Ragged Quotes

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

  William Rounseville Alger

  Life, Desire, Lines

  98 Copy quote

• 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.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  10 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)

  9 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

  97 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

  7 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

  11 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

  7 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

  79 Copy quote

• Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

  Gloria Naylor

  Hurt, Memories, Glasses

  Gloria Naylor (2005). “The Women of Brewster Place”, p.35, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Keep your words. This pain is no life." "You only feel pain because you're alive, boy!" the keeper thundered. "This is the mystery of it. Life is lived on the ragged edge of the cliff. Fall off and you might die, but run from it and you are already dead!

  Ted Dekker

  Running, Pain, Fall

  19 Copy quote

• Until quite recently dance in America was the ragged Cinderella of the arts . . .

  Shana Alexander

  Art, America

  Shana Alexander (2015). “Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album”, p.158, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• He was drunk upon the average once a day, and penitent upon an equally fair calculation once a month; and when he was penitent, he was invariably in the very last stage of maudlin intoxication. He was a ragged, roving, roaring kind of fellow, with a burly form, a sharp wit, and a ready head, and could turn his hand to anything when he chose to do it.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Average

  Charles Dickens (1903). “The Works of Charles Dickens: Sketches by Boz : illustrative of every day life and everyday people. 1903”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mean, Men, Knights

  13 Copy quote

• With my sister perched on my arm, I walked to the elevator. A business man with a rolling suitcase was waiting by the doors. His eyes widened as he saw me. I must’ve looked pretty strange—a tall black kid in dirty, ragged Egyptian clothes, with a weird box tucked under one arm and a bird of prey perched on the other. “How’s it going?” I said. “I’ll take the stairs.” He hurried off.

  Rick Riordan

  Dirty, Kids, Eye

  5 Copy quote

• The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

  Rick Bass

  Heart, Men, Wire

  12 Copy quote

• I have never said this to anyone before.” Leo’s voice was like ragged velvet. “But the idea of you with child is the most insanely arousing thing I’ve ever imagined. Your belly all swollen, your breasts heavy, the funny little way you would walk … I would worship you. I would take care of your every need. And everyone would know that I’d made you that way, that you belonged to me.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Children, Ideas, Voice

  4 Copy quote

• I was no Cherokee. I was no warrior. I was nobody special. I was just a girl, scared and angry. When I saw myself in Daddy Glen's eyes, I wanted to die. No, I wanted to be already dead, cold and gone. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at me and I was ashamed of myself. It was like sliding down an endless hole, seeing myself at the bottom, dirty, ragged, poor, stupid.

  Dorothy Allison

  Girl, Stupid, Dirty

  Dorothy Allison (2005). “Bastard Out of Carolina: A Novel”, p.192, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

  Elizabeth Warren

  Mom, Heart, Men

  4 Copy quote

• Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament.

  Victor Hugo

  Night, Clouds, Black

  Victor Hugo, Frederic Shoberl (1834). “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• There seemed to be a sense about Sarah [Harmer] even back then.She was obviously a quick study. I remember going to the Harmer farmhouse and sitting around the pool, and Sarah had a guitar. Maybe I knew four chords, but she already knew five. After doing 600 gigs that week, I would sing with her in a ragged voice, and she had the voice of a bird.

  Gordon Downie

  Guitar, Voice, Bird

  Source: www.macleans.ca

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Jesus, Moving, Dark

  Flannery O'Connor (1983). “Three by Flannery O'Connor: Wise blood, The violent bear it away, Everything that rises must converge”, Signet Classics

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...Hardly. A ragged apron does not a waiter make.

  Eoin Colfer

  Doe, Aprons, Waiter

  Eoin Colfer (2001). “Artemis Fowl”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won't go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed. And then there's the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

  Jenny Downham

  Cancer, Lying, Kids

  Jenny Downham (2007). “Before I Die”, David Fickling Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I pushed my ragged mouth against the mirror. A thousand crushed bleeding lips pushed back at me.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Mirrors, Mouths, Bleeding

  4 Copy quote