Dirt Quotes - page 12
This morning, when I got my mail - there's concrete all over the ground - cement, you know - and these little clovers - the little green clovers, like from St. Patrick's Day - the plant - were growing up out of the cement - no dirt and no nothing and no rain - and there they were, growing up out of the cement, and I was thinking - "that's like me."
Ysabella Brave
I don't like it,"" said Lenina. ""I don't like it."" She liked even less what awaited her at the entrance to the pueblo, where their guide had left them while he went inside for instructions. The dirt, to start with, the piles of rubbish, the dust, the dogs, the flies. Her face wrinkled up into a grimace of disgust. She held her handkerchief to her nose.
""But how can they live like this?"" she broke out in a voice of indignant incredulity. (It wasn't possible.)
Bernard shrugged his shoulders philosophically. ""Anyhow,"" he said, ""they've been doing it for the last five or six thousand years. So I suppose they must be used to it by now.""
""But cleanliness is next to fordliness,"" she insisted.
""Yes, and civilization is sterilization,"" Bernard went on, concluding on a tone of irony the second hypnopaedic lesson in elementary hygiene. ""But these people have never heard of Our Ford, and they aren't civilized.""
Aldous Huxley
What kind of food did we drop on Afghanistan? Pop-Tarts, peanut butter...just add a Honey Baked Ham and you've got a redneck Christmas. Why are we dropping this food on Afghanistan? Tastes a shit load better than dirt, #1. #2, difficult to have a call to jihad with a mouth full of peanut butter. Thirdly, Afghanistan is a hashish-smoking culture, and anyone who's ever been a friend of the hookah will go, (intense, stoned stare) "Pop-Tarts!"
Robin Williams
The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there.
Charles Dudley Warner
Always remember the objects you are working with. When you make a bridge, remember you are putting steel on stone and dirt. ... Some day you will write poems to a little girl: marks with ink on paper. ... When you are making love, you are moving flesh against flesh. That is the basis of all magic.
Samuel R. Delany
People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong.
Alice Munro
Ironically, for all of their love of conspiracy theories - the rigging of the 2000 election, vote suppression in Ohio in 2004, 9/11 being an inside job, oil companies covering up miracle technology that would allow cars to run on dirt, Britney Spears' career, etc., etc. - when presented with an actual conspiracy of Soviet spies infiltrating the U.S. government, they laughed it off like world-weary skeptics and dedicated themselves to slandering Joe McCarthy.
Then as now, liberals protect themselves from detection with wild calumnies against anybody who opposes them. They have no interest in - or aptitude for - persuasion. Their goal is to anathematize their enemies.
Ann Coulter
The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. (Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.)
China Miéville
I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.
George Orwell
"There's no courage", The Prophet said, "before the war has begun."
Drunkards vaunt their bravery when you speak of war.
But in the blaze of battle they scatter like mice.
I'm astonished by the man who wants purity
And yet trembles when the harshness of polishing begin...
When a man beats a carpet again and again
It's not the carpet he's attacking, but the dirt in it.
Rumi
Other people say that their parents are the same way whenever there's bad news from whatever patch of dirt they came from, but being common still doesn't mean it makes any sense. After all, it was twenty years ago, and if the adults were going to get so upset about having everything smashed up, they shouldn't have had a war or tolerated AIDS for so long that they gave it the chance to turn into mutAIDS, or allowed the climate disequilibration to get so far out of hand. Honestly, they remind me of the three-year-olds in the nursery, smashing things to bits and then crying because they're broken. I certainly hope I'm not that kind of a moron when I'm that old.
John Barnes
Ironically, the Pirates' only run was driven in by Clemente when Marichal tried to quick-pitch him with the bases loaded in the fifth. With the count three and two, Clemente was standing in the box, but not looking at Marichal, who threw swiftly. "I was trying to smooth out the dirt around the plate,” Clemente said, "not looking, when I hear someone on the bench yell at me. I look up and see the ball, and I try to just punch at it with one hand.” He got just enough of it to drive it into the ground in front of the plate and bounce it so high that Orlando Cepeda had to wait helplessly for it to come down as the run scored and Clemente fled across the base. Clemente laughed in reminiscence. "I don't remember anybody try to quick-pitch me since Don Bessent do it with Brooklyn. I punch it for double."
Roberto Clemente
I don't make the infantryman look noble, because he couldn't look noble even if he tried. Still there is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers and medical aid men with dirt in their ears. They are rough and their language gets coarse because they live a life stripped of convention and niceties.
Their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other.
Bill Mauldin
