Ragged Quotes

• The sweet small clumsy feet of april came into the ragged meadow of my soul.

  e. e. cummings

  Sweet, Feet, Soul

  e. e. cummings (2014). “100 Selected Poems”, p.29, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  T. S. Eliot

  Should Have, Sea, Pairs

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" l. 73 (1917)

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The line of life is a ragged diagonal between duty and desire.

  William Rounseville Alger

  Life, Desire, Lines

  94 Copy quote

• Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

  Herman Melville

  Literature, Edges

  Herman Melville (2009). “Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales”, p.312, OUP Oxford

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

  Walt Whitman

  Life, Women, Cities

  Walt Whitman “Annotated LEAVES OF GRASS with English Grammar Exercises: by Walt Whitman (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.

  Mark Twain

  Loyalty, Country, Real

  Mark Twain (1889). “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, p.100, Createspace Independent Pub

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.

  Jack Kerouac

  Sleep, Forever, Forget

  Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.179, Penguin

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Dirty, Wine, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “Walden; Or, Life in the Woods”, p.15, Courier Corporation

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is one kind of charity common enough among us... It is that patchwork philanthropy which clothes the ragged, feeds the poor, and heals the sick. I am far from decrying the noble spirit which seeks to help a poor or suffering fellow being... [However] what advances a nation or a community is not so much to prop up its weakest and most helpless members, but to lift up the best and the most gifted, so as to make them of the greatest service to the country.

  Jamsetji Tata

  Country, Clothes, Sick

  71 Copy quote

• Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!

  Alexander Blok

  Fun, War, Gun

  11 Copy quote

• God, the Master Weaver. He stretches the yarn and intertwines the colors, the ragged twine with the velvet strings, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes his reach.

  Max Lucado

  God, Christian, Religious

  Max Lucado (2013). “You'll Get Through This: Hope and Help for Your Turbulent Times”, p.7, Thomas Nelson Inc

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• He was sure that he was not the cause of the abrupt silence. His passage through the canyon had not previously disturbed either birds or cicadas. Something was out there. An intruder of which the ordinary forest creatures clearly did not approve. He took a deep breath and held it again, straining to hear the slightest movement in the woods. This time he detected the rustle of brush, a snapping twig, the soft crunch of dry leaves-and the unnervingly peculiar, heavy, ragged breathing of something big.

  Dean Koontz

  Breathing, Silence, Bird

  6 Copy quote

• Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

  Yusef Komunyakaa

  Fall, Night, White

  0 Copy quote

• There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Strong, Pain, Grief

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1954). “The Power of Emerson's Wisdom”

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• [On Sitting Bull:] The contents of his pockets were often emptied into the hands of small, ragged little boys, nor could he understand how so much wealth should go brushing by, unmindful of the poor.

  Annie Oakley

  Boys, Hands, Pockets

  75 Copy quote

• The anything-goes passiveness of the religious and political Left is matched by the preachy moralism of the religious and political Right. The person who uncritically embraces any party line is guilty of an idolatrous surrender of her core identity as Abba's Child. Neither liberal fairy dust nor conservative hardball addresses our ragged human dignity.

  Brennan Manning

  Religious, Children, Party

  12 Copy quote

• If you want to run the show, God will let you. If you want to pull all the strings, that's up to you. If you want to insist that what you are doing is the way it should be done, even when you are not getting anywhere, go right ahead. God will let you run yourself ragged, if you choose to do so. Unfortunately, you may not always be aware that you are in God's way. . . . God has no need to prove to you what God can do.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Running, Needs, Up To You

  2 Copy quote

• Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Feelings, Would Be, Poverty

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters”, p.98, London S. Low, Son & Marston 1870.

  2 Copy quote

  Show source

• The truth is, "What is a journalist?" is one of those questions for which there is no proper answer. The prehistory of modern journalism shows it has been a ragged and confusing trade all the way through.

  Andrew Marr

  Modern Journalism, Confusing, Way

  3 Copy quote

• I pull back, gasping for breath. Reeling. His breath is ragged, and I place my hands on his cheeks to steady him. "Is this okay?" I whisper. "Are you okay?" His reply is anguished. Honest. "I love you."

  Stephanie Perkins

  Love, Hands, Honest

  Stephanie Perkins (2014). “Lola and the Boy Next Door”, p.191, Usborne Publishing Ltd

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic and he true, by whose light it surveys and shape s their opposites. It is a humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the space which separates the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Beautiful, Humble, Humor

  0 Copy quote

• The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.

  David Hare

  Art, Theatre, Done

  "The Playwright as Historian". Sunday Times Magazine, November 26, 1978.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Therefore we pledge to bind
  ourselves to one another, to embrace
  our lowliest, to keep company with
  our loneliest, to educate our illiterate,
  to feed our starving, to clothe our
  ragged, to do all good things,
  knowing that we are more than
  keepers of our brothers and sisters.
  We are our brothers and sisters

  Maya Angelou

  Brother, Knowing, Giving

  Maya Angelou, “The Black Family Pledge”

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is better to live under a tree in a jungle inhabited by tigers and elephants, to maintain oneself in such a place with ripe fruits and spring water, to lie down on grass and to wear the ragged barks of trees than to live amongst one's relations when reduced to poverty.

  Chanakya

  Spring, Lying, Elephants

  6 Copy quote

• No map to help us find the tranquil flat lands, clearings calm, fields without mean fences. Rolling down the other side of life our compass is the sureness of ourselves. Time may make us rugged, ragged round the edges, but know and understand that love is still the safest place to land.

  Rod McKuen

  Mean, Love Is, Land

  17 Copy quote