Seamus Heaney book Death of a Naturalist
"Digging", line 25, from Death of a Naturalist (1966).
Poetry Quotes, Death of a Naturalist
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)
Seamus Heaney book Death of a Naturalist
"Digging", line 25, from Death of a Naturalist (1966).
Poetry Quotes, Death of a Naturalist
Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist
"Motto"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
Variant: My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.
George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general
Speech to the Third Army (1944)
Context: When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one either. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have. We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!
Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909–1966) Polish writer
"He who had dug his own grave", from To Abel and Cain, commemorating his escape from the Nazis by his 1943 killing of an SS guard who had been assigned to watch as he dug his own grave, as quoted in "10 Amazing Ways People Survived The Holocaust" by Alan Boyle at Listverse (9 November 2014) http://listverse.com/2014/11/09/10-amazing-ways-people-survived-the-holocaust/
“Should I get you a shovel, so you can dig that hole deeper?”
Rick Riordan book The Hammer of Thor
Source: The Hammer of Thor
“You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”
Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician
Source: Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 8.
“To live and to write, it's all the same, both together, for the pen is my spade”
Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)
Context: To live and to write, it's all the same, both together, for the pen is my spade; when I look ahead I only look back, when I stare at the paper I only see the past: she crossed that bluish green carpet as if she were crossing the sea because she wanted to talk to me, for she found out that I was "B.", author and literary translator, one of whose "works" had read, and which she definitely wanted to discuss with me, she said, and we talked and talked until we talked ourselves into bed — Good God! — and continued to talk even then, uninterrupted.