Quotes about laundry

A collection of quotes on the topic of laundry, doing, likeness, want.

Quotes about laundry

“We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.”

Source: Foucault's Pendulum

“Gaea?” Leo shook his head. “Isn’t that Mother Nature? She’s supposed to have, like, flowers in her hair and birds singing around her and dear and rabbits doing her laundry.”
“Leo, that’s Snow White,” Piper said.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Flowers, Nature, Bird, Singing

“What is clear should not be drawn out too much. These useless explanations, these endless examinations are a kind of long whiteness and lead to boredom. It is the uniformity of a wall, of a long piece of laundry.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“And because they kept marching, America changed. Because they marched, a Civil Rights law was passed. Because they marched, a Voting Rights law was signed. Because they marched, doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else’s laundry or shining somebody else’s shoes. Because they marched, city councils changed and state legislatures changed, and Congress changed, and, yes, eventually, the White House changed. Because they marched, America became more free and more fair -- not just for African Americans, but for women and Latinos, Asians and Native Americans; for Catholics, Jews, and Muslims; for gays, for Americans with a disability. America changed for you and for me. and the entire world drew strength from that example, whether the young people who watched from the other side of an Iron Curtain and would eventually tear down that wall, or the young people inside South Africa who would eventually end the scourge of apartheid.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)

Life, Women, People, World

“You'll fold faster than Superman on laundry day”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

“July 24, 6:03 A. M.
The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff…
Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing.
He killed himself for wanting to live.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“For the record," she continued, "it's not my fault I came in here looking like Chesty LaRue. You caught me on laundry day, so I have no undergarments on. Though I will cop to a little extra spring in my step for your benefit.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

Spring

“Knowing Myrnin, there could be anything inside, from a body he'd forgotten about to his dirty laundry.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Bitter Blood

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Home

“Can I ask you a question?" "I'd be disappointed if you didn't." "How many of those suits do you have? Do you like, send them to the laundry, or throw them out and put on a new one when it gets all gamey?" - Bobby talking to Saint Dane, RR”

D.J. MacHale (1955) American television director and producer

Disappointment, Question

“[Kagura is doing laundry and tries to wring out Kyou's shirt causing it to rip in two ]

Kyo Sohma: Tell me what I think just happened didn't just happen

Kagura: My love!

Kyo Sohma: My shirt!”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Love, Thinking

“Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

I'm Telling You for the Last Time (1998)

Problem, Thinking

“I just told you to be quiet. That's one step away from asking you to wash my laundry and make me a sandwich.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Succubus Dreams

“Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”

Patrick Lencioni (1965) American writer

Source: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Fear, For Team

“In case you're wondering, the underside of a sheep doesn't smell that great. Imagine a winter sweater that's been dragged through the mud and left in the laundry hamper for a week. Something like that.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

Imagination, Winter

“It's better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Love, Valentine's Day

“In the past, I had particularly loved her smell. She always smelled freshed, freshly washed or of freshed laundry or fresh sweat or freshly loved”

Bernhard Schlink book The Reader

Source: The Reader

Love, Past

“I won't put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.”

David Sedaris book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Source: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Dead

“Okay, I get it. You people destroy billions of brain cells on a daily basis with your excess consumption of alcoholic beverages, over-the-counter as well as prescription medication—the latter of which, chances are, aren't even yours—and a veritable laundry list of substances that you shove into your soft little bodies day after day. The reason I bring up your chemically-induced mind is because I think the lot of you have forgotten my accomplishments, so please allow me to jog your ailing memory: I am the only three-time straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion in WWE history, I am the only Superstar in WWE history to win back-to-back Money in the Bank Ladder Matches at WrestleMania, and don't forget I am the man that did you, the WWE Universe, a favor that you didn't even deserve when I got rid of the Charismatic Enabler Jeff Hardy from this company…forever. But that runs a close #2 to my crowning achievement of using my Anaconda Vice and, for the first time, making the Undertaker [makes the motion on his chest] tap out—I did that. Me. I did that, and I did it all without drugs, I did it all without alcohol, and above all else, I did it all without any help from any of you. So I want somebody, anybody in a position of power to come out here right now and treat me with the respect I have earned, not only as the face of SmackDown, but the poster boy of the entire company, and as the choice of a new generation, I deserve to know who my next opponent is now that I have defeated the all-powerful Undertaker. [Waits amidst the boos of the crowd] Oh, that's right. There isn't anybody left!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

September 25, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Money, People, Alcohol, World

“(Woman on television) Frank, Frank, make me feel like a woman. (Man on television) Could you pick up my laundry?”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p.173

Feeling

“My folks were always putting her down (down, down)
Because her laundry came back brown (brown, brown)
I don't care if they think she's bad
I fell in love cuz she looked so sad
I got a date tonight with the Leader Of the Laundromat.”

Paul Vance (1929) American record producer

Song "Leader Of The Laundromat" (1964)

Love, Sadness, Thinking

“There is imagery. Symbolism is a difficult idea. I'm not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don't decide in advance that am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me. It's not symbolism any more than it's calligraphy. I'm not painting bridge constructions, skyscrapers or laundry tickets.... I don't paint a given object – a figure or a table; I paint an organization that becomes a painting.... it's not these things that get me started on a painting.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1958
1960's, Talks with Seventeen Artists, 1962

Idea, Painting

“Slowly his eyes left my hair and traveled downwards. This time he really took in my outfit and then that Look that I’m always encountering; that special one composed in equal parts of amusement, astonishment and horror came over his face.
I am not a moron and I can generally guess what causes this look. The trouble is, it’s always something different.
I squirmed uncomfortably, feeling his eyes bearing down on my bare shoulders and breasts.
"What the hell are you doing in the middle of the morning with an evening dress on?” he asked me finally.
"Sorry about that,” I said quickly, "but it’s all I’ve got to wear. My laundry hasn’t come back yet.””

Elaine Dundy (1921–2008) American journalist, actress

Part One, One
The Dud Avocado (1958)

Travel, Feeling, Hell, Time

“With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the street, until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors’, delicatessens. (pp. 23-24)”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Manhattan Transfer (1925)

Flowers, Grass, Past, Housing

“We discovered at one point that the brick wall of the pillar would hold up a sock pretty well. This led to sorting socks by putting them on the wall, which in turn led to mosaics built entirely of socks. Mission drift is a hazard in all pursuits, including doing the laundry.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[d6qu65$cm6$1@reader1.panix.com, 2005]
2000s

“Organizations under norms of rationality seek to place their boundaries around those activities which if left to the task environment would be crucial contingencies.
The implication of this proposition is that we should expect to find organizations including within their domains activities or competencies which, on a technological basis, could be performed by the task environment without damage to the to the major mission of the organization. For the hotel, for example, provision of rooms and meals would be the major mission, and the operation of a laundry would be excluded; yet we find hotels operating laundries. On the other hand, provision of rooms and meals would not be within the major mission of the hospital, although hospitals commonly include these activities within their domains.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Organizations in Action, 1967

“Fall in love with a man, and you end up doing laundry, even if it does belong to another man.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Min Farshaw
(15 October 1993)

Love

“Shocking, absolutely shocking – they [the German w:Fluxus artists] pissed in the tub, snag the German national anthem, covered the audience with paper, poured laundry detergent into the piano, attached microphones to fountain pens.... it was all very cynical and destructive; it was a signal for us and we (the German artists Lueg and Polke and Gerhard Richter himself] became [also] cynical and cocky.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 47

“We believe it is imperative that farm laborers, among the most abused and neglected of all American workers, be included at last among those who benefit from the Fair Labor Standards Act. We want coverage extended to include those millions in retail trades, laundries, hospitals and nursing homes, restaurants, hotels, small logging operations and cotton gins who still work for starvation wages.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Statement on minimum wage legislation (18 March 1966)], as quoted in Now Is the Time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Labor in the South: The Case for a Coalition (January 1986)
1960s

Home

“Diet and nutrition advice is often focused on how much we ought to eat, and misses the point: More important than how much, how often, and when we eat is what we eat. Different kinds of animals require different types of diets. We humans are built to thrive on starch. The more rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beans we eat, the trimmer, more energetic, and healthier we become.
Starch? Really? Isn't that for laundry? Yes, but it's also the key to optimum health and satiety. We hear a lot about carbohydrates and whether or not we should eat them, but we don't hear enough about the most valuable type of carbohydrate, starch.”

John A. McDougall (1947) American physician

The Starch Solution (Rodale Books, 2013), Ch. 1, p. 6 https://books.google.it/books?id=if9YAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA6.

Health, Animals

“They are laundry detergents who sing.”

Lobão (1957) Brazilian musician

About the refusal by most artists to join his campaign against copyright violations by record labels
IstoÉ magazine, issue #1736

Singing

“What do you mean you washed my three-piece hemp suit in the laundry?”

Bill Allred

Radio From Hell (June 22, 2006)

“Very well, the starting point would be that claim of Professor Quarrey’s, which had been in the news at the beginning of the year, that the country’s greatest export was noxious gas. And who would like to stir up the fuss again? Obviously, the Canadians, cramped into a narrow band to the north of their more powerful neighbors, growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases and soiling laundry hung out to dry. So she’d called the magazine Hemisphere in Toronto, and the editor had immediately offered ten thousand dollars for three articles.
Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she’d put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowl like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climactic change. That was back in the news—the Russians had revised their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry “their” water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river.
And so on.
Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

June “A PLACE TO STAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

War, People, Disease, Way

“Ed walked away from the program feeling fortified and stapled. His brain was buzzing, the way it always did just after Jeopardy! He loaded up the microbus with Atlases and poseidons and headed for Pope County. "I've had it," he sang. "I've had it with puns, alliteration, Russian literature, Italian neorealism, meaningless cross-references, and laundry lists of nonsense. I shall drive without a license, without clothing, without direction, and if I make it to Arkansas, fine, and if I'm running late, if I'm running a numbers game, it doesn't matter, I shall keep on running. Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it's better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this."”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

"Ed"
Lyrics, Happy Hour (1992)

Pain, Way, Feeling, Game

“The study resulted in a model of competence, not merely a laundry list of characteristics.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 43.

Study

“I would say people will want to watch the younger lot rather than me. We need to give them more time. It will be a little harsh to put them aside. They are working in a much more competitive climate. They are working with many more disadvantages than perhaps we were. The audiences too, are not as tolerant as they were in my time. I think the audience gave me a lot of breathing space. I made mistakes and kept trying to rectify them in film after film. It takes a while to do away with the soiled laundry.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

People, Thinking, Time

“Pieces of You is not a good record. It's an embarrassing record, ultimately. It's like having your dirty laundry aired out. I didn't think people would hear it. But it made me realize that all people want is to be touched. They don't care if it's Celine Dion or Meat Loaf or me.”

Jewel (1974) American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, actress, and poet

Interview with Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone (24 December 1998)

People, Thinking

“I've only had one dream in my life with kids in it that didn't involve me gnawing my feet off, and it had to do with kids doing my laundry.”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

9 things I learned about the world according to anonymous stock photo models. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=stock_photos <br class="br">The Best Page in the Universe

Life, Dreams

“There was constant talk about hewing things and ravaging things and splitting things asunder. Lots of big talk of things being mighty, and of things being riven, and of things being in thrall to other things, but very little attention given, as I now realise, to the laundry.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 18

“It's a purging of sorts. Like, when you're all done doing your laundry and it's fresh and bright, but washing the clothes, you wouldn't want to get in while it's spinning around.”

Maynard James Keenan (1964) musician

On why his band Tool is like a washing machine — reported in Jim Sullivan (July 4, 1997) "Lollapalooza Still Packs A Wallop", Boston Globe, p. D1.

Clothes

“The plight of the actor, even if he's a star, is the plight of the women's movement. They're saying the same thing to us: get into bed, give me a good time, then give me something to eat, go get the laundry, be a good girl.”

Dustin Hoffman (1937) American actor

Interview, Films Illustrated, May-June 1980.

Women, Girl, Star, Time

“The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Writing", p. 22
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Cooking

“I have grown accustomed to the disrespect expressed by some of the participants for their colleagues in the other disciplines. "Why, Dan," ask the people in artificial intelligence, "do you waste your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands about 'information processing' and worry about where it happens, and which neurotransmitters are involved, but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher cognitive functions." "Why," ask the neuroscientists, "do you waste your time on the fantasies of artificial intelligence? They just invent whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about the brain." The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created, in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery. All these charges are true, and more besides, but I have yet to encounter any idiots. Mostly the theorists I have drawn from strike me as very smart people – even brilliant people, with the arrogance and impatience that often comes with brilliance – but with limited perspectives and agendas, trying to make progress on the hard problems by taking whatever shortcuts they can see, while deploring other people's shortcuts. No one can keep all the problems and details clear, including me, and everyone has to mumble, guess and handwave about large parts of the problem.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

People, Intelligence, Problem, Time

“Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to…well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 12, “Power Breakfast” (p. 254)

Law, Nature, Universe

“The Government of the proletarian dictatorship, together with the Communist Party and trade unions, is of course leaving no stone unturned in the effort to overcome the backward ideas of men and women, to destroy the old un-communist psychology. In law there is naturally complete equality of rights for men and women. And everywhere there is evidence of a sincere wish to put this equality into practice. We are bringing the women into the social economy, into legislation and government. All educational institutions are open to them, so that they can increase their professional and social capacities. We are establishing communal kitchens and public eating-houses, laundries and repairing shops, nurseries, kindergartens, children’s homes, educational institutes of all kinds. In short, we are seriously carrying out the demand in our programme for the transference of the economic and educational functions of the separate household to society. That will mean freedom for the woman from the old household drudgery and dependence on man. That enables her to exercise to the full her talents and her inclinations. The children are brought up under more favourable conditions than at home.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted by Clara Zetkin in "Lenin on the Women’s Question", My Memorandum Book https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm, 1920. <br class="br">Attributions

Women, Men, Children, Education

“Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy. Despite this, most organizations will not create focused strategies. Instead, they will generate laundry lists of desirable outcomes and, at the same time, ignore the need for genuine competence in coordinating and focusing their resources. Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 20

Bad luck, Making love, Time

“We can do the innuendo,
We can dance and sing
And when it's said and done
We haven't told you a thing,
We all know that crap is king, give us dirty laundry.”

Don Henley (1947) American singer, lyricist, producer and drummer

"Dirty Laundry"
Song lyrics, I Can't Stand Still, 1982

Singing, Dance

“…My house is my laboratory, set apart from the rest of the world, and when my son was small I spent most of my time there. I often wrote poems while doing housework. I always had pencils and paper throughout the house: in the laundry, in the dining room, in the kitchen…”

Lucha Corpi (1945)

On how she included domesticity in her poems in the book Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets https://books.google.com/books?id=LkVO9mmfwZYC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq

World, Time, Housing

“I told her I had always lived alone and I probably always would
And all I wanted was my freedom
And she told me that she understood
But I let her do some of my laundry
And she slipped a few meals in between
And the next thing I remember, she was all moved in
And I was buying her a washing machine”

Jackson Browne (1948) American singer-songwriter

Ready or Not For Everyman (1973)

Freedom

“We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.”

Luke Rhinehart book The Dice Man

The Dice Man, 1971, p. 99.

Loneliness