Shabby Quotes - Page 2

• I write a lot and I will have some originals on the record. I think it is a mistake for an artist like me to think I am a better writer than Cole Porter. I think it is important to realize what my strengths are. I do like to write and I'm not shabby but I don't think I'm the most brilliant writer. I think it would be a shame and sort so egotistical to say I don't need these wonderful writers. These men created works of art and wrote hundreds of beautiful songs. It would be a mistake for me to say at this point in my career that I am so good.

  Michael Buble

  Beautiful, Song, Art

  Interview with Edina Patsy, www.noise11.com. April 25, 2016.

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• It was not the beautiful or pleasant feelings that gave me new insight, but the ones against which I fought most strongly: feelings that made me experience myself as shabby, petty, mean, helpless, humiliated, demanding, resentful or confused, and above all, sad and lonely. It was precisely through these experiences, which I had shunned for so long, that I became certain that I now understood something about my life, stemming from the core of my being, something that I could not have learned from any book.

  Alice Miller

  Beautiful, Lonely, Confused

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• One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

  Henry Adams

  Months, Towns

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• Part of the shabbiness of our culture, if indeed it is shabby, is that it doesn't seem to prepare people. With all the songs about love and all the movies and all the books, there doesn't seem to be any way that we can prepare the human heart for this experience.

  Leonard Cohen

  Song, Book, Heart

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• ... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.

  Albion Fellows Bacon

  Mother, Mind, Majority

  Albion Fellows Bacon (1914). “Beauty for Ashes, by Albion Fellows Bacon; with Numerous Illustrations”

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• It is curious, isn't it, that things you know well never look dirty and dilapidated-other people's old furniture looks shabby and moth-eaten. “I would never have that horrible old couch in my room,” you say. But your own old couch is every bit as bad and you are not disgusted with its appearance; it is your friend, you see, and you remember it when it was new and smart. Friends that you have known for a long time and love very dearly never seem to grow old.

  D.E. Stevenson

  Smart, Dirty, Long

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• Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Wise, Kings, Clothes

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• What if my trousers are shabby and worn, they cover a warm hearth.

  Thomas Lansing Masson

  Fashion, What If, Worn

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• Hence, the less government we have, the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formalGovernment, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Wise, Character, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1505, Delphi Classics

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• Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

  Iris Murdoch

  Love Is, Gold, Our Love

  Iris Murdoch (1962). “An Unofficial Rose: A Novel”

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• The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Book, Men, Elderly

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852). “The Blithedale Romance”, p.9

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• It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat; and worldly wisdom dictates to her disciples the propriety of dressing somewhat beyond their means, but of living somewhat within them,--for every one, sees how we dress, but none see how we live, except we choose to let them. But the truly great are, by universal suffrage, exempted from these trammels, an may live or dress as they please.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Mean, Men, Dresses

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.121

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• It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuite or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtle delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgement, which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing: for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Friendship, Character, Men

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• In the early forties and fifties almost everybody "had about enough to live on," and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.

  M. E. W. Sherwood

  Daughter, Mother, Fashion

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• I feel shabby - because I've made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

  Don McCullin

  Photography, Names, Asking

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• I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Hate, Home, Cities

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West (2005). “Fitzgerald: My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940”, p.108, Cambridge University Press

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• I would love to work with Quentin Tarantino - he's my number one. My ultimate. I would love to work with Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne - Pedro Almodovar wouldn't be too shabby. There are so many good directors, but those are some of my favorites.

  Kirsten Dunst

  Numbers, Directors, Tarantino

  "irsten Dunst Relies on Intuition and Years of Experience to Serve the Role". Interview with Jessica Gardner, www.backstage.com. November 2, 2011.

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• Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

  Douglas Adams

  Mixing, Males, Generations

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• She went out and took a last long look at the shabby little library. She knew she would never see it again. Eyes changed after they looked at new things. If in the years to be she were to come back, her new eyes might make everything seem different from the way she saw it now. The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

  Betty Smith

  Eye, Years, Long

  BETTY SMITH (1943). “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”

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• Not all shabby is chic, just like not every porn actor is a star.

  Sloane Crosley

  Stars, Actors, Chic

  Sloane Crosley (2010). “How Did You Get This Number”, p.34, Penguin

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• Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Believe, Sleep, Night

  Charlotte Bronte (2014). “The Complete Works Of Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor”, p.41, Harper Collins

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• The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority... the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.

  Martin Amis

  Loyalty, Mother, Children

  Martin Amis (1973). “The Rachel papers”, Jonathan Cape

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• A broken heart is such a shabby thing, like poverty and failure and the incurable diseases which are also deforming. I hate it and am ashamed of it, and I must somehow repair this heart and put it back into its normal condition, as a tough somewhat scarred but operating organ.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Broken Heart, Hate, Disease

  Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead (2006). “The letters of Martha Gellhorn”, Vintage

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• We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

  George Eliot

  Self, Achievement, Looks

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.3538, ShandonPress

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• Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about. He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter.

  Margery Williams

  Beautiful, Real, Boys

  Margery Williams, Margery Williams Bianco, William Nicholson (2011). “The Velveteen Rabbit”, p.32, Courier Corporation

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