Rubbish Quotes

“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Great and pure thoughts cannot be deposited in minds accumulated with rubbish.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“It does not come to me in quite so direct a line as that; it takes a bend or two, but nothing of consequence. The stream is as good as at first; the little rubbish it collects in the turnings is easily moved away.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“... but now men who could work preferred to beg, and the artists forgot that their calling was noble and became imitators instead of creators, charging exorbitant sums for the rubbish they churned out with one eye closed.”
― Pauline Gedge, The Eagle and the Raven

“People think that whatever comes out of the mouth of a wise man is the choicest gem, sometime it's utter stupidity and rubbish”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Most great ideas, or a lot of them anyway, were thought at the time to be rubbish, and you were reckoned an idiot for having them.
This was true of stupid ideas too.
Telling them apart was the tricky bit.”
― Mick Herron, Slough House

“A plain, brown paper-wrapped package came in the mail recently. Upon opening it, I saw that it was a patchwork quilt about four feet by five feet. Many little scraps of cloth, carefully joined by loving hands. Two squares have suggestions of a black cassock and Roman white collar. The maker of the quilt states, “In its variety, I feel it denotes confusion and the world “mixed” up. There are dark spots for the dark times and bright squares, so, hopefully, some good and brightness will come in the future. The other pieces of cloth were of happy times, mothers and children, peaceful settings, happy things.” A note inside stated that she felt we were “scraps,”—the “scraps” that the abusive priests treated us like. They would use us as a scrap is used and then simply toss us aside. I was moved to tears. Holding it in my hands, I could almost feel others' pain and suffering, as I touched each panel. It is a magnificent work, worthy of a prize. I was deeply humbled by the receipt of the quilt. This woman got it; she really got it. This woman got it; she really got it. She has a deeper understanding of what we have gone through. It is rare.”
― Charles L. Bailey Jr., In the Shadow of the Cross: The True Account of My Childhood Sexual and Ritual Abuse at the Hands of a Roman Catholic Priest

“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."

Outside The Whale (Granta, 1984)”
― Salman Rushdie

“Rubbish is immortal, it pervades the air, swells up in water, dissolves, rots, disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke, into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it. (...) Rubbish is like death. What else is there that is so indestructible?”
― Ivan Klíma, Love and Garbage

“Good people who are always silent for bad people to gain freedom and do their worsts are the most dangerous wastes the world ever has.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts

“I hoped that was because someone more honest with him than I could bring myself to be told him they were rubbish.”
― Laura Greenwood, Fangs For Nothing

“Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town”
― David Thomson, In Camden Town

“You may have been born on the rubbish damp. But be careful not to believe that the rubbish damp was born in you! Your environment may try to set conditions that may attempt their fingers on crippling you. But you got to stand and say "I thank you Lord that I am rising against and above my limitations”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“If you're reading this, then I guess someone, somewhere does go through the rubbish and read every piece of paper that gets balled up and tossed away. So in that case here it is- my name's Sal.”
― Alex Scarrow, City of Shadows

“What do you mean? In Old Castle? I still live with my parents in case you haven’t noticed, Jack. Those two strangers – that man and woman sitting on my sofa – are actually my parents. Oh, you mean your place? Yes, let’s evict your parents…let’s place them neatly in a cardboard box and leave it by the rubbish bins!”
― Jonathan Dunne, Hearts Anonymous

“When he lifted the cover of one of the trash cans, before emptying the contents of his own pail into it, he was always astonished by its neatness and order. His own trash was the most indecent collection in the entire building. Repugnant and despicable. There was no resemblance between it and the honest, day-to-day trash of the other tenants. That had a solid, respectable appearance, and his did not.”
― Roland Topor, The Tenant

“Hence that state of mind at once gloomy and euphoric which one associates with carrying out the rubbish; and the way we see the men who go by emptying the bins into their pulping truck not just as emissaries for the chthonic world, gravediggers of the inanimate, Charons of a beyond of greasy paper and rusty tin, but as angels too, as indispensable mediators between ourselves and the heaven of ideas in which we undeservedly soar (or imagine we soar) and which can exist only in so far as we are not overwhelmed by the waste which every act of living incessantly produces (even the act of thinking: these thoughts of mine that you are reading being all that been salvaged from the scores of sheets of paper now crumpled up in the bin), heralds of a possible salvation beyond the destruction inherent in all production and consumption, liberators from the weight of time’s detritus, ponderous dark angels of lightness and clarity.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“Cleaning up is expensive; arson is cheap.”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“Worn old shoes need a good cobbler to be repaired; but worn old thoughts, only a rubbish bin!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Melt all the tanks in the world and make them rubbish bins. They will be much more useful for the humanity!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“I pray for sufficient wisdom to understand that wisdom apart from God is the stuff of opinion tainted by the rot of bias. And if I am somehow apt to confuse such rubbish with wisdom, I will think myself wise but find myself living in a landfill.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The first and most obvious understanding of education comes from the fact that anyone who can not tell Reason from rubbish is not yet in a condition to know that he can not tell Reason from rubbish, a disability, which, you would suppose, can hardly be one of those put forth as education. But it is.”
― Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

“If man was created in God's likeness, then God must have just got rid of the trash when he threw man down onto Earth. After all, we do the same thing, don't we?

Somehow, I don't think God is like man at all, do you?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Zero waste is itself, a waste.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Microplastics will the death of everyone.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“I thought i think i’m thinking the bangladeshi people bangladeshi some of people not the lot’s of people because lot’s of actor actress lot’s of journalistht is a giving me the hi giving me the is a good way wishes for the award but lot’s of but few people is all over in the country view of journalisht few of people is not the happy for the award because of zelas”
― Zayed Khan

“Talking about sex is not rubbish.”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“English: "Every book is rubbish until you understand how to read it."

Česky: „Každá kniha je brak jen do chvíle, než pochopíš, jak ji číst.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“Wan decade frae wir last self-defeatin referendum, we're close tae hae the centenary ae MacDiarmid's masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Oan the man's daith, Norman MacCaig said they should observe twa minutes' pandemonium. Fine description ae MacDiarmid himself, as much as whit he unleashed. MacDiarmid wiss Scotland's ultimate political poet. We winna rehearse the man's mony faults here - "problematic", says Heaney. Aye. And in spite ae this, MacDiarmid's mair important tae the cause ae Scots and Scotland than ony ither poet frae the previous century. "My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit's egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish." And that's hou Mount MacDiarmid maun be regarded: tempted as we may be tae tak oot the rubbish, we canna thraw the hail lot awa, as wull shairly be settin the bins ablaze. An whit's mair self-defeatin nor a bin fire?”
― Colin Bramwell, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland