Squalor Quotes

“The mask of art is the means through which corruption is spread. The mask makes vice seem beautiful, turns squalor and nastiness into glamorous thrill, seduces the onlooker into the game – and leaves him or her with the corpse on his hands.”
― Jennifer Birkett

“Satin occupied a couple of rooms which a chemist had furnished for her in order to rescue her from the clutches of the police; but in little over a year she had broken the furniture, knocked in the chairs and dirtied the curtains in such a frenzy of filth and disorder that the two rooms looked as if they were inhabited by a pack of mad cats.”
― Émile Zola, Nana

“What do we mean by poverty? Not what Dickens or Blake or Mayhew meant. Today no one seriously expects to go hungry in England or to live without running water or medical care or even TV. Poverty has been redefined in industrial countries, so that anyone at the lower end of the income distribution is poor ex officio, as it were-poor by virtue of having less than the rich. And of course by this logic, the only way of eliminating poverty is by an egalitarian redistribution of wealth-even if the society as a whole were to become poorer as a result.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him—that is the best account of it that has been yet given. Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us; and strengthen the wings of love.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“I tell you, say the rich,
the poor are naught
but dirty wind
welling in air-shafts
over the cinders
and droppings of
the past, their
voices thick
with grease
and ordure,
sewer-greed
to corrode the ear
with the horrors
of the past
and the voids
of new stupidity.
One could drown
waiting for the poor
to make
one fine distinction.
Yes, destroy us
say the rich
and you lose
the roots
of God.”
― Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies

“Human beings in there took turns standing or lying down. The legs of those who stood were like fence posts driven into a warm, squirming, farting, sighing earth. The queer earth was a mosaic of sleepers who nestled like spoons.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.”
― Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club

“It's a cultural matter. They take pride in their unpride. It reflects their lack of status. Bottom... of the bottom of the human world, and they know it, and they don't like it, and the squalor is like a badge of nonstatus for them. Saying, you want us to be filth, we'll live in filth too. Reveling in it. Wallowing in it. If we're not people, we don't have to be tidy....”
― Robert Silverberg, Tower of Glass

“Wealth without thankfulness is nothing more than well-heeled squalor.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Used" is such an odd word, so much stranger than "second-hand." A prefix for condoms, and there's a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore