Junkyard Quotes

• A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

  Fred Hoyle

  Blow, Yards, Pieces

  Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”

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• Going to a junkyard is a sobering experience. There you can see the ultimate destination of almost everything we desired.

  Roger von Oech

  Destination, Ultimate

  Roger Von Oech (2001). “Whack on the Side of the Head”, Mjf Books

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• History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Broken, Treaties, Pathetic

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• She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.

  Stephen King

  Dog, Makeup, Emotional

  Stephen King (2014). “Under the Dome: Part 2: A Novel”, p.166, Simon and Schuster

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• The faerie represent the beauty we don't see, or even choose to ignore. That's why I'll paint them in junkyards, or fluttering around a sleeping wino. No place or person is immune to spirit. Look hard enough, and everything has a story. Everybody is important."- Jilly Coppercorn

  Charles de Lint

  Sleep, Important, Looks

  Charles de Lint (2002). “The Onion Girl”, p.508, Macmillan

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• That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Three, Truck, Tractors

  Source: therumpus.net

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• This junkyard is an environmental nightmare, strewn with tree stumps, old tires, derelict vehicles, scrap metal and other waste. This owner may be failing to properly dispose of vehicle fluids and other contaminating chemical-laden trash, possibly imperiling groundwater and wells. He is junking the law as well as the environment.

  Richard Blumenthal

  Law, Tree, Environmental

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• alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.

  Charles Bukowski

  Wall, Fate, Men

  Charles Bukowski, “Alone With Everybody”

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• I always like junkyards. All this metal piled up - they're filled with pathos, those places. Much more pathos than most of the music I've heard. You look at it, and there's more feeling, even though it's depressing, than there is in a lot of music I hear these days. A junkyard is what it is, whereas listening to a record by, say, Styx, is something else.

  Tom Verlaine

  Depressing, Feelings, Listening

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• The attitude of gratitude is yoga. Ingratitude is "unyoga," like "uncola." Where gratitude is, there is yoga. Where there is ingratitude, yoga is gone. That mind which does not live in gratitude is just like a junkyard. There are great cars there, but they don't work; they are useless, because they are junk. What are you without gratitude?

  Harbhajan Singh Yogi

  Gratitude, Attitude, Yoga

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• Through its prohibition on birth control, the Church has suggested that the only right way to have children is through biological reproduction: a kind of forced labor culminating in the production of another soul for God. What kind of a God stands like Lee Iacocca at the end of an assembly line, driving his workers with a greedy 'More! More!' while the automobiles pile up in showrooms and on freeways and in used-car lots and finally junkyards, his only satisfaction the gross production figures at the end of every quarter?

  Nancy Mairs

  Children, Car, Soul

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• This argument [that life is too improbable to have arisen by chance] comes up repeatedly: its latest manifestation is Hoyle's discussion of the likelihood of a wind blowing through a junkyard assembling a Boeing 707 [sic]. What is wrong with it? Essentially, it is that no biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step.

  John Maynard Smith

  Wind Blowing, Boeing, Steps

  "The Problems of Biology". Book by John Maynard Smith, p. 49, 1986.

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• They were...well, Beautiful People! - not 'students', 'clerks', 'salesgirls', 'executive trainees' - Christ, don't give me your occupation-game labels! We are Beautiful People, ascendant from your robot junkyard.

  Tom Wolfe

  Beautiful, Games, People

  Tom Wolfe (2008). “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, p.155, Macmillan

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• I know it's sappy, but I bet there's a market for civility and niceness out there that, while probably not as titillating as a junkyard scrap between shirtless adversaries, it'd sure be healthier.

  Steven Weber

  Civility, Niceness, Scrap

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

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• The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.

  Fred Hoyle

  Origin Of Life, Boeing 747, Junk

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• If I want to walk out in the desert and heat up a can of beans on a fire, I still can. In those movies like Gattaca or whatever, the space age stuff is always all there is. But in the world there is never just one way of living. It's more like a big junkyard. Put it this way: I'm not afraid I'm going to end up on a space station in aluminium-foil underwear.

  Tom Waits

  Fire, Space, Age

  "Tom Waits: 'I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me'". Interview With Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. October 22, 2011.

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• The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.

  Charles de Lint

  Girl, Hands, League

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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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• I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Character, Writing, Hands

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• The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who've been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.

  Tom Robbins

  Men, Mold, Barns

  Tom Robbins (2006). “Wild Ducks Flying Backward”, p.75, Bantam

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• The recommendation by the Arkansas Supreme Court Disciplinary Committee that President Clinton be disbarred is like a tender green shoot of integrity rising from the stinking junkyard of American public life. At last, some official body has come to a decision about Clinton's conduct that is untainted by politics, cowardice or cynicism.

  Mona Charen

  Integrity, Decision, President

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