Rags Quotes

• Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

  John Donne

  Love, Time, Months

  'Songs and Sonnets' 'The Sun Rising'

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• There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

  George Farquhar

  Justice, Scandal, Poverty

  'The Beaux' Stratagem' (1707) act 1, sc. 1

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• Well, that's baseball. Rags to riches one day and riches to rags the next. But I've been in it 36 years and I'm used to it.

  Casey Stengel

  Baseball, Years, One Day

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• With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread.

  Thomas Hood

  Inspirational, Red, Heavy

  'The Song of the Shirt' (1843)

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• There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

  Herman Melville

  Purple, Devil, Democracy

  Herman Melville (2016). “Redburn.His First Voyage”, p.310, Herman Melville

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• [Autobiographies] are all the same - it's always rags-to-riches or I-slept-with-so-and-so. Damned if I'm going to say that.

  Deborah Kerr

  Riches, Autobiography, Ifs

  50 Copy quote

• Rags will always make their appearance where they have a right to do it.

  Samuel Johnson

  Laziness, Appearance

  Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (1825). “The Table Talk of Dr. Johnson: Comprising Opinions and Anecdotes of Life and Literature, Men, Manners, and Morals”, p.90

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• We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been human. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality.

  Loren Eiseley

  Dream, Sleep, Reality

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• There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.

  John Ortberg

  Dolls, Treasure, Littles

  66 Copy quote

• Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.

  Charles Dickens

  Purple, Doe, Virtue

  Charles Dickens (2009). “Speeches: Literary and Social: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.13, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• When a child of the streets stands before you in rags, with a tear-stained face, you cannot easily forget him. And yet, you are perplexed what to do. The human soul is difficult to interfere with. You hesitate how far you should go.

  Charles Loring Brace

  Children, Choices, Soul

  50 Copy quote

• Even in rags I am a god,fallen I am divine,high I triumph when down-trod,long I live when slain!

  Sri Aurobindo

  Long, Triumph, Divine

  Sri Aurobindo, “Life”

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• Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

  Anne Lamott

  Jesus, Kitchen, Together

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.41, Anchor

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• Oh, my tattered rags are caught on your coffee table.

  Homer

  Coffee, Tables, Caught

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• Now suzanne takes you hand And she leads you to the river She is wearing rags and feathers From salvation army counters And the sun pours down like honey On our lady of the harbour And she shows you where to look Among the garbage and the flowers There are heroes in the seaweed There are children in the morning They are leaning out for love And they will lean that way forever While suzanne holds the mirror And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For shes touched your perfect body with her mind.

  Leonard Cohen

  Morning, Children, Hero

  Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”

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• Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.

  Charles Lamb

  Dresses, Poverty, Suits

  Charles Lamb (1835). “Essays of Elia”, p.127

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• I tell you one thing that's great about children. They don't need a show to have fun. What do they need? A book of matches, some oily rags, a little brother... that's all they need.

  Dave Attell

  Brother, Children, Fun

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• The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Christian, Simplicity, Mind

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”, p.463

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• And so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.

  Mark Twain

  Cute, Sugar, Satisfied

  Mark Twain (2010). “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, p.7, Collector's Library

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• I must say, though, that a man who has staked his whole life on the card of a woman's love and who, when that card is trumped, falls to pieces and lets himself go to the dogs -- a fellow like that is not a man, not a male. You say he's unhappy -- you know best. But all the nonsense hasn't been taken out of him yet. I'm sure he really believes he's a smart fellow just because he reads that rag Galignani and saves a muzhik from a flogging once a month.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Dog, Smart, Fall

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• In our rags of light, all dressed to kill.

  Leonard Cohen

  Light

  Song: If It Be Your Will

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• There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Together, Want, Way

  "Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia". Book by Marya Hornbacher, www.glamour.com. 1998.

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• Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite; Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now, as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.

  John Donne

  Fall, Heart, Thinking

  John Donne, Theodore Redpath (2009). “The Songs and Sonets of John Donne”, p.166, Harvard University Press

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• The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait - I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.

  Anne Lamott

  Hate, Team, Daddy

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• I don't buy these rag magazines that feed off of stolen, you know, press. They're basically stealing someone's image in order to make money for themselves... They wait at the end of my street in their cars. Every time I exit my home, I have company.

  Ashton Kutcher

  Home, Order, Car

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