Quotes about mattress (25 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Betrayal was a stone beneath a mattress of thr bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?”

Jodi Picoult book The Tenth Circle

Source: The Tenth Circle

Forgiveness , Betrayal , Forgetting

“Bran was stripping her futon down to the bare mattress when she entered her apartment. It was sort of like watching the president mowing the White House lawn or taking out the trash.”

Patricia Briggs book Cry Wolf

Source: Cry Wolf

Housing

“I've never told anyone this, but I suffer from terrible stage fright. True. You can't tell though, can you? Unbelievable, the panic. I nearly die of fear before I go on stage. Something wicked. I can't eat a thing the day before a gig. It'd make me vomit. Once I come off? I could eat a scampied elephant between two buttered mattresses. But I'm kinda glad about the stage fright. I've read Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud about their terror. And I reckon it's what gets the adrenalin going.”

John Lydon (1956) English singer, songwriter, and musician

Interview: Seven Magazine in the London Telegraph (6 January 2008)

Fear , Suffering , Reading

“The so-called pejorative tendency has yet another cause. It is in the nature of human malice to take pleasure in looking for a vice or a fault behind a quality. The French have the adjective prude, which had formerly a good and noble acceptation, since it is the feminine of preux. But the spirit of the narrators (perhaps also some feeling of rancour against the loftier virtues) turned this adjective aside towards the equivocal sense that it now bears. Words which refer to the relations of the sexes are especially exposed to changes of this kind. We remember what a noble signification amant and mattress still possessed in Corneille. But they are dethroned, as was Buhle in German. Here we see the inevitable results of a false delicacy; honourable names are dishonoured by being given to things which are dishonourable.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 101; parly cited in: Geoffrey Hughes (2011). Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture. p. 11

Pleasure , Sex , Feeling , Nature

“Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”

Maya Angelou book Gather Together in My Name

Gather Together in My Name (1974), p. 17.

“Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. It's not like you can blame a mattress when people don't tie it down tight enough.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

People , Parent

“Grover started to sniffle and I figured if I didn't cheer him up he'd either start bawling or chewing up my mattress. He tends to eat household objects whenever he gets upset.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

“I hardly think a girl is much of a threat. I presume you searched her for weapons? But if she attempts to suffocate me with her straw mattress, I promise to call out for help.”

Mary Hoffman book City of Masks

Source: City of Masks

Search , Girl , Thinking , Help

“They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Princess and the Pea

The Princess and the Pea
Fairy Tales (1835)
Source: The Princess and the Pea: The Graphic Novel

Way , Question , Princess

“Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come? We will have hotcakes for breakfast. How can I protect this...? My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. Of every hue and caste am I.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Love , Dreams , Cars , Feeling

“When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea-water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure it was a great soft mattress.”

Stephen Crane book The Open Boat

Pt. IV
The Open Boat (1894)

Suffering , Water , Sea

“He wanted a home desperately. He was close to the point where he would take a mattress in Hell if the Devil would lend him a pillow.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 14, “A Crown of Fire” (p. 342).

Home , Hell

“I settled at Cold Mountain long ago
Already it seems like ages
Wandering free I roam the woods and streams
Lingering to watch things be themselves
Men don't come this far into the mountains
Where white clouds gather and billow
Dry grass makes a comfortable mattress
The blue sky is a fine quilt
Happy to pillow my head on the rock
I leave heaven and earth to endless change”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Men , Age , Mountain , Grass

“The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not pertend the demise of civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 12, Group Theory In The Bedroom, p. 229

Disappointment , Learning

“A word of advice: If you get the choice between the upper and lower bunks in a cell, choose the lower. Prisons do not turn off their lights at night, and I spent a sleepless night, without a mattress, with a five-hundred-watt bulb shining directly into my eyes.”

William Powell (author) book The Anarchist Cookbook

"Postscript", p. 157.
The Anarchist Cookbook (1971)

Light , Night

“Our spiritual imaginations have fallen asleep on the comfortable mattress of the consumer culture, and before any remedy for the church can be prescribed our dormant imaginations must be stirred from their slumber.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

Imagination

“If you don't want a little moisture on the mattress, maybe you shouldn't have gone to the bar.”

Merlin Mann (1966) American blogger

Roderick On The Line" podcast, October 2011
Podcasts, Other podcasts

“If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

Source: A Walk in the Woods (1997), Chapter 6 (p. 81)

Suffering

“A jealous wife is like a hornets’ nest in your mattress.”

Robert Jordan A Crown of Swords

Old saying in Randland
A Crown of Swords (15 May 1996)

“Unfortunately, the public is all gaga over the idea of replacing a card swipe with an NFC pass-over using a smartphone. Go ahead and believe that. But if you think it is also hacker-proof, you'll be in for a surprise. It's no safer than using the mattress to stash cash. At some point, you can expect to be robbed blind.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

Apple Pay: What's the Big Deal? http://pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2470828,00.asp in PC Magazine (22 October 2014)
2010s

Idea , Thinking

“Nobody ever wrote so well so fast as Jim. One year he wrote, and we published, nine novels. It was an obsession. Back in 1941, his father had been in an asylum in Oklahoma City, begging Jim to get him out. Jim needed money to get him out, so he said to his father, "Give me a month, and I'll raise the money." His father brightened, because Jim never went back on his word. Jim took a bus to New York City and went door to door to the publishing houses, asking for money for a hotel room, a rented typewriter and meals so he could write a novel. Finally, at Modern Age, they took a chance, and in 10 days he wrote a novel. But things being what they are in publishing, it was a month plus one day before Jim got his advance. The same day, a telegram arrived. His father had committed suicide, ripping the excelsior out of his mattress and stuffing it down his throat. When Jim would drink he would sometimes cry and say, "Why couldn't he have waited another day? Didn't he trust me?"”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Jim Thompson, 1906 - 1977," in The Los Angeles Times (May 1, 1977), p. X3
Other Topics

Money , Age , Drink , Suicide

“[Talking about "The First Singles Apartment"] They're all furnished pretty much the same way. In your bedroom, you have the mattress on the floor, protected by a mountain of dirty clothes, milk crates for night stands, lava lamp with a permanent glob in the bottom, stolen road sign on the wall, a blanket for a curtain. Out in the hall it was the mystery stain on the carpet, Budwiser mirror on the wall. Out on the balcony it was the rusted-out Hibachi grill, plant with no leaves on it, bike with no chain on it. In the den you had the spool. If you get one of those, you'll be like "it's coffee table time!" Next to that, the $9,000.00 stereo. We're going hungry, but we've got tunes! That was the stereo, you could turn it on after midnight and make the people down the street wet the bed. And the beanbag chair with duct tape on it to keep the stuff from fallin' out of it.”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

You Might Be a Redneck If… (1993)

People , Way , Mountain , Coffee

“Early feminists sensed this: they were strong opponents of protective legislation. They knew that as long as the princess was protected from the pea, women would be deprived of equality. The modern-day woman’s ‘pea under the mattress’ is the rough spots in the workplace. When today’s feminists are proponents of protective legislation, they oppose equality. Sexual harassment legislation is sexist because it makes only the man responsible for the male role in the sexual dance.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 307.

Women , Sense , Strong , Dance

“I sat through the first act and heard my lovely lines falling like cold porridge on a damp mattress.”

James Bridie (1888–1951) Scottish playwright, screenwriter and surgeon

One Way of Living, alluding to his play Marriage is no Joke 1939

Love , Making love

“I'da flipped every mattress, every rock and desert cactus.
Owned a collection of maps and followed my kids to the edge of the atlas. If someone ever moved 'em from me.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Headlights"
2010s, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)