Wastebasket Quotes & Sayings

Everything rational and sensible abandons me when I try to throw out photographs. Time and time again, I hold one over a wastebasket, and then find it impossible to release my fingers and let the picture drop and disappear. — Susan Orlean

The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the room. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time. — Robert Benchley

What is the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher?

A mathematician uses a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket.
The philosopher needs only the pencil and paper. — Matthew Rave

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket. — Ernest Hemingway,

But what sent his face clear down off his skull and broke him in two, though, was he said when he saw the Pam-shiny empty biscuit pan on top of the stove and the plastic rind of the peanut butter's safety-seal wrap on top of the wastebasket's tall pile. The little locket-picture in the back of his head swelled and became a sharp-focused scene of his wife and little girl and little unborn child eating what he now could see they must have eaten, last night and this morning, while he was out ingesting their groceries and rent. This was his cliff-edge, his personal intersection of choice, standing there loose-faced in the kitchen, running his finger around a shiny pan with not one little crumb of biscuit left in it. He sat down on the kitchen tile with his scary eyes shut tight but still seeing his little girl's face. They'd ate some charity peanut butter on biscuits washed down with tapwater and a grimace. — David Foster Wallace

When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody's embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket. — John Dos Passos

It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is. It is very easy to explain everything on the table if you have put everything you cannot explain underneath it in the wastebasket. — Whitley Strieber

I told the students that whatever they did in class was for the wastebasket. — Imogen Cunningham

When a man sends you an impudent letter, sit right down and give it back to him with interest ten times compounded, and then throw both letters in the wastebasket. — Elbert Hubbard

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. — Margaret Atwood

Next to the dog, the wastebasket is your best friend. — B.C. Forbes

If this had been a public-school locker room, there would have been some gray jumbo-sized garbage cans nearby, and I probably could've taken care of cleanup by myself. But apparently the girls of St. Andrew's don't throw anything away, because all they had was a tiny wastebasket and some recycling bins. There were bins for paper, plastic, and glass, but none for rotting corpses. Go figure. — James Ponti

The past is in the wastebasket. — Abigail Thomas

Sure, a surgeon can stand to look at a mutilated body," Crawford said, crumpling his cup and stepping on the pedal of the covered wastebasket. "But I don't think a doctor can stand to see a life wasted. — Thomas Harris

I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it's an infinite wastebasket-but at some point you're going to run into the reality, which is that that isn't true. — Noam Chomsky

1. Write like you'll live forever - fear is a bad editor.
2. Write like you'll croak today - death is the best editor.
3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.
4. Pick one - fame or delight.
5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.
6. Cunning and excess are your friends.
7. TV and liquor are your enemies.
8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.
9. You're done when the crows sing. — Ron Dakron

God squeezed Day and held him close as he shot his first jet of come. God growled deep in his throat with his teeth still latched on to Day's throat. He stopped biting only to pull the tender flesh into his mouth and suck as hard as he could until he stopped coming inside Day's spasming hole. God stilled and caught his breath, his cock still buried inside his lover. He felt Day lick at the sweat on his neck and unhook his legs from around his back. God slid his hands down Day's back and palmed both of his ass cheeks, lifting him off his cock. Day hissed, and God gently laid him back down on the damp sheets. God was exhausted. He removed the condom and dropped it in the wastebasket beside the bed before dropping down beside Day. "You — A.E. Via

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine. — Donald Knuth

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. — Ernest Hemingway,

When everything is at its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a little while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burnt down. — Richard Bachman

I found a discarded textbook on calculus in a wastebasket and read it from cover to cover. — John Pople

A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket. — J.D. Salinger

Small wastebasket liners, $1.17 ... tall wastebasket liners, $2.29 ... garbage can liners, $3.98 ... I think I just spent $7.44 buying something I'm going to throw away. — Cathy Guisewite

One applauds the industry of professional philanthropy. But it has its dangers. After a while the private heart begins to harden. We fling letters into the wastebasket, are abrupt to telephoned solicitations. Charity withers in the incessant gale. — Phyllis McGinley

My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow? — Sylvia Plath

Dear Bea - I've been wading through a pile of "Due before 3" mimeos - but now at last I know what to do with them: into the wastebasket! I'm also hep to the jargon. I know that "illustrative material" means magazine covers, "enriched curriculum" means teaching "who and whom," and that "All evaluation of students should be predicated upon initial goals and grade level expectations" means if a kid shows up, pass him. Right? — Bel Kaufman

If you can't trust your can opener, then what? Is your wastebasket going to get you? — Garrison Keillor

Hollywood is like an empty wastebasket. — Ginger Rogers

Writers have two main problems. One is writer's block, when words won't come at all, and the other is Logorrhoea, when the words come so fast that they can hardly get to the wastebasket in time. — Cecilia Bartholomew

The most important tool of the theoretical physicist is his wastebasket. — Albert Einstein

Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before. — Conrad Aiken

I make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someone's been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practice-somewhat contrived, I admit-to write the man's name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself: "That finishes the incident, and so far as I'm concerned, that fellow. The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumpled-up spite and discarded personalities. Besides, it seemed to be effective, and helped me avoid harboring useless black feelings." — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead. — Erma Bombeck

Elvis!" Min shoved herself off the couch to shoo him away. "Stay away from there. There's broken glass."
"He did that on purpose," David said, outraged.
"Yes, David, the cat is plotting against you." Min fished the base out of the water and glass shards and put it on the table. Then she went to get her wastebasket and began to put the glass pieces in it. — Jennifer Crusie

Happiness is a very small desk and a very big wastebasket. — Robert Orben

Marriage is the wastebasket for human emotions. — Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield

A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable. — William Stafford

Hubert complains that the electric wastebasket has been overheating. I haven't noticed it but that's what Hubert says and Hubert is rarely wrong about things that don't matter. The electric wastebasket is a security item. Papers dropped into it are destroyed instantly. How the electric wastebasket accomplishes this is not known. An intimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration, one assumes. It is not emptied. There are not even ashes. — Donald Barthelme

[I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull! — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Merv Griffin, who developed Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, had a great line once. I used to personally answer all the mail that came in to Jeopardy! whether it was favorable or unfavorable, and Merv said, You know how I handle the nasty mail? I said no. He just grabbed it and folded it up and crunched it up and threw it in the wastebasket. He said, I don't bother with it. — Alex Trebek

There is a scene in Arthur Miller's play Incident at Vichy in which an upper-middle-class professional man appears before the Nazi authority that has occupied his town and shows his credentials: his university degrees, his letters of reference from prominent citizens, and so on. The Nazi asks him, "Is that everything you have?" The man nods. The Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him: "Good, now you have nothing." The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed. Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond. — Viktor E. Frankl

If someone gives me a to-do list, I say 'thank you, this is nice.' One needs things to throw in the wastebasket. — Karl Lagerfeld

Photographers undervalue the use of the wastebasket in their pursuit of fine photography. — Ralph Steiner

The physicist's greatest tool is his wastebasket. — Albert Einstein

The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble. — Bel Kaufman

This weekend on The History Channel, someone digs through old plastic junk ("It's a Dukes of Hazzard wastebasket!"), someone else tries to sell a doll head ("I used to take the heads off the bodies, and I kept the heads") . . . and Larry the Cable Guy taste-tests Tabasco sauce ("I can't feel my dadgum tongue!"). The History Channel. What the hell happened to us? Jimmy Kimmel Live4 — Donald R. Prothero

The customer glared. Then she threw the bonnet at Sophie and stormed out of the shop. Sophie carefully crammed the bonnet into the wastebasket, panting rather.
The rule was: Lose your temper, lose a customer. She had just proved that rule.
It troubled her to realise how very enjoyable it had been. — Diana Wynne Jones

A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation. — Norbert Wiener

Mr. Benedict: "After I woke up and composed myself, however, I realized the flowers must certainly be yours, Constance, to do with as you please. At any rate
"
Mr.Benedict broke off, for just then Constance jumped to her feet, snatched the bouquet from his desk, and hurled it into the wastebasket with all the force she could muster
so hard that flower petals flew up out of the wastebasket like tiny pink butterflies. Then placing her hands against the wall to steady herself, she stomped one foot repeatedly into the wastebasket as if trying to put out a fire.
"I see we are of the same opinion," said Mr. Benedict as Constance returned to her seat, and the others congratulated her on her judgment. — Trenton Lee Stewart

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit
subliterature. — Ursula K. Le Guin