Unusable Quotes & Sayings

Do not keep control over household affairs. The one who keeps control has to wander around. The unusable money [torn notes, ruined coins] are offered as homage in prayer rituals! 'Live' as a 'friend' with the 'wife'. You are her 'friend' and she is your 'friend'. — Dada Bhagwan

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am. — John Marsden

As human pastoralists discovered 8,000 years ago, raising animals can be an efficient way of harnessing otherwise unusable resources such as grass. — Tristram Stuart

This may account for Americans' overuse of the courts as a means of finding coherence and stability. As other institutions become unusable as mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth. For how long, no one knows. I — Neil Postman

Half-truths are worth more than outright lies. — George R R Martin

Here in Florida, we know plenty about the Castro brothers, and we hear stories of their ruthless and violent rule far too often. It is shameful that we would grant them any shred of legitimacy. — Rick Scott

He knew where his towel was. — Douglas Adams

[The intellect of fallen man] may be compared to a buzz-saw that is sharp and shining, ready to cut the boards that come to it. Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut fifty boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house. He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board. But he does not know that his seven-year-old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise and thus unusable because too short except at the point where the saw made its first contact with the wood. As long as the set of the saw is not changed, the result will always be the same. So also whenever the teachings of Christianity are presented to the natural man, they will be cut according to the set of sinful human personality. — Cornelius Van Til

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. — Leslie Lamport

Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. — Ray Bradbury

We loved each other in the same difficult, unusable way where you took turns doing it, instead of ever managing to do it at the same time. — Laura Dave

The thing is, there are so many different ways to make music these days with virtual instruments, software applications, physical instruments, and computer programs. — Mike Shinoda

There was a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe. — Robert Cailliau

No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait. — Albert Camus

All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago ... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible. — Aaron Levie

The old women in black at early Mass in winter
are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes
they have seen Christ. They make the kernel
of his being and the clarity around it
seem meager, as though he needs girders
to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses
against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.
Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges
across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills
along the banks where he became a young man
as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
The silver is worn down to the brass underneath
and is the better for it. He will gauge
by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.
He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt. — Jack Gilbert

In addition to the authoritarian threat, there is another insidious possibility: that endemic elite failure will prompt the populace to retreat into denialism. As distrust spreads from institution to institution like a contagion, it can render the entire social structure of publicly accessible knowledge unusable. If the experts as a whole are discredited, we are faced with an inexhaustible supply of quackery. To — Christopher L. Hayes

Whoso despiseth the word shall be destroyed: but he that feareth the commandment shall be rewarded. — Anonymous

As far as I could see, she didn't take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they'd been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I'd never solve - like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office. — Dennis Lehane

The problem is we have a standard of what evil is, Hitler, the Holocaust - THE standard of absolute evil. . . . But then everyone gets frantic as soon as you try to use the standard, nothing compares, nothing resembles - and the standard becomes unusable and nothing qualifies as Evil with a capital E. . . . I mean like a certain ex-actor-turned-president who shall go nameless sat idly and I do mean idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldn't even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help . . . I mean do you have to pile up some magic number of bodies before you hit the jackpot and rare a comparison with you-know-who? — Tony Kushner

I could imagine my grandmother's opinion about Holly's white wedding dress, since Holly had a little boy in school - but hey, whatever made the bride happy. White used to symbolize the virgin purity of the wearer. Now it just meant the bride had acquired an expensive and unusable dress to hang in her closet after the big day. — Charlaine Harris

I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. — Huey Newton

But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is ... When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making — Robert Hass

There is no other place where the heart should be so free as before the mercy seat. There, you can talk out your very soul, for that is the best prayer that you can present. Do not ask for what some tell you that you should ask for, but for that which you feel the need of, that which the Holy Spirit has made you to hunger and to thirst for, you ask for that. — Charles Spurgeon

The English have loudly and openly told the world that skis and dogs are unusable in these regions and that fur clothes are rubbish. We shall see - we shall see. — Roald Amundsen

Madness is forever! We even smell different, our hearts don't beat, they tick, our eyes are different, we don't just see, we also pick up vibes. We are probably dehumanised and way past our 'sell by' date, totally unusable, bitter as lemons. — Stephen Richards

Turkey is the main course in more Christmas dinners than any other meat or fowl. The high proportion of meat to unusable bone and fat makes it an ideal bird for a feast. Turkeys were domesticated in Mexico long before Spanish explores found them and introduced them into their homeland. From there they spread throughout Europe and gradually replaced most of the native Christmas feast foods. — Patricia Del Re

Computers shouldn't be unusable. You don't need to know how to work a telephone switch to make a phone call, or how to use the Hoover Dam to take a shower, or how to work a nuclear-power plant to turn on the lights. — Scott McNealy

Any religion can be compared to the attic of an old home. Unless the attic is regularly cleaned, it gathers dust and cobwebs and eventually becomes unusable. Similarly, if a religion cannot be updated or cleaned from time to time, it loses its usefulness and cannot relate anymore to changed times and people. — Bhaskarananda

Don't let small minded people dictate how you should look and be free. — Brian Molko

Aping the lower class will only lead to fatherless children, unusable muscles, and the fear of tomorrow's sobriety. — Bauvard

Laurent's fair skin and blue eyes were a combination that was rare in Patras, rarer in Akielos, and a particular weakness of Damen's. — C.S. Pacat

I am a congenital liar. Some Highlanders are. To my ancestors, the truth was so sacred as to be unusable. — Gladys Mitchell

Just as experience dictates to the ballet teacher the length of time necessary to train his students, so the horse, too, needs time to mature into a great four legged dancer. This fact cannot be obliterated by seeming successes that supposedly prove the opposite. For, even if someone should succeed in training a horse to high school level by the age of eight, this individual occurrence cannot shake the foundations of the classical art of riding, if this dressage horse is completely unsound and unusable by the age of ten. — Alois Podhajsky

If the Poe Lock were ever rendered unusable due to a terrorist attack or natural disaster, it would halt commerce on the Great Lakes and these industries would be helpless. — Bart Stupak

Been Contented goes beyond our material wants; contentment sets us free from the illusion of having more or "Better things", or expecting "better times" it sets us free from the illusion that somehow things should be different. — Martin Suarez

Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam. Con artists prowl the listings, paying sellers with fake cashier's checks and luring buyers to share their credit card numbers. — Gary Wolf

I supposed if you were going to make a career of breaking laws, you might as well know them. — Richelle Mead

My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance ... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art. — Samuel Beckett

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable. — Paul Valery

Another important method of evaluation is to determine the as purchased (AP) weight, which is the amount of food purchased before processing to give the number of edible portions required to serve a specific number of customers. The edible portion (EP) is the amount of weight or useable product is left after the removal of such - skin, bones, outside leaves, stems, peels, and so forth - are removed and discarded and are unusable to produce or serve. — Ruby Parker Puckett

The truth is I suppose that a tour lays in a great stock of thought and spirits for the future; the fatigue and drawbacks of actual travelling are forgotten and a bright residuum remains. — Henry Parry Liddon

I had never been a dresser. My shirts were all faded and shrunken, 5 or 6 years old, threadbare. My pants the same. I hated department stores, I hated the clerks, they acted so superior, they seemed to know the secret of life, they had a confidence I didn't possess. My shoes were always broken down and old, I disliked shoe stores too. I never purchased anything until it was completely unusable, and that included automobiles. It wasn't a matter of thrift, I just couldn't bear to be a buyer needing a seller, seller being so handsome and aloof and superior. Besides, it all took time, time when you could just be laying around and drinking. — Charles Bukowski