Tinned Quotes & Sayings

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it ...
It wasn't only the sand drifts and the mud and the narrow, winding, broken roads up in the mountains. There was all that business at the frontier posts, all that haggling in the forest outside wooden huts that flew strange flags. I had to talk myself and my Peugeot past the men with guns
just to drive through bush and more bush. And then I had to talk even harder, and shed a few more bank notes and give away more of my tinned food, to get myself
and the Peugeot
out of the places I had talked us into.
Some of these palavers could take half a day ... — V.S. Naipaul

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me. — Tom Stoppard

In 1969, we emigrated to Australia. It was a big change. The heat, the flies, and the completely different tinned meats. The shock was so great, I stopped reading books for nearly a year. — Morris Gleitzman

Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographics for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat. — Donna Tartt

The dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the incessant toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Imprisoned killer whales! Our breastmilk is poisoned. We live absurdedly, ridiculously. OUR BREASTMILK IS POISONED. Try and explain even one sliver of it to a kid, just one angle of a thousand, and you'll see the face of the world's most incredulous and urgent WTF.

We have little to recommend us, and we know it. We shrug.

Rasmus Krook is the Captain of the Griffons. He doesn't shrug. — Kate Inglis

The sun was up - stuck like half a tinned apricot on a sky awash with all the colours of a fading bruise. Down below the living dead were forming their complaining queues at bus stops. — Helen Hodgman

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. — Evelyn Waugh

She wanted nothing more than someone to miss, to touch, with whom to speak like a child, with whom to be a child. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I do not compare the past with the present without a prejudice for either, but, great as the improvement in country life is in many respects, it seems a pity the old cheap, wholesome dishes have gone to make way for tinned and preserved foods. — Flora Thompson

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It's not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is the exact typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of 'Eyes Wide Shut' and '2001'.
'It's Futura Extra Bold,' explains Tony. 'It was Stanley's favorite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant.'
'Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to talk about?' I asked.
'God, yes,' says Tony. 'Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs. — Jon Ronson

Any view of things that is not strange, is false. — Neil Gaiman

You may have the best vegetables, you may be the most capable cook, but, if the copper vessel in which you prepare the vegetable soup is not tinned, the concretion you cook will be highly poisonous! So 'tin' your heart with truth, right conduct, peace and divine love; it will then become a vesssel fit for repeating holy name or symbols, meditation, religious vows, pilgrimage, ritualistic worship and the other dishes that you prepare in it. — Sathya Sai Baba

To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti. — Brigid Brophy

Every good villain has his or her own vulnerability. — Rita Volk

There's a widespread notion that children are open, that the truth about their inner selves just seeps out of them. That's all wrong. No one is more covert than a child, and no one has greater cause to be that way. It's a response to a world that is always using a tin-opener on them to see what they have inside, just in case it ought to be replaced with a more useful type of tinned foodstuff. — Peter Hoeg Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow

The next phase is to 2016, and yes, I want to be First Minister because I believe I have the life experience, and I've got a commitment to change. — Johann Lamont

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease. — George Orwell

The meal was pretentious - a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once. — Anthony Burgess

To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical little bowler-hatted sneak - Strube's "little man" - the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour's listening-in to the B.B.C. Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife "feels in the mood!" What a fate! No, it isn't like that that one was meant to live. — George Orwell

Helen lifted the lid, her eyes widening as she discovered a treasure trove of caramels, jelly creams, candied fruit, toffees and marshmallow drops, all wrapped in twists of waxed paper. Her wondering gaze traveled to the nearby mountain of accumulating delicacies... smoked Wiltshire ham and collar bacon, a box of dry-cured salmon, pots of imported Danish butter, tinned sweetbreads, and a sack of fat glossed dates. There was a basket of hothouse fruits, wheels of Brie in papery white rinds, cunning little cheeses wrapped in netting jars of rich fig paste, pickled quail eggs, bottles of jewel-colored fruit liqueur meant to be sipped from tiny glasses, and a gold-colored tin of cocoa essence. — Lisa Kleypas

Some things are impossible to tear yourself away from. — Gayle Forman

We wanted to guide the musicians, so we could create our own sound. We would never let the band just go in and play the chord sheets. We were very focused on what we had in mind for these productions. — Lamont Dozier

Books are precious things and cannot be selected like tinned peas in Tesco. — Colin Bateman

Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,
the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions. — Henry David Thoreau

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli? — Douglas Coupland

Theories:
*During the off-months for the visitors, which are the on-months for the oysters, are the oysters packed in ice or tinned, and shipped to Paris?

*During the off-months for the visitors, which are the on-months for the oysters, do the serving staff shuck shells?
Or
*During the off-months for the visitors, which are the on-months for the oysters, are the restaurant, and the oysters, abandoned, and the staff laid off? — Joanna Walsh

Yes, cider and tinned salmon are the staple diet of the agricultural classes. — Evelyn Waugh

To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder. — George Orwell

The interior was dim like a cave. The ceiling, pressed tin, was stalactited with hooks from the days when the shopkeeper would hang it with buckets, watering cans, coils of rope and paired boots. Refrigerator cases lined a side wall, shallow crates of withered fruit and vegetables the back, and in the vast middle ground were aisles of rickety shelving, stacked with anything from tinned peaches to tampons. The sole cash register was adjacent to the entrance, next to ranks of daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines and a little bookcase thumbtacked with a sign, Library. If you were a farmer in need of an axe or some some sheep dip you headed for the far back corner. If you wanted to buy a stamp, you headed a couple of paces past the library. — Garry Disher

We came back right over the World Trade Center and could see, even from that altitude, the devastation, the smoke that was coming up. It was obvious it was going to be horrible. — Hugh Shelton

Though my hair has grown grey now, and my sight dim, and my heart cold with years, and ennui, and disappointment, and treachery of friends, and yet I have but to lean back in my arm-chair and think, and those sweet figures comes rising up before me out of the past, with their smiles, and their kindnesses, and their bright tender eyes! — William Makepeace Thackery

By education, I mean an all-round drawing of the best in child and man in body, mind and spirit. — Mahatma Gandhi

There was something about feeding a man who appreciated your efforts and ate every bite. — Judith Fertig

If I had the choice between smoked salmon and tinned salmon, I'd have it tinned. With vinegar. — Harold Wilson

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature - like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines — Mary MacLane

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun. — George Orwell

Any meal at the front was an exercise in war-time ingenuity and devotion of the lower classes for their officers. The Petite Marmite a la Thermit was from beef-broth cubes, the tinned Canadian salmon was called Saumon de Tin A & Q Sauce. The Epaule d'Agneau Wellington, N.Z. was army ration lamb, and the terrine of foie gras aux truffes was a can of foie gras that I had bought from the French commanding general. There was a salad of fresh lettuce from somewhere (no one asked in what or whose fertilizer it had been grown in since we would all soon be dead anyway) and the Macedoine de Fruits a la Quatre Bas was a can of mixed fruit. Then fresh strawberries soaked in Cognac. All the usual wines starting with an amontillado, Pommery Extra Sec, Chateau Steenworde Claret, Graham's Five Crowns Port, Bisquit Dubouche Grande Champagne Cognac, Brandy and a Waterloo Cup. — Jeremiah Tower

It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster. Enough of hit-and-miss suppers of tinned soup and boxed biscuits and an occasional egg just because I had failed once more to rate an invitation! — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust ... So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a tiny trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food. — David Nicholls