Quotes about sponge

A collection of quotes on the topic of sponge, likeness, use, time.

Quotes about sponge

“They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Children, Nature

“The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Water

“Do you remember back at the hotel when you promised that if we lived, you'd get dressed up in a nurse's outfit and give me a sponge bath?"
"Actually, I think you misheard," Clary said. "It was Simon who promised you the sponge bath."
Jace looked involuntarily over at Simon, who smiled at him widely. "As soon as I'm back on my feet, handsome.”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

"I knew we should have left you a rat."
Jace, Clary, and Simon, pg. 296-297
The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

Smile, Thinking

“When you have drawn the same thing so many times that it seems that you know it by heart try to do it without the model; but having a tracing made of the model upon a thin piece of smooth glass and lay this upon the drawing you have made without the model. …where you find that you have erred bear it in mind in order not to make the mistake again. …if you cannot procure smooth glass to make a tracing… take a piece of very fine parchment well oiled and then dried, and when you have used it for for one drawing you can wipe this out with a sponge and do a second.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XXIX Precepts of the Painter

Time, Heart, Drawing

“He felt like an old sponge steeped in paraffin and left in the sun to dry.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Sun

“I think we're dating now" "Come on… I got you naked. You wore a damn corset. And don't get me started on the sponge bath afterward.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

Thinking

“One more thing."
"What."
"I think we're dating now." As V barked out a laugh, the cop shrugged. "Come on…. I got you naked. You wore a damn corset. And don't get me started about the sponge bath afterward."
"Fucker."
"To the end.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

Thinking

“Try to be a filter, not a sponge.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I heard you went to Ireland… I haven't seen it in many years. Is it still green then, and beautiful?

Wet as a bath sponge and mud to the knees but, aye, it was green enough.”

Diana Gabaldon book The Scottish Prisoner

Source: The Scottish Prisoner

Beauty

“Pray use both cats as sponges if it pleases you, infatuated infantryman.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Castle in the Air

Source: Castle in the Air

Cats

“We can see the Divine in each speck of dust, but that doesn't stop us from wiping it away with a wet sponge. The Divine doesn't disappear; it's transformed into the clean surface.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch Of Portobello

“How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn’t live there?”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“I have been working with silicone for years. While still studying, I painted on unusual materials, for example on a soft felt. I like material that easily surrenders – you can tame them and "go out" to the third dimension, and at the same time sanctify something that is considered ordinary. Once, I painted on sponges over twenty centimeters long, which create a great illusion of sandstone.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

Tomasz Vetulani o Holandii, niskim kraju http://www.nto.pl/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110605/REPORTAZ01/762330357, nto.pl, 5 June 2011 (in Polish)

Study, Time, Painting

“If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to come and rescue you.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

People, Family, Home, Business

“Sponge Bob Square Pants will begin airing in China in December so millions of factory workers can finally know what the hell they’re making. But Chinese censors have ordered the name of the show be changed to "CleaningpadCharlie RectangleShorts"”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

citation needed

Hell, Change

“The sponge, whether considered as a single or compound animal, has the power to reproduce itself, and here the mystery of life is as much hidden as it is in God's highest creation. It has been stated that every sponge contains a large number of separate cells which carry on the operation of circulation and respiration, and may be likened to the heart and lungs of an animal of a higher creation. Zoologists claim that each one of these cells represents a separate animal, living in a common structure.”

Elisha Gray (1835–1901) American electrical engineer

Familiar Talks on Science, Volume 1, 1899, p. 172
Nature's Miracles (1900)

Life, God, Heart, Animals

“Shameless sponging on friends and relatives … Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was too anxious to cadge and use so recklessly. Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes toward money.”

Murray N. Rothbard book An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)

Money

“Glenn Beck: And it goes nowhere if you go onto 'compassion, compassion, compassion, compassion' or well, 'They should've put it out, what is the fire department for?' No, what is the 75 dollars for. To keep the firemen available, to keep the firetrucks running, to pay for the fire department to have people employed to put the fire out. If you don't pay your 75 dollars then that hurts the fire department. They can't use those resources, and you would be sponging off your neighbor's 75 dollars if they put out your neighbor's house and you didn't pay for it — I mean, if your neighbor didn't pay for it, you did, and they put out their house — your neighbor is sponging off of your 75 dollars.
Pat Gray: And as soon as they put out the fire of somebody who didn't pay the 75 bucks,
(in unison) no one
Pat Gray: will pay the 75 dollars.
Glenn Beck: Why would you pay the 75 dollars, you don't have to, they're gonna put it out anyway? Nobody pays attention.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

2010s, 2010

People, Hurt, Housing

“We are sufficiently at the mercy of machines, Roger; if our music must necessarily be mechanical, then it is time for us to throw in the sponge, and abandon all hope for the future of humanity.”

Jack Vance book Space Opera

Source: Space Opera (1965), Chapter 4 (p. 31)

Hope, Music, Time, Future

“[Of a recipe for Chilli Con Carne] English people may like to substitute a sponge cake at this point.”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Series 1, Episode 6
A Brief History of Timewasting

People

“While upon the subject of plants I may here mention a few of the more striking vegetable productions of Borneo. The wonderful Pitcher-plants, forming the genus Nepenthes of botanists, here reach their greatest development. Every mountain-top abounds with them, running along the ground, or climbing over shrubs and stunted trees; their elegant pitchers hanging in every direction. Some of these are long and slender, resembling in form the beautiful Philippine lace-sponge (Euplectella), which has now become so common; others are broad and short. Their colours are green, variously tinted and mottled with red or purple. The finest yet known were obtained on the summit of Kini-balou, in North-west Borneo. One of the broad sort, Nepenthes rajah, will hold two quarts of water in its pitcher. Another, Nepenthes Edwardsiania, has a narrow pitcher twenty inches long; while the plant itself grows to a length of twenty feet.”

Alfred Russel Wallace book The Malay Archipelago

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Beauty, Mountain, Tree, Water

“Then there is the final possibility, my favorite.
—Yes?
—The final possibility is that I’m God.
—You’re God?
—Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable…and a hermaphrodite to boot. Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be fatally dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I am both immortal and infinite.
—You’re God? You’re God herself? You?
—The data are provocative.
—God is a sponge? A sponge? There’s not much comfort in that.
—Agreed.
—Sponges can’t help us.
—Neither can God, as far as I can tell. I’d be happy to see some contrary data.”

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 18 (p. 312)

God, Help, Parting, Happiness

“I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident […] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border—and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 389–390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Lie, Confidence

“Yet people who benefit from this now viciously defy Westminster, purporting to act as though they were an elected government, spending their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods. Who do these people think they are?”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (25 May 1974), referring to the Ulster Workers Council strike, quoted in The Times (27 May 1974), p. 2
Prime Minister

People, Democracy, Thinking

“I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.”

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 2, “Experiment” (p. 22)

“My mother, whom I loved very much, had trouble with me. I had very good school certificates. But I tormented her with horribly stinky collections. It was not enough for me at home to have a dog, a cat, a canary, a fish, and even a white mouse, which loved to walk around the apartment, although it lived in a cage. I added the protozoa to this menagerie. Traditional definitions regarded these small organisms – such as, for example, amoebae, flagellates, sponges, algae – as single-celled. What in these asexually reproducing animals or plants could intrigue the little boy so much that he permanently endured this abomination (as the mother would say) home?! After all, neither the request nor the threat of this exceptionally tolerant woman, who carried out her home diligently on a daily basis, did not help. A trip to the ponds, or actually to the stagnant at Bonarka – where today is Mateczny Roundabout – were exciting for the little boy. And even more he enjoyed moments when he could watch for hours what was happening in aquariums, jars or cages.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Bętkowska, Teresa (August–September 2010). "Mistrz niszowej dyscypliny" http://www2.almamater.uj.edu.pl/126/17.pdf (PDF). Alma Mater (in Polish). Kraków: Jagiellonian University (126–127): pp. 41–46.

Love, School, Dogs, Home

“There is an honesty in science which leads to a certain acceptance of reality. There are some who, finding the ocean an impediment to the pursuit of their designs, try to ignore its existence. If they are unable to ignore it because of its size, they try to legislate it out of existence, or try to dry it up with a sponge. They insist that the latter operation would be possible if enough sponges were available, and if enough persons would wield them. There is no ocean of greater magnitude than the sexual function, and there are those who believe that we would do better if we ignored its existence, that we should not try to understand its material origins, and that if we sufficiently ignore it and mop at the flood of sexual activity with new laws, heavier penalties, more pronouncements, and greater intolerances, we may ultimately eliminate the reality.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

page 10
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

Law, Penalty, Understanding, Reality

“I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Esse" (1954), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Pinsky
Uncollected Poems (1954-1969)

Tree, Suffering

“What is called "sponge stone" or "Pompeian pumice" appears to have been reduced by burning from another kind of stone to the condition of the kind which we see. The kind of sponge-stone taken from this region is not produced everywhere else, but only about Aetna and among the hills of Mysia which the Greeks call the "Burnt District," and in other places of the same peculiar nature. …it seems to be certain that moisture has been extracted from the tufa and earth, by the force of fire, just as it is from limestone in kilns.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VI, Sec. 2-3

Nature, Appearance

“The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Geek Love (1989)

“Ammu,' Chacko said, his voice steady and deliberately casual, 'is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely colouring everything?'
Silence filled the car like a saturated sponge. Washed-up cut like a knife through a small thing. The sun shone with a shuddering sigh. This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things (1997)

Family, Cars, Silence, Sun

“I like working on sponge because it's a simple, light material and always ready to use. The colour and texture meet my aesthetic requirements and it has a lolof volume and physically, is very present in the space. The ink or paint is immediately absorbed into the foam surface, making any corrections almost impossible. It is a material which lends itself to quick, fast application and is particularly good for spontaneous sketching with paint squeezed directly from the tube. The fact that these works will not last (sponge is not a very durable material) does not deter me; it suits the character of the work very well and to an extent reflects my ideas about art.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

At the time of writing exhibition catalogue, the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, 1998.

Art, Idea, Light, Painting

“Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 380
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

Way

“So I broke into the palace, with a sponge and a rusty spanner
She said "eh, I know you and you cannot sing"
I said "that's nothing you should hear me play piano"”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From the song "The Queen Is Dead (Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty)"
From songs

Singing

“I drink no more than a sponge.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Gargantua (1534), Chapter 5.

Drink

“We are like figures which some great demonstrator draws upon the blackboard of Time. A problem is to be solved, without doubt; what the problem is, we, the figures, cannot know and do not need to know; all we know is that sooner or later we shall be sponged off the board and other figures take our places, and the demonstration go on.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Preface
The Light of Day (1900)

Problem, Time, Drawing

“[I'm] a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.”

Usher (1978) American singer, songwriter, dancer and actor

From " Usher ‘experimental’ in relationships http://www.music-news.com/shownews.asp?H=Usher-%EF%BF%BDexperimental%EF%BF%BD-in-relationships&nItemID=52417", Q Magazine (May 25, 2012).

Light

“Male tumescence is an assertion of the separateness of objects. An erection is architectural, sky-pointing. Female tumescence, through blood or water, is slow, gravitational, amorphous. In the war for human identity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female body is a sponge. At peak menstrual and natal moments, it is locked passively in place, suffering wave after wave of Dionysian power.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 91

War, Suffering, Water

“I wanted to do a show about a character that was an innocent, and so I focused on a sea sponge because it's a funny animal, a strange one, I thought he was a funny, nerdy, squeaky-clean square.”

Stephen Hillenburg (1961–2018) American marine biologist, cartoonist, animator, storyboard artist, director, producer, and writer

Animals, Sea

“When you’re dealing with people who think that Sponge Bob Square Pants is more important than social security, you have a problem.”

Christine Todd Whitman (1946) American politician

In appearance on The Daily Show, regarding her book It's My Party Too (January 2005)

People, Problem, Thinking

“You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1808-06-15) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“[About Jews] Sheer egotism compels us to the purest love of mankind as a whole…. Our hearts are like a sponge, receptive to all the newest humanitarian ideas; and our sympathy goes out to all the unfortunate, all the oppressed.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

Quoted in Jewish Affairs (Johannesburg), June 1952, p. 28. See Alle Verk, xii. 318.

Love, Idea, Heart

“I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. […] The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Crazy Old Randolph Kirkpatrick", p. 235
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Men, Imagination, Motivation, Idea

“I really like painting on unusual base, such as zinc plates, which are already subjected to rain. These are old plates, spoiled by time and weather. I paint very subtle paintings on such a ground. On the other hand, paintings on a sponge, which may seem harsh in terms of subject matter – are, contrary to appearances, very soft and pleasant. It is nice, for example, to move them and hang them.”

Tomasz Vetulani (1965) Polish artist

There is no threat. Weapons and colour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqfjr78Pyfs, video, Galeria Olympia, 23 Novmeber 2017 (in Polish)

Appearance, Time, Painting, Weather

“I borrow to pay my honest debts and not to squander foolishly. What's more, I confine my borrowing to those who can well afford it. I don't go around sponging on widows and orphans unless they have plenty.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

[Scribner's Magazine, 1937, CII, 6, 19-21, I'm Not the Budget Type, Will Cuppy, http://www.unz.org/Pub/Scribners-1937dec-00019, PDF] Retrieved on June 25, 2012.