Digging Quotes

• Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

  Edna Ferber

  Writing, Climbing, Interesting

  Edna Ferber (1939). “A Peculiar Treasure”

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• The first rule of holes: When you're in one stop digging.

  Molly Ivins

  Political, Politics, Firsts

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• He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

  Walter Benjamin

  Real, Past, Men

  "Reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings".

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• There's a light at the end of the tunnel. And it's a train.

  Margaret Smith

  Positive, Sassy, Tunnels

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• There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but the way out is through.

  David Allen

  Inspirational, Positive Thinking, Tunnels

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• The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels.

  Thomas Friedman

  Three, Firsts, Holes

  "Imbalances of Power" by Thomas Friedman, www.nytimes.com. May 21, 2008.

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• How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.

  Neville Chamberlain

  Country, War, People

  Radio broadcast, 27 Sept. 1938

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• Ritie, don't worry 'cause you ain't pretty. Plenty pretty women I seen digging ditches or worse. You smart. I swear to God, I rather you have a good mind than a cute behind.

  Maya Angelou

  Cute, Smart, Swear To God

  Maya Angelou (2012). “The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou”, p.55, Modern Library

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• We could imagine nothing pleasanter than to spend all of our lives digging for relics of the past.

  Heinrich Schliemann

  Past, Imagine, Relics

  Leo Deuel, Heinrich Schliemann (1977). “Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann: a documentary portrait drawn from his autobiographical writings, letters, and excavation reports”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• If you’re in a hole, stop digging.

  Denis Healey

  Holes, Ifs

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• No gold-digging for me; I take diamonds! We may be off the gold standard someday.

  Mae West

  Jewels, Gold, May

  Mae West (1967). “The wit and wisdom of Mae West”

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• As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to go on a number of archeological digs. So I had experience excavating, digging up remains of ancient Indian villages in the Midwest and in the Southwest.

  Donald Johanson

  Opportunity, Hiking, Numbers

  "The Quest for Human Origins". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. January 25, 1991.

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• During the mission, Walter Jones, a team member was given a package containing bone fragments by a Lao. The source said they were from a crash site. He presented photographs showing himself in company with others digging around obvious aircraft debris.

  Bo Gritz

  Team, Laos, Bones

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• When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

  Tammara Webber

  Inspirational, Cowboy, Digging A Hole

  Tammara Webber (2014). “Between the Lines: The Complete Series”, p.521, Tammara Webber

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• When digging ceases to be a great game and becomes, as in Egypt, merely business, it will be a bad thing.

  Leonard Woolley

  Business, Egypt, Games

  Sir Leonard Woolley (1920). “Dead Towns and Living Men: Being Pages from an Antiquary's Notebook”, London, Milford

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• There is a light at the end of the tunnel... hopefully its not a freight train!

  Mariah Carey

  Positive Thinking, Tunnels, Light

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• I describe my plots as follows; A character is walking down the street when all of a sudden a piano falls on them. They spend the rest of the story digging out from under that piano. How they dig, how long and how well, this all depends entirely on the character.

  Sarah Zettel

  Fall, Character, Piano

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• The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! - breathe dead hippo, so as to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in - your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.

  Joseph Conrad

  Smell, Sight, Sound

  Joseph Conrad (2004). “Heart of Darkness”, p.62, Variocity

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• The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.

  H. L. Mencken

  Drinking, Men, Wind

  H. L. MENCKEN (1924). “PREJUDICES FOURTH SERIES”

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• When you're thirsty, it's too late to think about digging a well.

  Harvey Mackay

  Thinking, Too Late, Thirsty

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• I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

  John Updike

  Art, Book, Home

  John Updike's tstimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor in Boston, Massachusetts, January 30, 1978.

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• It is no use asking me or anyone else how to dig... Better to go and watch a man digging, and then take a spade and try to do it.

  Gertrude Jekyll

  Men, Trying, Watches

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• I felt that if we, as the Met, were not intervening once one person starts digging up Parliament Square, then someone else is going to join in and you have a spiral.

  Mike Todd, Jr.

  Squares, Spirals, Parliament

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• There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.

  Charles Guggenheim

  Tunnels, Slave Labor, Would Be

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don't like looking back. I don't even like talking about 'em! So I'm really digging back in my memory because I don't like to sit and look at my films again.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Memories, Talking, Looks

  Guardian interview, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 1999.

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