Salvage Quotes

• We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair.

  Guy Gavriel Kay

  Despair, Matter, Gates

  Guy Gavriel Kay (2001). “Summer Tree, The: Book One of the Fionavar Tapestry”, p.126, Penguin

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• A sound man is good at salvage, at seeing nothing is lost

  Laozi

  Business, Men, Sound

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• You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.

  Kelly Link

  Life, Firsts, Buried

  Kelly Link (2009). “Pretty Monsters”, p.7, Canongate Books

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• To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.

  Louise Erdrich

  Prayer, Eye, Men

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• Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage.

  Henry Ford

  Waste, Wasting Time, Lean Manufacturing

  Henry Ford (2006). “The Great To-Day and Greater Future”, p.142, Cosimo, Inc.

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• If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer.

  Rosalynn Carter

  Dream, Needs, World

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• Millions of people have wrecked their lives in angry turmoil, because they refused to accept the worst; refused to try to improve upon it; refused to salvage what they could from the wreck. Instead of trying to reconstruct their fortunes, they engaged in a bitter and "violent contest with experience"- and ended up victims of that brooding fixation known as melancholia.

  Dale Carnegie

  Acceptance, People, Trying

  Dale Carnegie (2016). “How to stop worrying & start living”, p.27, Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd

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• Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

  George Orwell

  Independent, Civilization, Evil

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• Look at Obama - he is now [2015] trying to help us environmentally but he should have done it eight years ago. He's trying to salvage his legacy and trying to do something good but we needed for him to show leadership from day one.

  Patti Smith

  Eight, Should Have, Years

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it’s the fiction writer’s job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in.

  Wells Tower

  Meaningful, Jobs, Believe

  "Wells Tower, Fiction Writer, Is Looking for Joy". Interview with Leon Neyfakh, observer.com. March 23, 2009.

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• For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Love, Kings, Car

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• Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Thinking, Futility Of Life, Evil

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016). “The Beautiful and Damned: American Literature”, p.287, VM eBooks

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• If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

  John Irving

  Writing, Giving, Cooking

  John Irving (1978). “The world according to Garp”, Pocket

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• Man can and must prevent the tragedy of famine in the future instead of merely trying with pious regret to salvage the human wreckage of the famine, as he has so often done in the past.

  Norman Borlaug

  Regret, Past, Men

  Norman Ernest Borlaug (1971). “Mankind and Civilization at Another Crossroad”

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• We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.

  Hermann Hesse

  Flower, Fall, Heart

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Narcissus and Goldmund: A Novel”, p.157, Macmillan

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• Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.

  Henry Ford

  Doe, Waste, Wasting Time

  Henry Ford (2006). “The Great To-Day and Greater Future”, p.142, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.

  Susan Sontag

  Becoming One, Ironic, World

  On Photography "Melancholy Objects" (1977)

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• We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities ... Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Country, Men, Cities

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• Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Ruins, Boards, Vinyl

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• It's as if women are in a totally rigged race. A lot of men are driving souped-up, low-slung racing cars and we're running as fast as we can in tennis shoes we managed to salvage from a local garage sale.

  Naomi Weisstein

  Running, Men, Race

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• Now if we can get white population, immigrants and big companies and so on moving into Africa and if we can get with that Scientology well established in Southern Africa, why we can then look forward to a salvage operation base, in case the northern hemisphere's lights go out.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Moving, White, Light

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• I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the way that they move and in how their bodies work. That was foremost in my head when I was writing Salvage: I wanted every gesture, every little movement, to really carry meaning and communicate meaning to the reader. I was very conscious of that when I was writing.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Running, People, House

  "Aleksandar Hemon: A personal history of Sarajevo". Interview with John Freeman, www.theguardian.com. February 23, 2013.

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• I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Michigan, Firsts, Bones

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• The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  People, Soul, Aftermath

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