Quotes about pile (298 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Third Notebook:Part Two
No Longer Human

Dreams , Failure , Suffering , Chance

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book Flight to Arras

Les pierres du chantier ne sont en vrac qu’en apparence, s’il est, perdu dans le chantier, un homme, serait-il seul, qui pense cathédrale.
Pilote de Guerre (1942) (translated into English as Flight to Arras)

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," Tribune (12 April 1946, page 10, last paragraph http://archive.tribunemagazine.co.uk/page/12th-april-1946/10)

Sun

“He made a lot of friends everywhere and was always in contact with them too. Weeks before Christmas he would have piles of cards and he always wrote to anyone that he knew, keeping them informed. Even his enemies I think.”

Bon Scott (1946–1980) Rock musician

Angus Young, from Sounds, March 1980.
About

Thinking , Christmas

“As Linda drifted in and out of consciousness, her fellow comedian Mark Steel noticed Joan Collins on the television. “I was on a chat show with Joan Collins,” he told fellow comedian Andy Hamilton. “How old is she?” Hamilton asked. “I think she must be close to 75,” replied Steel. From beneath the pile of bedclothes a little voice piped up: “How much is that in human years?””

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Sunday Times, 11 November 2007

Thinking

“As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," The Tribune (17 January 1947)
"As I Please" (1943–1947)
Context: This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can't perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews — all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.

Secret , Time

“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”

André Malraux book Antimémoires

Antimémoires, preface (1967)
This preface paraphrases a line of dialogue from his own earlier work: "A man is what he hides: a miserable little pile of secrets."
Original: (fr) L'homme est ce qu'il cache : un misérable petit tas de secrets.

Secret

“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
"When I have fears that I may cease to be" (1817)
Source: The Complete Poems

Love , Books , World , Fear

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Walter Benjamin book Theses on the Philosophy of History

Source: Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), IX

Angels , History , Past , Future

“My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Love , Books , Time , Waiting

“If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Time

“I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
the slow result of life's decay,
To be once more a little child
for one bright summer day.”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

Solitude (1853), conclusion
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)
Context: p>Ye golden hours of Life's young spring,
Of innocence, of love and truth!
Bright, beyond all imagining,
Thou fairy-dream of youth!I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.</p

Life , Summer , Wealth

“I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.”

Ovid Metamorphoses

Source: Metamorphoses

Birthday , Youth , Birthday

“It's not an old book, or a treasure map. Nope. Staring up at me was a pile of rocks.”

Wendy Mass Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

Source: Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

Books

“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to James Madison (20 December 1787), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (19 Vols., 1905) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. VI, p. 392. http://books.google.com/books?id=5iUWAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA332&dq=%22When+we+get+piled+upon+one%22+inauthor:jefferson&lr=&num=50&as_brr=0&hl=sv
1780s

“The search for the "white hope" not having been successful, prejudices were being piled up against me, and certain unfair persons, piqued because I was champion, decided if they could not get me one way they would another.”

Jack Johnson (boxer) (1878–1946) American boxer

As quoted in Introduction to "Knockout" at Unforgivable Blackness at PBS (2005) http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness/knockout/

Hope , Way , Search , Success

“In regard to Germans and foreigners, I esteem foreigners no better than other people, nor any worse. They are all of the great family of men, and if there is one shackle upon any of them, it would be far better to lift the load from them than to pile additional loads upon them. And inasmuch as the continent of America is comparatively a new country, and the other countries of the world are old countries, there is more room here, comparatively speaking, than there is there; and if they can better their condition by leaving their old homes, there is nothing in my heart to forbid them coming; and I bid them all God speed.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech to Germans at Cincinnati, Ohio (1861), Gazette version

Men , God , People , World

“The Bata system of management is a testimony to the understanding that capital is knowledge and not money, buildings or technology:Buildings-they are just piles of brick and concrete. Machines-they are a lot of iron and steel. Only people can give life to it all.”

Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932) Czech businessman

Bata, Tomas. Knowledge in Action: The Bata System of Management. IOS Press, 1992.

Life , Money , People , Understanding

“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Twitter https://twitter.com/pontifex/status/611518771186929664?lang=pt (18 June 2015)
2010s, 2015

Home

“At the same time, new difficulties are constantly surfacing: experiences of failure and the human weaknesses which bring so much pain. We all know from experience that sometimes a task does not bring the satisfaction we seek, results are few and changes are slow, and we are tempted to grow weary. Yet lowering our arms momentarily out of weariness is not the same as lowering them for good, overcome by chronic discontent and by a listlessness that parches the soul. It also happens that our hearts can tire of the struggle because in the end we are caught up in ourselves, in a careerism which thirsts for recognition, applause, rewards and status. In this case we do not lower our arms, but we no longer grasp what we seek, the resurrection is not there. In cases like these, the Gospel, the most beautiful message that this world can offer, is buried under a pile of excuses.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 277
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Pain , World , Beauty , Soul

“Pointing to a pile of dust, that had collected, I foolishly begged to have as many anniversaries of my birth, as were represented by the dust. But I forgot to ask that the years should be accompanied by youth.”
Ego pulveris hausti ostendens cumulum, quot haberet corpora pulvis, tot mihi natales contingere vana rogavi; excidit, ut peterem iuvenes quoque protinus annos.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Book XIV, lines 136–139; translation by A. S. Kline
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Youth , Birth

“Recently, while I was in the street, my eye was caught by a poulterer's shop; I stared unthinkingly at his piled-up wares, neatly and appetizingly laid out, when I became aware of a man at the side busily plucking a hen, while another man was just putting his hand in a cage, where he seized a live hen and tore its head off. The hideous scream of the animal, and the pitiful, weaker sounds of complaint that it made while being overpowered transfixed my soul with horror. Ever since then I have been unable to rid myself of this impression, although I had experienced it often before. It is dreadful to see how our lives—which, on the whole, remain addicted to pleasure—rest upon such a bottomless pit of the cruellest misery! This has been so self-evident to me from the very beginning, and has become even more central to my thinking as my sensibility has increased … I have observed the way in which I am drawn in the [direction of empathy for misery] with a force that inspires me with sympathy, and that everything touches me deeply only insofar as it arouses fellow-feeling in me, i. e. fellow-suffering. I see in this fellow-suffering the most salient feature of my moral being, and presumably it is this that is the well-spring of my art.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, translated by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), pp. 422-424 http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/wagner02.htm

Pleasure , Art , Way , Feeling

“Jove strikes the Titans down
Not when they set about their mountain-piling
But when another rock would crown the work.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 4.
Paracelsus (1835)

Mountain

“I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Said to Molotov in 1943, as quoted in Felix Chuev's 140 Conversations with Molotov Moscow, 1991.
Contemporary witnesses

Death , History

“One might ask why Senhor José needs a hundred-yard-long piece of string if the length of the Central Registry, despite successive extensions, is no more than eighty. That is the question of a person who imagines that one can do everything in life simply by following a straight line, that it is always possible to proceed from one place to another by the shortest route, perhaps some people in the outside world believe that they have done so, but here, where the living and the dead share the same space, sometimes, in order to find one of them, you have to make a lot of twists and turns, you have to skirt round mountains of bundles, columns of files, piles of cards, thickets of ancient remains, you have to walk down dark gulleys, between walls of grubby paper which, up above, actually touch, yards and yards of string will have to be unravelled, left behind, like a sinuous, subtle trail traced in the dust, there is no other way of knowing where you have to go next, there is no other way of finding your way back.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), pp. 140–141

Life , People , World , Way

“Go ahead, switch the style up. If niggas hate, then let them hate and watch the money pile up.”

50 Cent (1975) American rapper, actor, businessman, investor and television producer

In Da Club
Song lyrics, Get Rich or Die Tryin (2003)

Money , Hate

“One may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

Support , Strong , Water

“It has been the error of schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the Author of them: for all the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them, and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of architecture, a well-executed statue, or a highly-finished painting where life and action are imitated, and habit only prevents our mistaking a surface of light and shade for cubical solidity, our ideas are naturally led to think of the extensive genius and talent of the artist. When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How, then, is it that when we study the works of God in creation, we stop short and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools in having taught those subjects as accomplishments only and thereby separated the study of them from the Being who is the Author of them.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)

Life , God , School , Error

“The past, when it is merely known historically (that is, as a subject for abstract study), somehow piles itself up outside our real lives. … I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time.”

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), p. 39

Feeling , Thinking , Study , Time

“When on the ground red apples lie there
in piles like jewels shining
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbines twining”

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) Novelist, poet, writer, activist

from October's Bright Blue Sky

Lie

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Second State of the Union address (1862)
Context: The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Thinking , Past

“He gathers the things he would have seen and piles them up”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

“The Blind Man” J. Neugroshel, trans. (1979), p. 13
Der Ohrenzeuge: Fünfzig Charaktere [Earwitness: Fifty Characters] 1974
Context: The blind man is not blind by birth, but he became blind with little effort. He has a camera, he takes it everywhere, and he just loves keeping his eyes closed. He walks about as though asleep, he has seen absolutely nothing as yet, and already he is shooting it, for when all things lie next to one another, equally small, equally large, always rectangular, orderly, cut off, named, numbered, proven and demonstrated, then you can see them much better in any event.
The blind man saves himself the trouble of viewing anything beforehand. He gathers the things he would have seen and piles them up and enjoys them as though they were stamps. He travels all over the world for the sake of his camera, nothing is far enough, shiny enough, strange enough—he gets it for the camera. He says: I was there, and he points to it, and if he could not point at it he would not know where he had been, the world is confusing, exotic, rich, who can retain it all.

“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Context: The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

God , War , Hope , Wealth

“Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) English poet, diarist and memoirist

"On Passing the New Menin Gate" (1927-1928)
Collected Poems (1949)
Context: Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, —
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Peace

“This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.”

Mark Twain Christian Science

Book I, Ch. 1 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3187/3187-h/3187-h.htm#link2H_4_0002
Christian Science (1907)

Family , Housing , Light , Mountain

“I used to be a hide-bound Tory simply for traditional and antiquarian reasons—and because I had never done any real thinking on civics and industry and the future. The depression—and its concomitant publicisation of industrial, financial, and governmental problems—jolted me out of my lethargy and led me to reëxamine the facts of history in the light of unsentimental scientific analysis; and it was not long before I realised what an ass I had been. The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right—for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past. They had been using science while I had been using romantic antiquarianism. At last I began to recognise something of the way in which capitalism works—always piling up concentrated wealth and impoverishing the bulk of the population until the strain becomes so intolerable as to force artificial reform.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Jennie K. Plaiser (8 July 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 564
Non-Fiction, Letters

History , Light , Past , Future

“Schist," said an angry voice from the grass. Hazel raised her eyebrows. "Excuse me?" "Schist! Big pile of schist!”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Grass

“When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

Love , Training

“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

Imagination

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Variant: Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

“Mostly we just add to the piles of rainbow glass that's been blown off the exteriors of the cany-colored buildings.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Color

“I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

Thinking , Sea

“Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under
them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Meditations in an Emergency

Lie , Understanding , Tree

“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Citizenship Papers (2003), The Total Economy
Context: A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.

Money , Personality

“If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.”

Sean Covey (1964) author; business executive

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: The Ultimate Teenage Success Guide

Life

“There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Books

“Percy," Grover said, "the godsdon't appreciate people sitting in their thrones. I mean like turn-you-into-a-pile-of-ashes don't appreciate it.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

People

“Sophie said a bad word. In the dim light she had stubbed her toe on one of the many dusty bricks piled around the place.
Naughty-naughty" Twinkle said.
Oh shut up!" Sophie said, standing on one leg to hold her toe. "Why don't you grow up?”

Diana Wynne Jones House of Many Ways

Source: House of Many Ways

Light

“This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next-and I didn’t want to forget a single one.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Goodbye Tsugumi

Source: Goodbye Tsugumi

World , Forgetting

“I poke around in the pile, about to settle on some cod chowder, when Peeta holds out a can to me. “Here.”
I take it, not knowing what to expect. The label reads LAMB STEW.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Reading

“Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.”

Arnold Lobel (1933–1987) American children's illustrator and writer

Love , Books , Time , Reading

“I don’t want my thoughts to die with me, I want to have done something. I’m not interested in power, or piles of money. I want to leave something behind. I want to make a positive contribution - know that my life has meaning.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Life , Money

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Life , Way

“Do not work primarily for money; do your duty to patients first and let the money follow; our life is short, we don't live twice; the whirlwind will pick up the leaves and spin them, but then it will drop them and they will form a pile.”

John Hersey book Hiroshima

Source: Hiroshima

Life , Money

“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“March: The Geese Return”, p. 18.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "January Thaw", "February: Good Oak" & "March: The Geese Return"
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

Education

“If you look at it from any other side, it looks like a pile of enormous deer droppings, but Chiron wouldn't let us call the place the Poop Pile, especially after it had been named for Zeus, who doesn't have much of a sense of humor.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Sense

“But what I really want is to just swim around in a warm baby pool of these friends, jump in their dry leaf pile-to rub them all over myself, without words and clothes.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

Baby , Clothes

“People got such a charge from seeing their names in print. Proof of existence. I could picture a squabble of ghosts ripping through piles of newspapers. Pointing at a name on the page. See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was.”

Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects

Source: Sharp Objects

People

“I glanced at Derek. The boy wonder didn't melt into a pile of goo, although his gaze was glued to Rowena's chest. Avoiding eye contact. Good strategy.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bites

Boy

“We ran, plowing through another pile of peppers. [No, I didn't pick a peck of them, Sadie - just shut up. ]”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“As crimes pile up, they become invisible.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

“As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry but they cannot kill ignorance, illnesses, poverty or hunger.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech at the International Conference on Financing for Development (March 2002) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2002/ing/f210302i.html

Hunger

“We cant go around picking up every pile of dust in the place just in case it turns out to be Gregor in the morning."
-Pg.242-”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“The truth sometimes reminds me of a city buried in sand. As time passes, the sand piles up even thicker, and occasionally it's blown away and what's below is revealed.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Truth , Time

“I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense.”

Sherman Alexie book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Source: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Books , Sleep

“Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Thinking , Heart

“It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Home , Reading , Night

“Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it…. Someone just ripped off my eyelids.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

Girl , Training

“I seriously think I could have sat in the middle of the kitchen floor rubbing two sticks together over a pile of dynamite blocks and gasoline cans, and my parents would be oblivious, as long as I was keeping myself occupied.”

Jordan Sonnenblick (1969) American writer

Source: Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

Thinking , Parent

“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Source: Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

Soul

“Nancy, every place you go, it seems as if mysteries just pile up one after another.”

Carolyn Keene book The Message in the Hollow Oak

Source: The Message in the Hollow Oak

“nothing says 'I love you' like reducing yourself to a smoldering pile of ashes”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Love

“For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Cats , Silence

“He trailed off as he saw the books. Piles and stacks of them beside the sofa, another stack on the coffee table, a sea of them on her dining table.
Jesus Christ, Dane, you need treatment.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Books , Coffee , Christ , Sea

“I have the right to do whatever I wish with my property. If I own a pile of wood, I can set fire to it even if it is currently nailed together in the shape of a barn. Cigarettes may not be healthy for me in the long run, but I have the freedom to smoke them anyway. Drinking alcohol may or may not have negative side effects, but even if it does, the government has no authority to prohibit you from consuming it, even if it is "in your own best interest." Since when do we let the government decide what is or isn't good for us? What the hell does Congress know about nutrition, anyway? (For that matter, what does Congress know about the Constitution?) If the government can use force whenever something is "in our best interest" then government should force everyone to wake up at 6am every morning for calisthenics in the front yard. Fast food establishments should be torn down and replaced with bars that serve carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts, since - "it's in your best interest."”

Michael Badnarik (1954) American software engineer

This paternalistic attitude that "the government knows best" and that you are merely a helpless child is insulting and reprehensible. Hitler used the same attitude to persuade the Germans to subjugate themselves to the "Fatherland."
Source: Good to be King (2004)

Alcohol , Food , Hell , Drink

“Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (1973)

Light , Science

“Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, each morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own "war aims." It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 181

Life , Death , War , Way

“There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth…”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

The legendary S.T. finally meets the legendary Hank Boone (proto-Enoch Root character), end of chapter 24
Zodiac (1988)

Smile , Way , Tea

“You shall not pile, with servile toil,
Your monuments upon my breast,
Nor yet within the common soil
Lay down the wreck of power to rest,
Where man can boast that he has trod
On him that was “the scourge of God.””

Edward Everett (1794–1865) American politician, orator, statesman

"The Dirge of Alaric, the Visigoth" In The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal Vol. V, No. 25 (January-June 1823), p. 64.

God

“What we tried to do, out of mutual loneliness, was make more out of the relationship than it could support. Then it becomes pretend, and you are both saying things cribbed from half-forgotten books and plays. So the structure slowly topples over, like vanilla ice cream piled too high. And the end of it there was an obscure impulse to shake hands.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1985)

Books , Support , Loneliness

“Theirs is no vulgar sepulchre--green sods
Are all their monument, and yet it tells
A nobler history than pillared piles
Or the eternal pyramids.”

James Gates Percival (1795–1856) American geologis, poet, and surgeon

"The Graves of the Patriots," first published in the United States Literary Gazette, Vol. 2 (1825).

History

“A waste is a nine-year-old boy playing catch with the roof of his garage who already understands that his existence makes for the perfect insult- gay. "You're so gay" a. k. a. stupid a. k. a. dumb a. k. a. wrong. Do you have any idea how gross it feels to hide inside the pile of lies it takes to make you, Sweet Angel, comfortable?”

Buddy Wakefield (1974) American poet

A Waste
Poetry

Stupidity , Angels , Feeling , Boy

“"Organization" for most people is simply an incomplete list, or amorphous piles, of still-unclear commitments.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

14 January 2011 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/25756431076560896
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

People

“A pure elastic fluid is one the constituent particles of which are all alike, or in no way distinguishable. Steam, or aqueous vapour, hydrogenous gas, oxygenous gas… and several others are of this kind. …Whatever …may be the shape or figure of the solid atom abstractedly, when surrounded by such an atmosphere it must be globular; but as all the globules in any small given volume are subject to the same pressure, they must be equal in bulk, and will therefore be arranged in horizontal strata, like a pile of shot.”

John Dalton book A New System of Chemical Philosophy

Source: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), Ch. II. On the Constitution of Bodies, Sect. 1. On the Constitution of Pure Elastic Fluids

Way

“Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it: many church steeples, piled one upon another, would not reach from the ground beneath to the surface of the water above. There dwell the Sea King and his subjects.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid
Fairy Tales (1835)

Water , Sea

“I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

“Know the joy of life by piling good deed on good deed until no rift or cranny appears between them.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

τί λοιπὸν ἢ ἀπολαύειν τοῦ ζῆν συνάπτοντα ἄλλο ἐπ ἄλλῳ ἀγαθόν, ὥστε μηδὲ τὸ βραχύτατον διάστημα ἀπολείπειν;
XII, 29
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book XII

Life , Appearance , Joy

“The foundational morality of the civilized world is best summarized in the Ten Commandments. Moral relativism and secular humanism are slippery slopes. The terminal moraine at the base of these slopes is a rubble pile consisting of either despotism and pillage, or anarchy and the depths of depravity. I believe that it takes both faith and friends to survive perilous times.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 13

World , Faith , Time

“One unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above;
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it—God is love.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

What we all think; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare Browning, Paracelsus: "God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that".

Love , God , Fear , Reading

“If my car should be in such a position where I can't quite see what's going on, can't get a good enough look, I'm not the least bit shy about asking the police to bring the bodies over a little closer to the car. "Pardon me, officer, would you mind dragging that twisted-looking chap over here a little closer to the car, please? My wife has never seen anyone shaped quite like that. Look at that, Sugar Lips! That's his ribcage sticking out the glove compartment. Thank you, officer, that'll be all. You can throw him back on the pile."”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

"Traffic Accidents: Keep Movin'!"
Complaints and Grievances (2001)

Cars

“My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual “coruscating wit” and “penetrating social observation”—but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Author”, opening; p. 45.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Children , Books

“Houses stretched off on all sides, sometimes dipping below the ground and sometimes emerging out of it, piling themselves into pyramids, into almost toppling waves, never one rooftree more than eighty yards from the next. The planet was covered. There were the old, open-air cities planted with whatever would grow, mountains honeycombed, resorts in Antarctica, covered roads crammed with carrier traffic only, hovercraft, sea-craft, masses, structures, and installations under the sea, nets of algae towed in the air, some insects and no animals whatever, but people, people, people everywhere.
What’s the opposite of the Garden of Eden?”

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) American author

Source: Fiction, And Chaos Died (1970), Chapter 3 (p. 120)

People , Mountain , Animals , Housing

“They had dropped the body behind a pile of cement blocks from a partly shattered wall, pulling a broken section of sheetrock over to hide it from casual view. But there's nothing casual about a little kid who liked to play in junk and found himself stumbling over the mutilated body of what had been a redheaded woman. At one time she would have been beautiful, but death had erased all that.”

Mickey Spillane book The Body Lovers

The Body Lovers (1967)

Death , Beauty , Time

“So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they'd captured it. Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.”

Christopher Monckton (1952) British public speaker and hereditary peer

Monckton climate change video goes viral http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/16/monckton-climate-change-video-goes-viral/ wattsupwiththat.com, November 16, 2009.

World

“Arranging props in a scene such as this is a joy. With gravity on my side, everything at arms length and no arduous physical conditions constricting me, I can go for hours at a clip, sculpting piles of stuff into a landscape of intersecting shape, form and color until my eye wanders endlessly among the details. In such conditions, how the image is captured has little bearing on the success of the arrangement – though the time-saving work flow enabled by digital preview, capture and post processing, certainly helps.”

Walter Wick (1953) American photographer and creator of children's books

Photo-Illusions In The Digital Age http://www.walterwick.com/blog/2015/11/16/photo-illusions-in-the-digital-age (November 16, 2015)

Color , Time , Success , Help

“The West pays money and piles up pressure to cause a strife between Islamic countries so that Muslims would kill each other and the West can obtain its desirable outcome thereby.”

Mohammad Emami-Kashani (1937) Iranian politician

http://www.indianmuslims.info/news/2007/april/13/muslim_world_news/west_strategy_on_islamic_states_based_on_causing_discord_cleric.html
West

Money , Country

“Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
'God!' let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, 'God!'
'God! ' sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, 'God!'.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

God , Soul , Flowers , Singing

“There you are', said Efros [Granovsky, director of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, in 1920], leading me into a dark room, 'These walls are all yours, you can do what you like with them'. It was a completely demolished apartment that had been abandoned by bourgeois refugees. 'You see', he continued, 'the benches for the audience will be here; the stage there'. To tell the truth, all I could see there was the remains of a kitchen… And I flung myself at the walls. The canvases were stretched out on the floor. Workmen, actors walked over them. The rooms and corridors were in the process of being repaired; piles of shavings lay among my tubes of paint, my sketches. At every step one dislodged cigarette-ends, crusts of bread.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 38
1920's, My life (1922)

Truth , Painting

“It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. Miss March is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/03/13/miss_march/index.html of Miss March (2009)

Age , Time

“I am sure that hon. members will realize that I am not drawing on my imagination when I state that last fall there were children going to school in Saskatchewan with only sacking wrapped around their feet. We have gone into homes and found mothers and children lying on piles of bedding in the corner; they did not have the proper bedding equipment or the proper clothing to meet the rigours of a very cold winter.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

Maiden speech, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, February 11, 1936.

Children , School , Home , Imagination