Quotes about junk

A collection of quotes on the topic of junk, likeness, doing, food.

Quotes about junk

James Hetfield photo
Charles Bukowski photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Joan Jett photo
William S. Burroughs photo

“When you give up junk, you give up a way of life.”

Junkie (1953)
Context: When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before.

William S. Burroughs photo
William S. Burroughs photo

“You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default.”

Prologue
Junkie (1953)
Context: The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity.

William S. Burroughs photo

“Once a junky, always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.”

Junkie (1953)
Context: Why does an addict get a new habit so much quicker than a junk virgin, even after the addict has been clean for years? I do not accept the theory that junk is lurking in the body all that time - the spine is where it supposedly holes up - and I disagree with all psychological answers. I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junky, always a junky. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.

Saul Bellow photo

“The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

"A Second Half Life" (1991), p. 326
It All Adds Up (1994)
Context: Much of junk culture has a core of crisis — shoot-outs, conflagrations, bodies weltering in blood, naked embracers or rapist-stranglers. The sounds of junk culture are heard over a ground bass of extremism. Our entertainments swarm with specters of world crisis. Nothing moderate can have any claim to our attention.

Ozzy Osbourne photo

“I hate these fucking stretch bastards junk pimp mobiles!”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

The Osbournes television show

Albert Einstein photo

“To invent something, all you need is imagination and a big pile of junk.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Susan Sontag photo

“Don’t ever make the mistake of telling God that you have nothing to offer. That simply is not true. God does not create any junk.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo

“Maybe a friend is someone who wants your updates. Even if they're boring. Or sad. Or annoyingly cutesy. A friend says "Sign me up for your boring crap, yes indeed"--because he likes you anyways. He'll tolerate your junk”

E. Lockhart (1967) American writer of novels as E. Lockhart (mainly for teenage girls) and of picture books under real name Emily J…

Source: Real Live Boyfriends: Yes. Boyfriends, Plural. If My Life Weren't Complicated, I Wouldn't Be Ruby Oliver

Jeannette Walls photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo

“Junk is in the eyes of the beholder. Some look, but others see.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: understanding your potential discovering the hidden you

Sue Grafton photo

“In my opinion, there's no condition in life that can't be ameliorated by a dose of junk food.”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

Source: Q is for Quarry

Janet Evanovich photo

“I don't use a crap camera, I don't eat junk, and I'm not going to a dance where the boys are bores”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: Viola in Reel Life

Jeannette Walls photo
Robert Crumb photo

“Junk does that. Junk is a forge. You enter the fire and come out twisted.”

Source: Summer of Love (1994), Chapter 15 “Over Under Sideways Down” (p. 329)

Ben Croshaw photo

“You know what's so great about junk food? Fat people who eat too much die young from cholesterol poisoning! It's a problem that solves itself!”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

My Tribute to the U.S.
Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

Richard Roxburgh photo
Daniel Tosh photo
Rick Santorum photo
Fred Hoyle photo
Irvine Welsh photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 309

Mickey Spillane photo
Pat Sajak photo
Tom Stoppard photo

“Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media.”

Molly Worthen (1981) American writer

"Lecture me. Really." The New York Times October 17, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

William S. Burroughs photo
Andy Warhol photo
Camille Paglia photo
Joe Strummer photo
Bruno Schulz photo
Nick Cave photo
David Puttnam photo
Bill Hybels photo

“Don't ask God to bless junk food and miraculously transform it so that it has nutritional value. That's not how God works.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

Preston Manning photo

“My first official consulting job, therefore, was for a scrap metal dealer (he resented the term "junk dealer") in East Edmonton named Benny Sugarman.”

Source: The New Canada (1992), Chapter Three, Adventures in the Marketplace, p. 53

Oliver Stone photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Paul Graham photo

“Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Mean People Fail", November 2014

Mickey Spillane photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Hank Williams photo

“You wore out a brand new trunk,
packin' and unpackin your junk.”

Hank Williams (1923–1953) American country music singer

"You're gonna change (or I'm gonna leave)" (1949)
Lyrics

William S. Burroughs photo
William S. Burroughs photo
William S. Burroughs photo

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

"Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs", written in 1956, first published in The British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 52, No. 2 (January 1957), p. 1 and later used as footnotes in Naked Lunch

Garth Nix photo

“Flotsam floats when all is sunk.
Jetsam thrown isn't just junk.
Coughs and colds and bright red sores
Waiting for us, so bend yer oars!”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Drowned Wednesday (2005), p. 53.

Maneka Gandhi photo

“The movement I have initiated against the entry of junk food has already resulted in the reduction of sales of KFC in Bangalore to a record low.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On her campaign against junk food, as quoted in "Kfc Branded "Poison" In India" http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-10-30/business/9510300036_1_maneka-gandhi-kentucky-fried-chicken-pizza-hut, Chicago Tribune (30 October 1995)
1991-2000

Michelle Pfeiffer photo

“Even from the beginning, when I was doing junk television, I still had this focus. I knew I wasn't going to be doing that forever, that I wasn't going to be like that…”

Michelle Pfeiffer (1958) American actress

Vanity Fair (1989) http://www.pfeiffertheface.com/Mag_1989-02_Vanity.htm

“You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift, not from Shopsy's.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Note on a thesis draft, where a graduate student who had used "hopefully" to mean "it is to be hoped"; published in Robertson Davies : Man of Myth (1994) edited by Judith Skelton Grant

Koxinga photo

“You have by this time surely seen with your own eyes what your iron ships, with which you think you can accomplish wonders and on which you boast so much, can do against my junks; how one of them has been burned by one of my junks and has disappeared in smoke; how the others would have met with the same doom had they not taken to flight and gone out to sea.”

Koxinga (1624–1662) Chinese military leader

Formosa under the Dutch: described from contemporary records, with explanatory notes and a bibliography of the island, 1903, William Campbell, Kegan Paul, 424, Dec. 20 2011 http://books.google.com/books?id=OpdMq-YJoeoC&pg=PA423&dq=koxinga+formosa+always+belonged+to+china&hl=en&ei=vsjiTergDM3TgAekqbzKBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=same%20doom%20had%20they%20not%20taken%20to%20flight%20and%20gone%20out%20to%20sea.&f=false, Original from the University of Michigan(LONDON : KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD DRYDEN HOUSE, 43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO MDCCCCIII Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty)

Marcus Orelias photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Rachel Maddow photo

“The bomb exploded the junk in Vladimir's trunk. Y'know, they always said that Communists would get it in the end.”

Rachel Maddow (1973) American journalist

The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC (1 April 2009)
Commenting on a bomb that blew a hole in an 80-year-old St. Petersburg statue of Vladimir Lenin.

Thomas Edison photo

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

As quoted in Behavior-Based Robotics (1998) by Ronald C. Arkin. p. 8.
Date unknown

William S. Burroughs photo
Lyndon LaRouche photo
Nam June Paik photo
Andreas Karlstadt photo
Lobão photo

“That movie about Cazuza looks like an episode of Malhação. The 1980s rock music was junk.”

Lobão (1957) Brazilian musician

IstoÉ Gente magazine, issue #260

Seth Lloyd photo

“For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role.”

Seth Lloyd (1960) American engineer

"Move Aside, Sex" http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_3.html#lloyd, in The Edge Annual Question—2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html, January 2010

Leonard Cohen photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Michael Hudson (economist) photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“When a fact came along, he junked theories that failed to match.”

Source: Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), Chapter 12

Michele Simon photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.”

“Life-Line”, p. 24
The Past Through Tomorrow (1967)
Context: There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.

John Updike photo

“The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”

Rabbit, Run (1960)
Context: He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Wendell Berry photo

“We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"The Rise".
The Long-Legged House (1969)
Context: We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.

Brad Bird photo

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

Brad Bird (1957) American director, screenwriter, animator, producer and occasional voice actor

"Anton Ego" in Ratatouille (2007)
Context: In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize — only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.

Brian W. Aldiss photo
Wendell Berry photo
Paul R. Ehrlich photo

“Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilisation - it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals - not consuming more junk.”

Paul R. Ehrlich (1932) American scientist and environmentalist

Source: Top scientists warn of 'ghastly future of mass extinction' and climate disruption https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/13/top-scientists-warn-of-ghastly-future-of-mass-extinction-and-climate-disruption-aoe. The Guardian (2021)

Ben Carson photo

“God don't make no junk.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 198

Natalie Goldberg photo
Scott Adams photo