Ingrained Dirt Quotes

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating. ~ Paul Harding

Be always at work scraping the dirt from the well.
To everyone who suffers, perseverance brings good fortune.
The Prophet has said that each prostration of prayer is a knock on heaven's door. When anyone continues to knock, felicity shows its smiling face. ~ Rumi Muhammad Jalal Ud Din Balkhi

You create a pile of dirt and then drive over it. We may have to learn to drive all over again. ~ Steven Squyres

Paul sat down where Hawat had been, straightened the papers. One more day here, he thought. He looked around the room. We're leaving. The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things - the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns - the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: What is the now? ~ Frank Herbert

There was once a girl who loved to lie in the grass and let it tickle her skin. She liked the feel of dirt under her fingers. She didn't like aprons or making dinner or washing dishes. She didn't like being told to behave. She didn't like feeling that no matter what she did her mother and father looked at her with disappointed eyes. She could never be pretty enough or sweet enough or pleasantly talkative enough. And she grew angrier and angrier and angrier that all anyone wanted her to be was an idea they held in their head that had nothing to do with her. And this anger became bitterness, and this bitterness turned her into a monster. ~ Peternelle Van Arsdale

After many years the woman died, of natural causes. And a few years after that, the ogre died. Eventually, his mistresses died, down on the ground, in the people village, over decades. The war men and women died. The human girl who had escaped her early death died, across the land, over by the ocean, in her shack of blue bowls and rocking chairs. The witch, who had originally made the cake and made up up the spell and given it as a gift to her beloved ogre friend, died.
The cake went on and on. Time passed...
And the cake, always wanting to please, the cake who had found a way to survive its endlessness by recreating its role over and over again, tried to figure out, in its cake way, what this light-dappled object might want to eat. So it became darkness, a cake of darkness. It did not have to be human food. It did not have to be digestible through a familiar tract. It lay there on the dirt, waiting, a simmering cake of darkness. Through time, and wind, and earthquakes, and chance. At last the cloak fell out of the tree and blew across the land and happened upon the cake where it ate its darkness and extinguished its own dappled light. The cloak disappeared into night and was not seen again, as it was only a piece of coat shaped darkness now and could not be spotted so easily, had there been any eyes left to see it. It floated and joined with nowhere.
Darkness was overtaking everything, anyway, pouring over the land and sky. The cake itself, still in the shap ~ Aimee Bender

By contrast, the grime of her journey, the outré inappropriateness of the state of her, it felt like armor.
I earned this dirt.
Respect. The dirt. ~ Laini Taylor

Aubade with a Broken Neck The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices - the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. ~ Traci Brimhall

In elementary and middle school, I threw kids against the wall. I rubbed their heads in the dirt at recess. I bit them. I even knocked teeth out. ~ Russell Wilson

A huge maze of tents and mud huts and homes built from plastic and aluminum siding in a labyrinth of narrow passageways littered with dirt and shit. It was a city in the belly of a yet greater city. He had lived in a small mud house there with his brothers ... In its alleyways, he and his brothers had learned to walk and talk. They had gone to school there. He had played with sticks and rusty old bicycle wheels on its dirty streets, running around with other refugee kids, until the sun dipped and his grandmother called him home. ~ Khaled Hosseini

She acts like she don't like you"
"She doesn't like anyone"
"She likes Capitan Black", Orr reminded.
"That's because he treats her like dirt. Anyone can get a girl that way ~ Joseph Heller

Bean decided to pay attention to what Ms. Aruba-Tate was saying. "Today, class, we are having a special science lesson." Science! Bean stopped thinking about Colorado. Science was usually dirt or fish, and Bean liked both of them. ~ Annie Barrows

Beauty hovers around you wherever you go, which is why these two poor young men chase after you when you're covered in dirt and dressed in rages. Not beauty of the face or form. Something eternal. ~ Julie Berry

Get down here before you're recognized."
"Playing hide-and-seek under the table? Crouching in the dirt? Typical of your kind, but far beneath my dignity."
He laughs unsteadily, like he expects I am going to laugh, too. I don't. I ball up my fist and punch him in the stomach, right where I know it will hurt. He staggers to his knees. The goblet drops to the dirt, making a hollow clanking sound. "Ow!" he shouts, and lets me tug him under the table. ~ Holly Black

Water was a state of mind. If you think it your friend when you swim in the river or wash away the dirt, why call it your enemy when it comes from the heavens? From the cup of the gods themselves. ~ Kate Furnivall

Let not the dirt of the sanskaras of your thoughts and deeds touch you, by surrendering every thought and act at the feet of your Guru. As a laundryman washes and cleans clothes, in the same way, I remove all the dirt which has stuck to you through your thoughts and actions. ~ Meher Baba

The terrors ingrained in a child went deeper than any anxiety acquired as an adult. The fear bred itself right into growing bones, mellowed into hatred, and became part of the DNA. In my case, it laced the edges of every cell, like heroin and equally addictive. The ~ Anne McAneny

If someone takes something from me I'm going to grab it right back out of their cold, twisted sick hands and say it is mine, and I am going to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt because this is the teachers! These are our tools and you sick people need to deal with us and the children we teach. ~ Michael Mulgrew

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

He is the playfulness of creation, scandal and utter goodness, the generosity of the ocean and the ferocity of a thunderstorm; he is cunning as a snake and gentle as a whisper; the gladness of sunshine and the humility of a thirty-mile walk by foot on a dirt road. ~ John Eldredge

As we get ready to leave, Georgina announces that she wants to keep the kitten. But of course she can't. We walk up and down looking for its mother, calling for its siblings. But the nearby kraals are deserted, of both people and animals. And eventually we have to leave it at the gate of an empty kraal, the closest one to where it found us, hoping that this might be its home. As we start to drive away, the kitten totters down the dirt road after us, a furry ball of khaki with irregular black spots, and Georgina bursts into tears.

'Over the kitten? Really?' I ask, gesturing around the ruins of the torture base and the mass graves. 'With all of this?'

'No,' she sniffs. 'It's not just the kitten. It's everyone here. They've all been abandoned. No one gives a **** about what happened to them. They're completely alone. ~ Peter Godwin

He's rude, controlling, abusive, misogynistic, disparaging and dismissive.... In all seriousness though, what a hideous lust object to mythologize. It'll be teaching all sorts of young girls that it's ROMANTIC to accept any sort of appalling treatment from some brooding loser who treats you like dirt. (describing the romantic lead in "Twilight") ~ The Morrigan

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt. ~ Lauren Oliver

Pull yourself out of the dirt, dust yourself off, and get back on the horse and ride towards the sunset. ~ Michael Dean Russell Jr.

Use a pegboard and some s-hooks to hang utensils along a wall. Most ovens get really dirty over time due to continuous use. Make a solution with a few tablespoons of vinegar, baking soda and dish washing soap. Spread this with a sponge along your oven surfaces and keep it for a while. Then use a clean wet sponge to wipe the dirt away. Garbage bins often acquire a stagnant smell after using them a few times. This is because despite using garbage bags, there could be leakage. Next time you clean out your dustbin, put in the garbage bag and then place some newspaper balls at the bottom. Put in your trash over this newspaper since it will absorb any such leaks. Organize everything in a systematic way so that you know where to grab them from next time. ~ Matthew Jones

He was beautiful.
Whatever else he was, Sage was by far the most magnetic man I had ever seen. I had felt it in my dreams, and it was even more true in real life. I welcomed the chance to study him without his knowledge.
He glanced up, and I quickly closed my eyes, feigning sleep. Had he seen me? The scratching stopped. He was looking at me, I knew it. I held my breath and willed my eyes not to pop open and see if he was staring.
Finally the scratching started up again. I forced myself to slowly count to ten before I opened my eyelids the tiniest bit and peeked through my lashes.
Good-he wasn't looking at me.
I opened my eyes a little wider. What was he doing? Moving only my eyes, I glanced down at the dirt floor in front of him…
…and saw a picture of me, fast asleep.
It was incredible. I could see his tools laid out beside the picture: rocks in several sizes and shapes, a couple of twigs…the most rudimentary materials, and yet what he was etching into the floor wouldn't look out of place on an art gallery wall. It was beautiful…far more beautiful than I thought I actually looked in my sleep. Is that how he saw me?
Sage lifted his head again, and I shut my eyes. I imagined him studying me, taking careful note of my features and filtering them through his own senses. My heartbeat quickened, and it took all my willpower to remain still.
"You can keep pretending to be asleep if you'd like, but I don't see a career for you as an actres ~ Hilary Duff

The professional cleaning industry estimates that 85 percent of the dirt we bring into our homes enters via our shoes or our pets' paws. ~ Christopher Gavigan

My mind went back to that picture in the obstetrics book. A cow standing in the middle of a gleaming floor while a sleek veterinary surgeon in a spotless parturition overall inserted his arm to a polite distance. He was relaxed and smiling, the farmer and his helpers were smiling, even the cow was smiling. There was no dirt or blood or sweat anywhere.
That man in the picture had just finished an excellent lunch and had moved next door to do a bit of calving just for the sheer pleasure of it, as a kind of dessert. He hadn't crawled shivering from his bed at two o'clock in the morning and bumped over twelve miles of frozen snow, staring sleepily ahead till the lonely farm showed in the headlights. He hadn't climbed half a mile of white fell-side to the doorless barn where his patient lay. ~ James Herriot

Fuming, I reach for the stick at my feet; however, this is the precise moment that a small black garter snake slithers out in front of me. I do what any normal fourteen-year-old girl would do: scream my head off, dance in spastic horror, and throw my tobacco knife into the dirt-completely missing the snake. I look to Luke for help, but he's laughing hysterically, which really gets my already hot blood boiling. Wrists on sweaty forehead, breathing totally out of control, I walk around in a circle until the disgusting little reptile slithers away.
I am-offically-over it. ~ Alecia Whitaker

Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny's face – stupid terror; the whole world opening upside down; his life exploding in a thunder of crows and the sky expanding empty over his stomach like a white ocean. Then nothing. Rotten stumps, sowbugs crawling in the fallen leaves. Dirt and dark. ~ Donna Tartt

Maybe it took the ugly things--the ashes, the scraps, the dirt--to grow the beautiful things. ~ Grace A. Johnson

A flower earns its honor in the dirt. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

This was the hidden machinery of life, not a clean, clinical well-oiled engine, monitored by a thousand meticulous dials, but a crazy, stumbling contraption made up of strange things roughly fitted together – things like a huge water tap, the dogleg stairs, cheese in the soap dish, and a crocheted tea cosy stiff with dirt and topped by a doll's broken face. ~ Margaret Mahy

when they buried me alive
i dug my way
out of the ground
with palm and fist
i howled so loud
the earth rose in fear and
the dirt began to levitate
my whole life has been an uprising
one burial after another

- i will find my way out of you just fine ~ Rupi Kaur

The Outing
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes. ~ Lydia Davis

Carlos, your mysophobia does affect my health. I feel freer – more alive, more vivacious and, ironically enough, healthier – if I'm not constantly made to worry about germs and unhealthy choices. Whether it's for a moment of spontaneous kissing in a phone booth or eating an occasional hamburger…Obsessing about your health doesn't actually make you healthier. The fact of the matter is, Carlos, our bodies are decaying at every moment, regardless of what we do. Living is bad for your health."

"It doesn't have to be."

"Maybe if you live in an antiseptic bubble specially designed by the CDC it doesn't. But in a place like New York City, you're fighting a pointless battle. You can either embrace the dirt and the germs as part of the risky joy of living in an exciting, overpopulated metropolis, or you can spend lots of mental real estate obsessing over whether you touched a few extra microbes when you got on the subway. ~ Zack Love

People don't realize that doing a horror movie is hard work. You're out there all day screaming your lungs out, breathing in toxic make-up fumes, rolling around in the dirt, getting your eyebrows burned off - it's not like doing a sitcom. ~ Clint Howard

You collect a hunderd pennies in one minute by Master's timepiece and you bought yourself free. Then they shakes a jar of coppers onto the belly of a shovel and holds it over the campfire long time. When they think it fun enough, they say, get yourself ready, and now you go, boy. The pennies go in the dirt around the fire and I got to pick them up and keep hold on them." "Oh," said Ada, with a sound like a kind of punch in the air, or out of it. "I gets forty-two hot cents before that minute up," he said, holding out his hands again. "Here's the proof." "Oh," she said. "And no freedom." "Nothing next, but that we left," he said. "One by one, and not on the same path, turns out." "And here you are." "And wherever this be, I don't know. Some mystery or t'other." She lifted her shoulders and dropped them. "Well. With me I suppose. ~ Gregory Maguire

Was that what it was all about? To know everything - the ultimate quest of the philosopher, to comprehend the universe from the highest heaven down to the dirt upon the Earth. And Wolfdon desired to go there too, wherever "there" might be. ~ Mary-Jean Harris

Must the Earth forever be arranged like an ocean steamer, with large, luxurious rooms and luxurious food for a select few, and underneath in the steerage, where the great mass can barely breathe from dirt and the poisonous air? ~ Various

The first time I passed through the country (Switzerland) I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt in Italy. ~ Ernesto Sabato

Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so the army is present. There would be no contradiction in that, if terror reigned everywhere in the world, but the colonizer enjoys, in the mother country, democratic rights that the colonialist system refuses to the colonized native. In fact, the colonialist system favors population growth to reduce the cost of labor, and it forbids assimilation of the natives, whose numerical superiority, if they had voting rights, would shatter the system. Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is abandoned without protection to inhuman forces - brought in with the colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus, and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of individuals - one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, 'subhumanity. ~ Albert Memmi

The whole 'starting with stories, ending with novels' thing, it's probably too ingrained in the industry and the psyche to change it. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

Entitlement is the shovel that digs a grave of greed. And there are those of us who stand at the bottom of such a grave having thrown out the last shovel full of dirt, never realizing that the grave that we've dug is our own until the same shovel suddenly starts backfilling the hole. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Maybe something can only be born when something else dies. Maybe our 'coming alive' feels like being dragged through the dirt. Maybe you and I are hanging my a thread of grace for most of our lives and we're expected to be humble, not haughty, with the breaks we've been given. Maybe we're supposed to pay good deeds forward. Maybe we're supposed to think what's in it for me? far less than we do. Maybe we need to sacrifice more. Maybe it won't feel like a sacrifice at all, but more like the sensation of becoming unnumbed. ~ Jeff Goins

All of this causes me to get a bit antsy before any major election.
Why? Because the modern American election is an open invitation for people who haven't had a working relationship with a clue since their first driver's test to step up and participate in a decision-making process that will have profound implications for my life and the life of my family long after I've been tucked in for the eternal, celestial dirt nap.
Frankly, it scares me to death. ~ Neal Boortz

I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds. ~ Robert Byrd

She was dry, dry inside like a ten-thousand-year-old tomb, with the last of her life barely dampening the dirt underneath. ~ Kat Rosenfield