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Garbage Quotes

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Garbage Quotes

“A truly compassionate man gives a poor woman a portion of his meal before he eats, not after he has eaten.”

“What do you mean? In Old Castle? I still live with my parents in case you haven’t noticed, Jack. Those two strangers – that man and woman sitting on my sofa – are actually my parents. Oh, you mean your place? Yes, let’s evict your parents…let’s place them neatly in a cardboard box and leave it by the rubbish bins!”

“Your water is in the bottles, and my water is in the bucket, but we are brothers? I am collecting garbage, and you are in the bed, but we are sisters? My fingers are broken, and your hands are so soft, but we are family? Your God is like an angel, and my God is like an evil, but we are equal? My stomach is empty, and your stomach is so big, but we are humans?”

“The planet’s witnessing the appearance of a new creature now, ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche. They travel in packs and are anemophilous, covering large distances without difficulty. Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily-perhaps this is the way they communicate. The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all content unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits.”

“Brian ebbe un attimo di illuminazione. Guardò tutta quella spazzatura in perenne aumento e per la prima volta capì in cosa consistesse il suo lavoro. Non in progettazione o trasporto o riduzione alla fonte. Lui si occupava di comportamento umano, delle abitudini e degli impulsi della gente, dei loro incontrollabili bisogni e innocenti desideri, forse delle loro passioni, sicuramente dei loro eccessi e delle loro debolezze ma anche della loro gentilezza, della loro generosità, e la domanda era come impedire questo metabolismo di massa di sopraffare l'umanità. La discarica gli mostrava senza mezzi termini come finiva il torrente dei rifiuti, dove sfociavano tutti gli appetiti e le brame, i grevi ripensamenti, le cose che si desideravano ardentemente e poi non si volevano più.”

“The fact that my parents did not have the where-with-all to buy toys, didn’t slow me down. Sometimes at the nearby dumps or in garbage cans, I would find discarded toys that could be repaired. In some cases, my father would restore a toy, such as my pedal fire engine that he fixed and repainted. My cousin Walter and I enjoyed years of peddling around, bumping into things and pretending to put out non-existing fires. Never mind that it had been restored, for us it was as good, if not better, than new. Papa was fairly handy. He didn’t always get it right, but more often than not he fixed things good enough for them to work again. He was also a reasonably good artist and painted copies of artwork done by well-known artists. For whatever reason, I never saw him do anything original, but his work did inspire me to try painting and construct things by myself. Much of the material I used came from the other side of U.S. Highway 1, or Tonnele Avenue, where the dumps were located. I didn’t know it at the time, however Tonnele Avenue was named after John Tonnele, a farmer and politician in the 1800’s. There were also some railroad tracks that I had to cross, but the dangers of crossing a highway or railroad tracks didn’t stop me, even though there were frequent articles in the Jersey Journal of people getting hurt or killed doing exactly this. To me the dumps were a warehouse of treasures.”

“Hence that state of mind at once gloomy and euphoric which one associates with carrying out the rubbish; and the way we see the men who go by emptying the bins into their pulping truck not just as emissaries for the chthonic world, gravediggers of the inanimate, Charons of a beyond of greasy paper and rusty tin, but as angels too, as indispensable mediators between ourselves and the heaven of ideas in which we undeservedly soar (or imagine we soar) and which can exist only in so far as we are not overwhelmed by the waste which every act of living incessantly produces (even the act of thinking: these thoughts of mine that you are reading being all that been salvaged from the scores of sheets of paper now crumpled up in the bin), heralds of a possible salvation beyond the destruction inherent in all production and consumption, liberators from the weight of time’s detritus, ponderous dark angels of lightness and clarity.”

“I get it. Who wants to contribute more to the buildup of the world's "trash mountains" than necessary?... The undeniable fact is that every object in your home already exists. The resources have already been pulled out of the earth and manufactured into something. If you can't recycle it, presumably it's never going to become usable raw materials again... It is already taking up space... namely inside your home. If you send it to the landfill, it will be taking up an equal amount of space in a location...designated for disposal and...to protect the public well-being. Let your regret about how much you have to throw away reinforce your determination not to buy so much in the future.”

“It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys--depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.”

“As we gain satisfaction from artificial substitutes for nature we forget that there is no known substitute for Nature, the real thing and its eons of intelligent, life supportive, experience. Each substitute we create falls short of nature's balanced perfection, thus producing our pollution, garbage and relationship conflicts.”

“I was actually a fruitarian at that point in time. I ate only fruit. Now I'm a garbage can like everyone else. And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o'clock that day. Hoping to stimulate creativity. And it stuck. And that's why we're called Apple.”

“There ARE people who won't customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don't grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating it, or get it back out of the garbage so they could eat it. Of course, my binge eating was just a cover-up for the larger issue: Trying to fill the emptiness”