Dingy Quotes

I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures - flattering, but still not lovely - are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who could have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. ~ George Eliot

I was like Elvis "The Pelvis" Presley on Ed Sullivan, I tells ya, punished for the crime of being sexy. (him on the telly , me in a dingy alley ... any analogy will break down under scrutiny.) ~ Russell Brand

After a moment, he calmed enough to see how his anger was a separate thing inside him, a dingy, surprise gift from his father. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

She'd been hunting for an indescribable thrill, a feeling she remembered from nights out with her friends, but she'd misunderstood where the feeling came from. It wasn't about drinking and partying in some dingy club. It had been about the people. The constant laughter they shared, too high on each other to care that they were being obnoxious. Group trips to the bathroom like a small army unit, where the mission objective was helping each other squat over filthy toilets without their dresses touching the seat. Belonging. ~ Talia Hibbert

Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep. Gentlemen ~ Charles Dickens

He couldn't have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.

This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn't exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The owner took her time unpacking the books she'd bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She'd never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'
Nicole Krauss

Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home. In the oven made by the hot pavements and hot buildings, he has baked himself dryer than usual; and he has in his thirsty mind his mellowed port-wine half a century old. ~ Charles Dickens

Traffic lurched forward. I crawled slowly past a flatbed truck that was pulled off onto the grass beside the road. The hood of the truck was up. Seven or eight men in dingy clothes sat on the bed of the truck. They were waiting, too, but they seemed a little happier about it than I was. Maybe they weren't being pursued by an insane homicidal artist. ~ Jeff Lindsay

Poetry was a discipline grounded in experience that drew its life and worth from a source much greater than oneself, and as it realized its potential to touch others in their innermost being, what [Kathleen] Fraser has termed their "yearning side," it could be a profoundly communal act. Poetry, when it succeeded, did so in ways that were not quantifiable, and did not look much like worldly success, but that might be summed up as the joy on the face of a girl in a dingy classroom who finds a kindred spirit in a poem by Garcia Lorca. ~ Kathleen Norris

Roland was so used to the pervasive sense of failure that he was unprepared for the blood-rush of success. He breathed differently. The dingy little room humped around in his vision briefly and settled at a different distance, an object of interest, not of choking confinement. He reread his letters. The world opened. [ ... ] How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence. Nothing in what he had written had changed and everything had changed. ~ A.S. Byatt

She had a collection of matchbooks from extravagant places, dropped here and there on tables in the dingy apartment she still shared with Gregg. They made it look as if she lived a gay, mad life. What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl's apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn't clean except weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and sufficient meals a week one could still light one's cigarettes for the rest of the week with the memory. ~ Rona Jaffe

I landed in London on a wintry autumn evening. It was dark and raining, and I saw more fog and mud in a minute than I had seen in a year. I walked from the Custom House to the Monument before I found a coach; and although the very house-fronts, looking on the swollen gutters, were like old friends to me, I could not but admit that they were very dingy friends. ~ Charles Dickens

Your coat's a little shabby - but who cares? It doesn't keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop - and if we can't keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership. ~ Edith Wharton

Phoebe realized how very wrong she'd been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she'd grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty and squalid, but they didn't pretend to be anything else. Here, things seemed so normal, so perfect, but it was all a deception. ~ Jennifer McMahon

Remembering his creative exposition on the subject of purple-spotted dingy-dippers, Lillian gave a little huff of amusement. She had always considered Westcliff an utterly humorless man…and in that, she had misjudged him. "I thought you never lied," she said.
His lips twitched. "Given the options of seeing you become ill at the dinner table, or lying to get you out of there quickly, I chose the lesser of two evils. Do you feel better now?"
"Better…yes." Lillian realized that she was resting in the crook of his arm, her skirts draped partially over one of his thighs. His body was solid and warm, perfectly matched to hers. Glancing downward, she saw that the fabric of his trousers had molded firmly around his muscular thighs. Unladylike curiosity awakened inside her, and she clenched her fingers against the urge to slide her palm over his leg. "The part about the dingy-dipper was clever," she said, dragging her gaze up to his face. "But inventing a Latin name for it was positively inspired."
Westcliff grinned. "I always hoped my Latin would be good for something." Shifting her a little, he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and glanced at his watch. "We'll return to the dining hall in approximately a quarter hour. By that time the calves' heads should be removed."
Lillian made a face. "I hate English food," she exclaimed. "All those jellies and blobs, and wiggly puddings, and the game that is aged until by the time it's served, it is older than I am ~ Lisa Kleypas

Adam retreated to sit beside Mary as Ronan stretched out on the pew, rubbing out the dingy plan with the legs of his jeans. Something about his stillness on the pew and the funereal quality of the light reminded Adam of the effigy of Glendower they'd seen at the tomb. A king, sleeping. Adam couldn't imagine, though, the strange, wild kingdom that Ronan might rule.
"Stop watching me," Ronan said, though his eyes were closed. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all. ~ Nicholson Baker

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I was sitting at the bar of the Hegira that night when Ginny came in. The barkeep, an ancient sad-eyed patriarch named Jose, had just poured me another drink, and I was having one of those rare moments any serious drunk can tell you about. A piece of real quiet. Jose's cheeks bristled because he didn't shave very often, and his apron was dingy because it didn't get washed very often, and his fingernails had little crescents of grime under them. The glass he poured for me wasn't all that clean. But the stuff he poured was golden-amber and beautiful, like distilled sunlight, and it made the whole place soothing as sleep - which drunks know how to value because they don't get much of it. ~ Stephen R. Donaldson

I've been to Washington many times over the years for stories, and it always seems remarkably the same. More the same than the rest of the country. It's almost like they dress the same as they did 20 years ago. The same old guys are sitting outside the same dirty, dingy secret offices in the Capitol that you're not allowed to go in. ~ Dave Barry

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense. ~ Joy Harjo

For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget. ~ Nicholas Sparks

It was Saturday night at the Tune-In Cafe and the only person inside its dingy walls who wasn't drunk was seriously starting to wish that she were. ~ Sandra Marton

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy - they wouldn't tell me the breed - but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Ode to Algebra
Thrust into this dingy classroom
we die like lampless moths
locked into the desolation of
fluorescent lights and metal desks.
Ten minutes until the bell rings.
What use is the quadratic formula
in our daily lives?
Can we use it to unlock the secrets
in the hearts of those we love?
Five minutes until the bell rings.
Cruel Algebra teacher,
won't you let us go? ~ Meg Cabot

By the end, she cleaned the house so much that she had dust in her eyes and her throat, her knees were scrapped a little and her back ached while she suffered from weary arms. But after everything was done, the once dark, dingy and dirty house was shining bright and looked so alive! ~ Prerna Varma

The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors, metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobilized under a mustard sun.
That's where we had assembly this morning. ~ Bel Kaufman

Some cynical people think that every activity must revolve around the mighty dollar, and that anyone saying otherwise is just attempting to delude the public. I will probably never be able to convice them that that isn't always the case, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that I live in a less dingy world than they do. ~ John Carmack

A dingy emblem on the door depicted a little boy peeing into a pot. The rest of the bar was equally drab and tasteless. Dim bulbs behind red-tasseled lamp shades barely illuminated each of a dozen maroon vinyl booths, which marched along one wall toward the murky front windows. Chipped Formica tables anchored the booths in place. Opposite the row of booths was a long, scarred wooden bar with uncomfortable-looking stools. Behind the bar, sitting on glass shelves in front of a cloudy mirror, were endless rows of bottles, each looking as forlorn as the folks for whom they waited.
He caught the strong odors of liquor and tobacco smoke, and the weaker scents of cleaning chemicals and vomit. In one of the booths , two heads bobbed with the movement of mug-clenching fists. A scrawny bartender with droopy eyelids picked his teeth with a swizzle stick and chatted quietly with a woman seated at the bar. Otherwise the bar was empty. ~ Robert Liparulo

My "do" now consisted of some really nifty spikes on top. I looked like a punker, but it was kind of fun, if you want to know the truth. Next thing I knew I'd be getting my ears pierced and chewing gum in public, social sins my auntie had always warned me about, along with red nail polish and dingy bra straps. ~ Sue Grafton

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, I will always be here. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Are we going to get killed?"
Cam scoped out the dingy room. No doubt there was at least one shotgun behind the bar and a few armed patrons, but no one struck him as particularly dangerous. "Not likely."
She kept her palm on the table and covertly pointed to a guy in a biker jacket with a large skull smoking a blunt. "But possible?"
He shrugged. "It is Friday night. ~ Avery Flynn

I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness - not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I'd been and all the places I hadn't, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found ... ~ Donna Tartt

What in the seven levels of hell did my son see in this place?" Horace asks.
We're standing on the street on Thursday morning, staring up at the house, after taking inventory of the place. From here, I can see five different spots where the brick needs to be repaired and pick out where shingles are missing on the sloped roof. The porch sags, and the windows are dingy. But if I let my eyes go out of focus and ignore all that, I can kinda picture what the place might look like after a little - never mind - a lot of TLC.
"It has good bones?" I suggest.
"It's got old bones," he mutters.
I smirk. "Yeah? So do you. Doesn't mean they're all bad."
He smacks my arm, but he's grinning. "Just wait till you get to be my age, and then tell me how good old bones are. ~ Erica Cameron

Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, it's just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like 'Brazil.' The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray. ~ Terry Gilliam

Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure. ~ Al Alvarez

My mother's true appeal went beyond the clash of the beautiful trust fund darling as the arm candy of an overweight trailer salesman. Carl grew up in harsh, chaotic poverty. His escape was the alcoholism that was conceived during puberty and flourished throughout adulthood. His initial career was a diesel mechanic wearing faded coveralls with oil up his nails and sweat on his brow. His earliest homes were the dingy trailers he would later profit from. His first marriage was doused with benders, acid trips, and sex crazed parties packed with orgies with a first wife who'd lost track of number of dicks shoved down her throat in the midst of intoxication. I don't know what sparked his revelation, but at some point, Carl decided to fiercely pursue the world he envied. He wanted a life of starched, white shirts, ties, SUVs, and picket fences. He ached for the scent of steaks grilling on his sunny patio. He dreamed of white-collar southern beauty and my mother, in all her naïve innocence, was the loveliest possession he could ever obtain. ~ Magda Young

Bel dames spent most of their time running after criminals in dingy, unfiltered cities, making enemies with other bel dames whose notes they stole, girlfriends they fucked, and sons they killed. ~ Kameron Hurley

Ah, Grace and Aislinn arguing. It's like old times again," a male voice said, sounding vaguely muffled. "Could someone take this blasted thing off so that I can see?"
Once again, my magic was thumping and bumping inside me, so I knew whatever was speaking, it wasn't human. Still, when Aislinn crossed over to the thing hanging on the wall and ripped down the canvas, I was taken aback by what I saw.
It wasn't a painting after all; it was a mirror, reflecting the dingy, gloomy room. It was weird seeing the tableau we made. Mom stood with her hand still on my elbow, her expression wary. Aislinn was looking at the mirror with something like disgust, while Izzy had gone even paler, and Finley was scowling. As for me, I was shocked by my reflection. I was thinner than I remembered being, and my skin was dirty, tears leaving trails on my dusty cheeks. And the hair…you know what? Let's not even go there.
But my looking like Little Orphan Sophie wasn't what had my powers going nuts. It was the guy. ~ Rachel Hawkins

I used to own a dingy and can still sail one if pushed, but I like the pleasure boats. ~ John Dyer

Disco satisfied social as well as musical needs. Disco people got to dress up all the time and go to places ... where everybody sort of 'looked good' - and later, after an evening of chemical alteration, everybody looked even better, and the next thing they knew, they were getting The Blox Job. Punk, in the late seventies, purported to be a rebellion against this sort of silly behavior. Maniac bands started thrashing away in dingy little places with no decor, developing their own silly behavior ... New wave evolved from punk, basically, by sterilizing its own safety pin. ~ Frank Zappa

Tower Bridge looked very grand in its new coat of blue, cream and gold paint. Gone was the dingy black and white of my youth. But otherwise it was just the same: gulls screaming overhead, and black water rushing past beneath. A magnificent view of the Tower from here. I took some pictures just for the record; then continued towards the East End which was only a short walk away. This would be the most painful part of my journey. ~ Bernie Morris

There is something infinitely dingy about the word workshop. Pray that England doesn't become a nation of workshopkeepers. ~ Jilly Cooper

Right thinking is necessarily an open process, and the only science and history of full value to men consist of what is generally and clearly known; this is surely a platitude, but we have still to discover how to preserve our centres of philosophy and research from the caking and darkening accumulations of narrow and dingy-spirited specialists. We have still to ensure that a man of learning shall be none the less a man of affairs, and that all that can be thought and known is kept plainly, honestly, and easily available to the ordinary men and women who are the substance of mankind. The ~ H.G.Wells

They looked at their reflections in the mirror, she in her torn skirt and dingy bra, he naked, his penis flaccid, his face covered with bright white shaving cream. Megan shook her head. "What a vision we'll be. ~ Anonymous

Maybe a little break," she muttered. "Just maybe." She'd lucked out with Mason Tobias. He might've been a little dingy, ~ J.D. Robb

Thank you, Department Stores, for the flickering fluorescent lights, dingy yellow wall paint, and adjustable mirrors in the dressing room where I try on bathing suits. You are why I drink. ~ Jen Hatmaker

Famously, the trick to good writing is bleeding onto the page. I picture the male writer who coined this phrase, sitting at his typewriter, the blank sheet before him. What kind of blood did he imagine? Blood from a vein in his arm? Or a leg? Perhaps a head wound? Presumably it was not blood from a cervix. I have so much of this blood, this period blood, this pregnancy blood, this miscarriage blood, this not-pregnant-again blood, this perimenopausal blood. It just keeps coming and I just keep soaking it up. Stuffing bleached cotton into my vagina to stem the flow, padding my underwear, sticking on the night pads 'with wings', hoping not to leak on some man's sheets, or rip off too much pubic hair with the extra-secure adhesive strips. Covering up with 'period pants', those unloved dingy underwear choices pulled out from the bank of the drawer every month. And all along, I was wrong. I should have been sitting down at my desk and spilling it across the page, a shocking red to fill the white. ~ Emilie Pine

In a weekend-long lingual-legal rage, I composed a heartless, fearless, terrifying work of negation that burdened every person save myself with every conceivable responsibility and loss and risk, that in every instance unfairly and unlimitedly and gratuitously and disproportionately favored me at the expense of the world and, most repellently of all, that withheld the basic hospitality of writing: my disclaimer, as completed, was a graphic monstrosity, a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreathable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation, indentation, or line breakage. ~ Joseph O'Neill

As the days and weeks and seasons wore on he found himself repeating this nothing, not wanting to. Gradually he came to understand that this particular nothing was all that he could really say now. He chanted it to himself in cell blocks and dingy apartments, recited it like a litany, ripped himself to rags against the sharp and ugly poetry of it. It echoed down the grimy hallways and squandered moments of his life, the answer to every question, the lyric of all songs. ~ Scott Hawkins

She resents the chipped paint of the table and the dingy closet they call a dressing room. (Dark City Lights) ~ Annette Meyers

What is love? Is it a lightning bolt that instantaneously unites two souls in utter infatuation and admiration through the meeting of a simple innocent stare? Or is it a lustful seed that is sown in a dark dingy bar one sweaty summer's night only to be nurtured with romantic rendezvous as it matures into a beautiful flower? Is it a river springing forth, creating lifelong bonds through experiences, heartaches, and missed opportunities? Or is it a thunderstorm that slowly rolls in, climaxing with an awesome display of unbridled passion, only to succumb to its inevitable fade into the distance? I define love as education....
It teaches us to learn from our opportunities, and made the stupidest of decisions for the rightest of reasons. It gives us a hint of what "it" should be and feel like, but then encourages us to think outside the box and develop our own understanding of what "it" could be. Those that choose to embrace and learn from love's educational peaks and valleys are the ones that will eventually find true love, that one in a million. Those that don't are destined to be consumed with the inevitable ring around the rosy of fake I love you's and failed relationships. I have been lucky enough to have some of the most amazing teachers throughout my romantic evolution and it is to them that I dedicate this book. The lessons in life, passion and love they taught me have helped shape who I am today and who I will be tomorrow. To the love that stains my heart, but define ~ Ivan Rusilko

The Dingy Playing Cards" by Robert Bly
Friends, it's time to give up our hope for Rapture. Saucers will not carry us away. Raskolnikov
Had to depend on the police to help him sleep.

Our soul loves the dingy cards that have been dealt
To the ne'er-do-wells. The old men put the old
Queens down with their smoke-stained fingers.

In the Cirque Du Soleil, when the acrobats
Sweep out over the crowd, babies are being
Born who know much more than we ever did.

The yellow teeth of old jackrabbits explains a lot
About the shortage of mercy; the caterpillar's walk
Reminds us of the Mongols galloping toward Khorakhan.

After the funeral, once they are safe, the dead begin
To miss losing at cards. We know that Cain and Abel
Want to meet each other again on the plowed field.

Robert, there's not a single humiliation we could
Have done without. We are still perched on a pole.
What will happen to us depends a lot on the wind. ~ Robert Bly

I am a book.

Sheaves pressed from the pulp of oaks and pines
a natural sawdust made dingy from purses, dusty
from shelves.
Steamy and anxious, abused and misused,
kissed and cried over,
smeared, yellowed, and torn,
loved, hated, scorned.

I am a book.

I am a book that remembers,
days when I stood proud in good company
When the children came, I leapt into their arms,
when the women came, they cradled me against their soft breasts,
when the men came, they held me like a lover,
and I smelled the sweet smell of cigars and brandy as we sat together in leather chairs,
next to pool tables, on porch swings, in rocking chairs,
my words hanging in the air like bright gems, dangling,
then forgotten, I crumbled,
dust to dust.

I am a tale of woe and secrets,
a book brand-new, sprung from the loins of ancient fathers clothed in tweed,
born of mothers in lands of heather and coal soot.
A family too close to see the blood on its hands,
too dear to suffering, to poison, to cold steel and revenge,
deaf to the screams of mortal wounding,
amused at decay and torment,
a family bred in the dankest swamp of human desires.

I am a tale of woe and secrets,
I am a mystery.

I am intrigue, anxiety, fear,
I tangle in the night with madmen, spend my days cloaked in black,
hiding from myself, from dark angels,
Lise McClendon

Moonlight

I know when the sun is in China
because the night shining other-light
crawls into my bed. She is moon.
Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last
one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque -
Fourth Street, or from similar avenues
in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also
awakened, the night thrown back and asked,
'where is the moon, my lover'?
And from here I always answer in my dreaming,
'the last time I saw her was in the arms
of another sky'. ~ Joy Harjo

Now burst above the city's cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
Thro' factory doors a stream of dingy light
Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks
To hut and home among the snow's gray blocks. --
I love you, human labourers. Good-night!
Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!
Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,
To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,
To the poor boy who can no more! I vow
The victim soon shall shudder at the stake
And fall in blood: we bring him even now. ~ Trumbull Stickney

Fantastic! Right in the middle of that long stretch between Christmas and Spring Break, your coats are getting dirty, everything's dark, dingy - what a great time for a movie! ~ John Hughes

Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off. ~ Murray Gell-Mann

For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation. ~ Patrick O'Neil

The 5,500-squarefoot house was custom built with a Mediterranean decor. It was the exact opposite of the dingy hotel rooms he stayed in when he was on the road. This house was very open with high ceilings, so even giant-like friends like Kevin Nash could hang out with no issue...
Shawn conducted a class as I photographed away. Students Lance Cade, Bryan Danielson (Daniel Bryan), Brian Kendrick, Paul London and others did calisthenics and other exercises. After an hour or so they got into the ring to do some falls and learn a few holds....
Here I was face-to-face with Shawn Michaels, and he asked me, "What do you want to do?" My mouth spewed words faster than I could think, as I whispered so the students wouldn't hear, "Shoot me into the ropes. When I come back on the rebound I will give you a flying dropkick and then put you in the figure-four leglock for the win. ~ Bill Apter

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world. ~ Albert Camus

do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world - those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In ~ George Eliot

What an amazing thing is the coming of spring to London. The very pavements seem ready to crack and lift under the denied earth; in the air is a consciousness of life which tells you that if traffic stopped for a fortnight grass would grow again in Piccadilly and corn would spring in pavement cracks where a horse had spilt his 'feed'. And the squares of London, so dingy and black since the first October gale, fill week by week with the rising tide of life, just as the sea, running up the creeks and pushing itself forward inch by inch towards the land, comes at last to each remote rock pool. ~ H.V. Morton

Why describe God as organic? More and more I realize that my own understanding of God is largely polluted. I have preconceived notions, thoughts and biases when it comes to God. I have a tendency to favor certain portions of Scripture over others. I have a bad habit of reading some stories with a been-there-done-that attitude, knowing the end of the story before it begins, and in the process denying God's ability to speak to me through it once again.
... The result is that my understanding and perception of God is clouded, much like the dingy haze of pollution that hands over most major cities. The person in the middle of a city looking up at the sky doesn't aways realize just how much their view and perceptions are altered by the smog. Without symptoms such as burning eyes or an official warning of scientists or media, no one may even notice just how bad the pollution has become.
That's why I describe God as organic. ~ Margaret Feinberg

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. ~ Norman Mailer

Arthur Clennam came to a squeezed house, with a ramshackle bowed front, little dingy windows, and a little dark area like a damp waistcoat-pocket, which he found to be number twenty-four, Mews Street, Grosvenor Square. ~ Charles Dickens

I had already imagined how it would be next year.
I'd be at Columbia, and Marcus would move to Manhattan, or maybe one of the outer boroughs. I would study hard, and he would make money playing gigs at dingy bars. We'd spend countless hours going to clubs to see bands on the verge, touring obscure art exhibits, and sipping pot after pot of black coffee at hole-in-the-wall cafes. Many more hours would be spent lounging under the covers. We would never run out of witty and fascinating things to say to each other. Eventually, he'd apply to Columbia, and we'd be the sort of well-educated, cosmopolitan couple that confuse the suburbumpkins who never leave Pineville. ~ Megan McCafferty

He danced along the dingy days, and this bequest of wings was but a book. ~ Emily Dickinson

The sun and the air are God's free gifts to all, we say; but are they so? In yonder city's dingy alleys the sun shines not, and the air is foul. Oh, man, how dost thou forget and obstruct thy brother man, and say, "Give us this day our daily bread," when he has none! Oh, would that men would leave the city, its splendour and its tumult and its gold, and return to wood and field and simple, honest living! Then would their children grow stately as noble trees, and their thoughts sweet and pure as wayside flowers. ~ Helen Keller

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as fore-shadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road and, like all antique shops except the swanky ones in the Bond Street neigbourhood, dingy outside and dark and smelly within. I don't know why it is, but the proprietors of these establishments always seem to be cooking some sort of stew in the back room. ~ P.G. Wodehouse