Wastepaper Quotes & Sayings

Good call. A second drag and your next stop's the wastepaper basket - and not to toss your kleenex, true. — J.R. Ward

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element. — Salman Rushdie

Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

All of my friends in the business ask, 'Why is this woman not a star? Why is she not a household name?' — Annie Golden

In a word, a concert hall is a place where middle-class white people can feel safe together. — Christopher Small

One of the most important pieces of equipment, for the photographer who really wants to improve, is a great big wastepaper basket. — Ansel Adams

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. Thomas Carlyle — Bohdi Sanders

How did Kirchmann understand the worthlessness of jurisprudence ? The answer lies in the aphorism: "Three revisions by the legislator and whole libraries became wastepaper." With a sharp alteration this answer became a slogan:"A stroke of the legislator's pen and whole libraries became wastepaper." Another aphorism in the same vein made the point even more brusquely and less politely: "Positive law turns the jurist into a worm in rotten wood." Kirchmann meant that jurisprudence could never catch up with legislation. Thus our predicament becomes immediately obvious. What remains of a science reduced to annotating and interpreting constantly changing regulations issued by state agencies presumed to be in the best position to know and articulate their true intent? — Carl Schmitt

The ocean was a molten gold. A drum roll sent the crowd into a frenzied cheering which reached a fevered pitch when the ocean swallowed the sun in a kinetic bolt of color representing the entire spectrum of light. Matt studied Shelly as she watched awed. The child-like delight on her face was captivating. — Meryl Sawyer

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse ... but surely you will see the wildness! — Pablo Picasso

To reach the farthest chamber of Lascaux, it's likely a man had to snuff out his light, lower himself down a shaft with a rope made of twisted fibers, and then rekindle his lamp in the dark so as to draw the woolly rhinoceros, the half horse, and the raging bison there. A long spear transfixes that bison, and entrails pour from its side. Beneath its front hooves lies the one painted man in all of Lascaux: prone, spindly wounded, disguised behind a bird mask. And below him, until its discovery in 196o, lay a spoon-shaped lamp carved of red sandstone ... Hold it again as it once was held, and the animals will emerge out of darkness as you pass. Nothing stays still. Shadows nestle in the cavities; a flicker of light across pale protruding rock turns a hoof or raises a head. One shape recedes as another emerges, and everything lingers in the imagination. — Jane Brox

People like Eunice just never had quite figured out how to get along in the world. They might be perfectly intelligent, but they were subject to speckles and flushes; their purses resembled wastepaper baskets; they stepped on their own skirts. — Anne Tyler

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing. — D.H. Lawrence

The wastepaper basket is the writer's best friend. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels. — Laurie Graham

There's none as deaf as those who won't listen. I get letters. If they are moronic, they go in the wastepaper basket, but if they are reasonable points, I try to explain. I am planning for the long-term future. I am planning for the long-term future. People say build a team not a hotel, but that argument is irrelevant. It's like fish or meat — Ken Bates

I don't repeat that many styles if I can help, although some have become classics. I try not to repeat. I'd rather surprise people. — Christian Louboutin

With the magnitude of the challenges we face right now, what we need in Washington are not more political tactics
we need more good ideas. We don't need more point-scoring
we need more problem-solving. — Barack Obama

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me. — David Sedaris

And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real — Mary Oliver

The quality of a man's mind can generally be judged by the size of his wastepaper basket. — Jose Bergamin

But there was no question in my mind that I was gonna still go for it. I was still going for the win. I wasn't skiing for second or third place today, and in the end I think that's probably what got me there. — Bode Miller

Gotham City. Clean shafts of concrete and snowy rooftops. The work of men who died generations ago. From here, it looks like an achievement. From here, you can't see the enemy. — Frank Miller

I went to the shoemaker to collect his wastepaper. One of them asked me if my book was communistic. I replied that it was realistic. He cautioned me that it was not wise to write of reality. — Carolina Maria De Jesus

The Dean's complaining to his Faculty. Why do you scientists need such expensive equipment? Why can't you be like the Math Department, which only needs a blackboard and a wastepaper basket? Better still, like the Department of Philosophy. That doesn't even need a wastepaper basket ... — Arthur C. Clarke

Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it - torn up to irrecoverable tatters. — Samuel Butler

Mrs. Darling loved to have everything just so, and Mr. Darling had a passion for being exactly like his neighbours; so, of course, they had a nurse. As they were poor, owing to the amount of milk the children drank, this nurse was a prim Newfoundland dog, called Nana, who had belonged to no one in particular until the Darlings engaged her. She had always thought children important, however, and the Darlings had become acquainted with her in Kensington Gardens, where she spent most of her spare time peeping into perambulators, and was much hated by careless nursemaids, whom she followed to their homes and complained of to their mistresses. She proved to be quite a treasure of a nurse. — J.M. Barrie

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society ... loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age. — Jacques Barzun

Because this week I've started in on a hundred reproductions of Rembrandt van Rijn, a hundred portraits of the old artist with the mushroom face, the face of a man pushed to the brink of eternity by art and drink, the door handle starting to turn, the final door pushed open from without by an unknown hand, and I'm beginning to have his puff-paste face, that peeling, piss-soaked wall of a face, I'm beginning to smile his half-moronic smile, to look at the world from the other side of human causes and events, and all my bales these days are framed with that portrait of Rembrandt van Rijn as an old man while I keep filling my drum with wastepaper and open books. — Bohumil Hrabal