Dry Up Quotes

• What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?

  Langston Hughes

  Love, Dream, Black History

  "Harlem" l. 1 (1951)

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• What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

  Langston Hughes

  Running, Dream, Sweet

  "Harlem" l. 1 (1951)

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• We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.

  Thomas Fuller

  Ocean, Sea, Oil And Water

  "Gnomologia". Book by Thomas Fuller, 1732.

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• Tears may be dried up, but the heart - never.

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Cute, Broken Heart, Lost Love

  32 Copy quote

• You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself. “What do you mean really cute?” “So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.

  Haruki Murakami

  Cute, Ocean, Mean

  3 Copy quote

• Listen, punk. To me you're nothin' but dogshit, you understand? And a lot of things can happen to dogshit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground. It can dry up and blow away in the wind. Or it can be stepped on and squashed. So take my advice and be careful where the dog shits ya!

  Clint Eastwood

  Dog, Blow, Wind

  3 Copy quote

• We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.

  Gregory Maguire

  Baby, Enough, Halt

  Gregory Maguire (2013). “The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz”, p.26, Harper Collins

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• Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Cat, Heart, Sweat

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “The Passion”, p.66, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Art, Block, Stupid

  51 Copy quote

• Wine give strenght to weary men. and
  And wine can of their wits the wise beguile.
  Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile. and
  Let those who drink not, but austerely dine,
  Dry up in law; the muses smell of wine. and
  No poem was ever written by a drinker of water. and
  Bacchus opens the gate of the heart. and
  Might to inspire new hopes and powerful
  To drown the bitterness of cares.

  Homer

  Wise, Powerful, Heart

  20 Copy quote

• The fun, joy, and humor dry up in a relationship when one of the partners is swimming in gin. To my way of thinking, it is selfishness personified to see life through the bottom of a liquor bottle.

  Ginger Rogers

  Fun, Drinking, Swimming

  Ginger Rogers (1991). “Gineger My Story”

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• the State only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed, and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls.

  Ouida

  Wall, Moving, Government

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• Since it is to the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as possible, even well-paid labor will have no more than what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labor will commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labor, that relief would compete in the labor market; check or dry up the supply of wage-labor. It would tend to render the performance of work by the wage-earner redundant.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Relief, Levels, Politics

  11 Copy quote

• Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.

  Anton Chekhov

  Creativity, Men, Animal

  "Uncle Vanya". Act I. Play by Anton Chekhov, 1897.

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• The Guide sang:
  The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,
  And fools crying,
  Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun!
  The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run
  Faster for ever,
  The old age is done,
  We have new lights and see without the sun.
  (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,
  Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Art, Light

  "The Pilgrim's Regress". Book by C. S. Lewis, pp. 186-187, 1933.

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• I can paint until I'm forty. After that I intend to dry up.

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

  Paint, Forty, I Can

  San Diego Museum of Art, Nora Desloge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Phillip Dennis Cate, Julia Frey (1989). “Toulouse-Lautrec: the Baldwin M. Baldwin Collection, San Diego Museum of Art”, Museum

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• Many books serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Book, Way, Guidance

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “101 Facts of life”, p.35, Publishdrive

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• Hollywood is fickle; your career can end pretty fast. If the acting jobs dry up, you have to have something to fall back on. In fact, that would be my advice to kids interested in acting - make sure you get an education too.

  Matthew Lawrence

  Jobs, Fall, Kids

  23 Copy quote

• One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.

  James Agee

  Mind, States, Adolescence

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• I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular administrative system whose aim is to provide for the needs of the poor will breed more miseries than it can cure, will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort, will dry up the sources of savings, will stop the accumulation of capital, will retard the development of trade, and will benumb human industry.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Comfort, Population, Needs

  Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont (1968). “Tocqueville and Beaumont on social reform”

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• If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers.

  Alfred de Musset

  Flower, Eye, Heart

  "Narration; The confession of a child of the century".

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• The spring in Boston is like being in love: bad days slip in among the good ones, and the whole world is at a standstill, then the sun shines, the tears dry up, and we forget that yesterday was stormy.

  Louise Closser Hale

  Spring, Bad Day, Being In Love

  Louise Closser Hale (1912). “Her Soul and Her Body”

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• Inner resources are like natural resources; they both dry up eventually when the demands on them are heavy.

  Sheila Ballantyne

  Demand, Natural, Resources

  Sheila Ballantyne (1975). “Norma Jean, the termite queen”, Doubleday Books

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• It's interesting, once I have convinced people that, yes, I have a sister with a mental disability, the retard jokes really dry up, so I'm not sure how much retard humor is really going on out there, but I imagine there's a lot because it's a pretty safe group to make fun of. It's not like the Retards of America are gonna rise up and organize a protest. They're not gonna write letters. They only just recently got the Supreme Court to stop executing them.

  Bonnie McFarlane

  Fun, Writing, America

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• Musically, I don't think I'd ever dry up. I trust my musical invention.

  Joni Mitchell

  Thinking, Musical, Invention

  Interview with Joe Smith, jonimitchell.com. November 3, 1986.

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