Rags Quotes - Page 2

• Not to rag on myself, but when people say, 'What does it feel like to be an icon?' I'm like, 'My dog does not think I'm an icon, my cat does not think I am an icon, my cousin does not think I am an icon.' I have a really lovely group of friends, and I just don't think about it.

  Kathleen Hanna

  Dog, Cousin, Cat

  4 Copy quote

• Woman, thou shouldst ever be clothed in rags and in mourning, appearing only as a penitent, drowned in tears, and expiating thus the sin of having caused the fall of the human race. Woman thou art the gate of the devil. It is thou who hast corrupted those whom Satan dare not attack face to face.

  Tertullian

  Art, Fall, Race

  31 Copy quote

• There was a horrible smell in the kitchen the next morning when Harry went in for breakfast. It seemed to be coming from a large metal tub in the sink. He went to have a look. The tub was full of what looked like dirty rags swimming in gray water. "What's this?" he asked Aunt Petunia. "Your new school uniform," she said. Harry looked in the bowl again. "Oh," he said, "I didn't realize it had to be so wet.

  J. K. Rowling

  Morning, Dirty, School

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.

  Douglas Coupland

  Crazy, Dark, Pigs

  4 Copy quote

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

  Leonard Cohen

  Light

  Song: If It Be Your Will

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The easiest thing to do is to rag on the media, because it isn't doing a very good job right now. It is so much easier to profit from celebrating the worst aspects of ourselves. Acting strikes me as the antithesis of that. We can examine the worst aspects of ourselves, but we don't have to celebrate them.

  Tom Hanks

  Jobs, Media, Acting

  4 Copy quote

• Whatever comes," she said, "cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Princess, Gold, Triumph

  Frances Hodgson Burnett (2012). “A Little Princess”, p.146, Collector's Library

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Is she become a rag doll? Are the wolves become children? It seems quite possible, there on the twilight fringes of dying. With some faint spark of herself, the little girl holds on to the idea. Even a rag doll has more life than does a dying child.

  Jane Lindskold

  Girl, Children, Twilight

  Jane Lindskold (2002). “Through Wolf's Eyes”, p.211, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ah, Father! That’s words and only words! Forgive! If he’d not been run over, he’d have come home today drunk and his only shirt dirty and in rags and he’d have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been sousing and rinsing till daybreak, washing his rags and the children’s and then drying them by the window and as soon as it was daylight I should have been darning them. What’s the use of talking forgiveness! I have forgiven as it is!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Running, Children, Father

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (1999). “Crime and Punishment”, p.303, Modern Library

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.

  Jean Genet

  Firsts, Mines

  Jean Genet (1994). “The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays”, p.31, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little— crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand. - "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

  Mark Twain

  Laughter, Blow, Race

  The Mysterious Stranger ch. 10 (1916)

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• and nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old

  Jack Kerouac

  Growing, Forlorn, Nobody Knows

  Jack Kerouac (2007). “On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.366, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Art, Rain, Weather

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.440, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.

  Eric Hoffer

  Dirty, Practice, Play

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Commend me to sterling honesty though clad in rags.

  Walter Scott

  Honesty, Sterling

  Walter Scott (1851). “The Waverley Novels”, p.60

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, east a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Honesty, Equality, Government

  Robert Green Ingersoll, Herman E. Kittredge (1909). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him — as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Hurt, Vanity, Rose

  "The Beautiful and Damned".

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You never know when you might come home and find Mam sitting by the fire chatting with a woman and a child, strangers. Always a woman and child. Mam finds them wandering the streets and if they ask, Could you spare a few pennies, miss? her heart breaks. She never has money so she invites them home for tea and a bit of fried bread and if it's a bad night she'll let them sleep by the fire on a pile of rags in the corner. The bread she gives them always means less for us and if we complain she says there are always people worse off and we can surely spare a little from what we have.

  Frank McCourt

  Children, Home, Heart

  Frank McCourt (1999). “Angela's Ashes: A Memoir”, p.273, Simon and Schuster

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• What children don't understand, and can't understand until they grow up some, is how much the whole fabric and process of human society depends on everybody agreeing to ignore, most of the time, the fact that all of us are, most of the time, inadequate, incompetent, pitiful, and, in fact, naked to our enemies. None of us really has very much in the way of spiritual, moral clothing. We dress ourselves in rags. And we agree to say nothing about it. To a very large extent, it is human charity that clothes us.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Spiritual, Children, Growing Up

  5 Copy quote

• Content with poverty, my soul I arm; And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

  John Dryden

  Soul, Arms, Poverty

  John Dryden, John Mitford (1847). “The Works of John Dryden in Verse and Prose”, p.189

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definition to assume the great burden and glory of their humanity and their responsibility for one another. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dungeon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it leaving the jailkeeper in the rubble.

  James A. Baldwin

  Wall, Responsibility, Color

  10 Copy quote

• Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.

  Aravind Adiga

  Jobs, Honesty, Fate

  Aravind Adiga (2008). “The White Tiger: A Novel”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source