnels fed into the river and the network of canals that had fed the industrial revolution. A thousand eyes, some blinded, that had never seen the sun strained in the soiled darkness. It struggled on and it listened with a thousand ears not its own and it cried. — Karl P.T. Walsh

Your inner glow comes from the light of God, and your light can never be extinguished or soiled. You are eternally bright and beautiful. — Doreen Virtue

Life as it proceeds reveals, cooly and dispassionately, what lies behind the mask that each man wears. It would seem that everyone possesses several faces. Some people use only one all the time, and it then, naturally, becomes soiled and wrinkled. These are the thrifty sort. Others look after their masks in the hope of passing them on to their descendants. Others again are constantly changing their faces. But all of them, when they reach old age, realise one day that the mask they are wearing is their last and that it will soon be worn out, and then, from behind the last mask, the real face appears. — Sadegh Hedayat

So that is what my dream meant! Pashenka is what I ought to
have been but failed to be. I lived for men on the pretext of
living for God, while she lived for God imagining that she lives
for men. Yes, one good deed
a cup of water given without
thought of reward
is worth more than any benefit I imagined I
was bestowing on people. But after all was there not some share
of sincere desire to serve God?' he asked himself, and the answer
was: 'Yes, there was, but it was all soiled and overgrown by
desire for human praise. Yes, there is no God for the man who
lives, as I did, for human praise. I will now seek Him! — Leo Tolstoy

She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door
every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum. — Claire Vaye Watkins

Human truth is always soiled with falsehood. — Austin O'Malley

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. — Mark Twain

The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics. — Edwin Percy Whipple

Midway between the too soiled ground and the too-sublime vaults, at the level of the air, entering the skin of the role, poetry plays its game. — Michel Leiris

She's tall - maybe a mite too tall for some folks' notions - and mid-Victorian mamas would never have approved of her, because she's no more coy, or shy, or artful than the blue sky overhead. She has violet eyes, riotous hair of a shade between brown and gold, a straight, shapely little nose, a mouth that is all laughter, and a way of carrying herself that puts you in mind of all out-doors. I've seen her in evening dress with diamonds on; and much more frequently in riding-breeches and a soft felt hat; but there's always the same effect of natural-born honesty, and laughter, and love of trees and things and people. She's not a woman who wants to ape men, but a woman who can mix with men without being soiled or spoiled. For the rest, she's not married yet, so there's a chance for all of us except me. She turned me down long ago. — Talbot Mundy

Undergarments flapped wildly on the fire escapes above, soiled with sweat and blood: private stains, flying high over the city like crests on the flags of a ship. — Leslie Parry

... for no matter how lost and soiled and worn-out wandering sons may be, mothers can forgive and forget every thing as they fold them into their fostering arms. Happy the son whose faith in his mother remains unchanged, and who, through all his wanderings, has kept some filial token to repay her brave and tender love. — Louisa May Alcott

There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled. — Mark Twain

My death, taking the light from my eyes, gives back to the day the purity which they soiled. — Jean Racine

Wow," Amos said over the comm. "Three hits. Small projectiles, probably PDC rounds. Managed to go right through us without hitting anything that mattered." "It went through my room," the scientist, Prax, said. "Bet that woke you up," Amos said, his voice a grin. "I soiled myself," Prax replied without a hint of humor. — Anonymous

She left her heels here. God, of all the things she could have left - earrings, boogered-up tissue paper, soiled panties, a toothbrush - she leaves her damn heels - O cruel fate! - the same ones she wore the night I first took her to bed - looked real good in them, too. She wanted them off at first, but I wouldn't let her, I said, If you remove those heels, I'll fuck them instead of you. — Brian Alan Ellis

How could all this fresh water of memories have spurted once again and flowed through my impure soul of today without getting soiled? — Marcel Proust

It was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around. — George R R Martin

A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought - -the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul - -and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism. — Oscar Wilde

When it really comes down to it, the sense of philanthropy is born out of boredom, too much time and resources on your hands. Despite all your posturing and eloquent speeches, you would never let your manicured hands become soiled by those you claim to aid. — Tyler Chase

As DH Lawrence said, the Protestant societies do dirt on sex, it is their dirty mind which aligns sex and a woman's genitals with the debased and soiled. This is something terrible, I think, and to be contended with head-on in art. — Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam. — John Milton

Ah, how the seeds of cockiness blossom when soiled in ignorance. — Steve Alten

had been like wandering into the wrong carnival sideshow, the kind that left one feeling sick and slightly soiled. — John Connolly

From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask. The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south again as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long. — William Faulkner

First, a bath. I'm feeling soiled. Too much contact with cold reality, I think. — Kerry Greenwood

The winter sunset, flaming beyond spires
And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,
Opens great gates to some forgotten year
Of elder splendours and divine desires.
Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires,
Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;
A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear
Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.
It is the land where beauty's meaning flowers,
Where every unplaced memory has a source,
Where the great river Time begins its course
Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.
Dreams bring us close - but ancient lore repeats
That human tread has never soiled these streets. — H.P. Lovecraft

O God, our merciful Father, by Your Holy Law do You work in us the true knowledge of our sin, that our heart may be penitent, and our soul humble before You. Blot out our iniquities with the blood of Your Son, cleanse our souls from the dark spots with which we have soiled them, and comfort us with the assurance of Your grace. Build Your Church with us and our children, that Your name may be glorified by many generations. Amen. — Martin Luther

This easy obedience to tyrants, which often verged on devotion, always surprised him. He had come to believe that the majority of human beings aspired only to slavery. He had long wondered by what ruse this enormous enterprise of mystification orchestrated by the wealthy had been able to spread and prosper on every continent. Karamallah belonged to that category of true aristocrats who had tossed out like old soiled clothes all the values and all the dogma that these infamous individuals had generated over centuries in order to perpetuate their supremacy. And so his joy in being alive was in no way altered by these stinking dogs' enduring power on the planet. On the contrary, he found their stupid and criminal acts to be an inexhaustible source of entertainment -- so much so that there were times when he had to admit he would miss this mob were they to disappear; he feared the aura of boredom that would envelop mankind once purged of its vermin. — Albert Cossery

For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones. — Wendell Berry

bedroom, on her part of the soiled mattress, Dorthea stared out the window at a perfect moonlit view of Sunny Slope Manor. — Timothy Patrick

Leave a chimney-sweep alone when you see him, Chiltern. Should he run against you, then remember that it is one of the necessary penalties of clean linen that it is apt to be soiled. — Anthony Trollope

Nikhilananda's birthday. Maybe we'd Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost I'd be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise and carbon neutral - Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn - was paying attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you're dead and you discover that the snake-handling, — Chuck Palahniuk

The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower. — James Anthony Froude

A corrupt practice may be abolished, but a soiled imagination is not easily cleansed. — Hannah More

If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in mans own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards
— William Faulkner

Better a long life as a squire than a shore one as a soiled knight. — George R R Martin

Also the spectacle and the awareness of her own body. Daily and, so to speak, ceremoniously soiled with saliva and sperm, she felt herself literally to be the respository of impurity, the sink mentioned in the Scriptures. And yet those parts of her body most constantly offended, having become less sensitive, at the same time seemed to her to have become more beautiful and, as it were, ennobled: her mouth closed upon anonymous members, the tips of her breasts constantly fondled by hands, and between her quartered thighs the twin, contiguous paths wantonly ploughed. — Pauline Reage

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. — Simone De Beauvoir

Who would want to enter the soiled Temple of Justice, wherein lies the corpse of justice, slain by her very guardians? And now her killers make mock of the sacred process, selling replicas of her blind virtue to the highest bidder. — Rohinton Mistry

Drenched in British purples, I have offered up my tones: pigeon breast, hind belly, balky mule lung, monkey bottom pink, lapis lazuli and malachite, excited nymph thigh, panther pee-pee, high-smelling hen hair, hedgehog in aspic, barrel-maker's brothel, revered rose, monkeybush, turkey-like white, sly violet, page's slipper, immaculate nun spring, unspeakable red, Ensor azure, affected yellow, mummy skull, rock-hard gray, brunt celadon, shop soiled smoke ring. — James Ensor

She lives a sophisticate's life among worldly people. At the slightest excuse she steps out of civilization, naked and relieved, as I should step out of a soiled chemise. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

1915. The year itself looks sepia and soiled-muddied like its pictures. In the snapshots everyone at first seems timid-lost-irresolute. Boys and men squinting at the camera. — Timothy Findley

Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat ... Our words for unhealthy contamination
"soiled" or "dirty"
suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew. — Barbara Kingsolver

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world. — Walt Whitman

Cost to clean deeply soiled rugs: $200.
Cost to replace shiny, black, stack-heeled, pilgrim-toed boots: $185.
Cost to fix every single delicious table and chair leg in the house: $490.
Life with two shelter dogs: fucking priceless. — Jen Lancaster

If Christians should vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease. They would elect every clean candidate in the United States, and defeat every soiled one. Their prodigious power would be quickly realized and recognized, and afterward there would be no unclean candidates upon any ticket, and graft would cease. — Mark Twain

What did you discover about the shooter?" Jude asked as he struggled to sit upright.
"Once I spotted him on the rooftop, I ran up the back stairs to follow him. He was long gone, but he left something behind," Sussex said.
"Oh?"
"Yes, I'll take it upon myself to investigate it."
Jude opened his eyes, his stare focused on the duke. "Do you need my help?"
Alynwick snorted. "A soiled dove with a broken wing," he drawled. "What use would you be?"
Jude grumbled, "I'll be fine by the morning. — Charlotte Featherstone

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends. — Edward Hirsch

I keep trying to forget, but I must remember. And gather the scattered continents of a self, once whole. Before they plant flags and boundary my destiny. Push down the watered mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me. I'll need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me. A vaccination for a lesser god's bleak history. — Saul Williams

She had shared his sheets, and, in nightmares of remorse, he had shared her body, waking with drastic regret, feeling as soiled and soilsome as the city itself. — Barry Hannah

Lord, help me to be still before you. Lead me to a greater vision of who you are, and in so doing, may I see myself - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Grant me the courage to follow you, to be faithful to become the unique person you have created me to be. I ask you for the Holy Spirit's power to not copy another person's life or journey. "God, submerge me in the darkness of your love, that the consciousness of my false, everyday self falls away from [me] like a soiled garment. . . . May my 'deep self' fall into your presence. . . . knowing you alone . . . carried away into eternity like a dead leaf in the November wind."24 In Jesus' name, amen. — Peter Scazzero

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

His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions
gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose. — Yukio Mishima

Ser Jaime?" Even in soiled pink satin and torn lace, Brienne looked more like a man in a gown than a proper woman."I am grateful, but ... you were well away. Why come back?"
A dozen quips came to mind, each crueler than the one before, but Jaime only shrugged. "I dreamed of you," he said. — George R R Martin

Every soul that is born into flesh is soiled by the filth of wickedness and sin ... In the Church, baptism is given for the remission of sins, and, according to the usage of the Church, baptism is given even to infants. If there were nothing in infants which required the remission of sins and nothing in them pertinent to forgiveness, the grace of baptism would seem superfluous — Origen

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene. — Kristen Henderson

The world may indeed be evil and ugly, I thought defiantly, it may be soiled with sin, but I also knew that when a man lifts his soul up to the vaults of heaven, reaching seraphic heights with the power of his voice, he becomes an eagle soaring, an instrument of the Holy Ghost — Adriana Koulias

A book is a book only when it is read; otherwise it is a bundle of gathered sheets of soiled paper. — Frederick Philip Grove

Hey,508! Your room is right above mine. You never said."
St. Clair smiles. "Maybe I didn't want you blaming me for keeping you up at night with my noisy stomping boots."
"Dude.You do stomp."
"I know.I'm sorry." He laughs and holds the door open for me.His room is neater than I expected. I always picture the guys with disgusting bedrooms-mountains of soiled boxer shorts and sweat-stained undershirts,unmade beds with sheets that haven't been changed in weeks, posters of beer bottles and women in neon bikinis,empty soda cans and chip bags,and random bits of model airplanes and discarded video games.s — Stephanie Perkins

Cicero gave an account of a party attended by a certain Quintus Gallius, a friend of Catilina, which evokes the raffish atmosphere of his circle. There are shouts and screams, screeching females, there is deafening music. I thought I could make out some people entering and others leaving, some of them staggering from the effects of the wine, some of them still yawning from yesterday's boozing. Among them was Gallius, perfumed and wreathed with flowers; the floor was filthy, soiled with wine and covered with withered garlands and fish bones. — Anthony Everitt

Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed. — A.E. Housman

He ate off dirty plates and was unfazed. His pillowcase was soiled and stank, but he never thought of changing it. Hamid thought long and hard, but he couldn't understand him. He often asked, 'Babuji, why aren't you revolted by dirtiness? — Saadat Hasan Manto

Miss Bennet, I am quite aware of your superior talent for cutting down the Lord's forsaken flock. I merely mean to spare your gown.'
Thank you,' said Elizabeth, composing herself, 'but I should rather my gown be soiled than my honor. — Seth Grahame-Smith

The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It's like being mad, Ursula. — Anonymous

I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett. — John D. MacDonald

As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.
"Ah, humanity ... " But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself. — Nathanael West

Sergeant Bellow marched us to the quartermaster's. It was there we were stripped of all vestiges of personality. It is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie. My socks henceforth will be tan. They will neither be soiled, nor rolled, nor gaudy, nor restrained, nor holey. They will be tan. The only other thing they may be is clean. — Robert Leckie

When his mind turned to look back at the memories of a life gone off the track, everything appeared murky, like looking through a stagnant pond, covered completely with green algae, black beneath with the overabundance of bacteria and rot that made it incapable of supporting any other life besides. Through the murk he saw love, love that wasn't cultivated, love that was left to wither and die on the vine in his vain attempt to find happiness. Happiness that he didn't even know he might have had in his hands, had he done his part.
He saw missed opportunities, roads not taken, chances that asked too much of him. And his life, like a beautiful room that slowly emptied of all furnishings until it came down to only himself and the worn soiled carpet beneath him, the walls darkening to make the hell he thought would be his happiness - the hell that was his life. — Jason Huffman-Black

He was tender with her. He wiped her eyelids with his handkerchief, not noticing how soiled it was. It was stained with ink, crumpled, stuck together. Her lids were large and tender and the handkerchief was stiff, not nearly soft enough. He moistened a corner in his mouth. He was painfully aware of the private softness of her skin, of how the eyes trembled beneath their coverings. He dried the tears with an affection, a particularity, that had never been exercised before. It was a demonstration of 'nature.' He was a birth-wet foal rising to his feet. — Peter Carey

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. — Mark Twain

Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean's salt seems thinly shaken, of letdowns local as the sofa where I copped my freshman's feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking. — William H Gass

Miss Wyndham, I know you're not pleased with the shocking things you've discovered lately, and I know you'll think even worse of me when I tell you of the things I did before we met. But everything I - "

"Sir, you are a liar and a cheat!" a customer bellowed at the shiner behind us.

Mr. Kent glanced over his shoulder and attempted to ignore the yells. "Everything I do is to - "

"These shoes are still soiled! The mud is right there! Return my money, sir!" the customer yelled again. Mr. Kent bristled and spun around to the shoe shiner.

"Sir, are you wrong in this matter?"

"N-no," the shoe shiner stammered.

"I'm trying to be fair." Mr. Kent turned to the customer. "Are you wrong?"

"Yes, of course I am," he said, his face flushing.

"Then avoid stepping in the mud, shut up, and be on your way! I am trying to convince a girl to love me! — Tarun Shanker

Girls barely budding open their legs to make a living, alongside the toothless and rancid of breath; hair thick with lice, they all find customers if the price is right, against the wall or on sheets well-soiled. Their holes cost but a shilling. Skins grow thick and claws sharp. — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

A soiled baby with a neglected nose cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty. — Mark Twain

And then the other guy will look really sheepish, and mumble that, okay, maybe he tried to make a run for it, and maybe he took a drunken swing at the arresting officer, and maybe he made a couple of off-color remarks about law-enforcement professionals, and maybe he's been hiding from the cops ever since an incident a few years back involving a bleeding hooker, nine pounds of cocaine, and a soiled image of Tipper Gore. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

Leaning against my car after changing the oil,
I hold my black hands out and stare into them
as if they were the faces of my children looking
at the winter moon and thinking of the snow
that will erase everything before they wake.
In the garage, my wife comes behind me
and slides her hands beneath my soiled shirt.
Pressing her face between my shoulder blades,
she mumbles something, and soon we are laughing,
wrestling like children among piles of old rags,
towels that unravel endlessly, torn sheets,
work shirts from twenty years ago when I stood
in the door of a machine shop, grease blackened,
and Kansas lay before me blazing with new snow,
a future of flat land, white skies, and sunlight.
After making love, we lie on the abandoned
mattress and stare at our pale winter bodies
sprawling in the half-light. She touches her belly,
the scar of our last child, and the black prints
of my hand along her hips and thighs. — B.H. Fairchild

The room had lost its morning light, the glow of expectation and potential. The daylight was now gray, and the new day was already used, a little soiled by mistaken thoughts and makeshift undertakings. — Tove Jansson

I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, "mother, let's kill her. "That's the only choice. — Alice Sebold

Whoever climbed the Lord's mountain had to possess clean hands and an innocent heart; otherwise the Summit would kill him. Today the doorway is deserted. Soiled hands and sinful hearts are able to pass by without fear, for the Summit kills no longer. — Nikos Kazantzakis

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens. — Thomas McGuane

Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time. — Jennifer Egan

Your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest - and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. Sometimes — Mark Twain