Janitor Quotes

Sir Roderick Glossop, Honoria's father, is always called a nerve specialist, because it sounds better, but everybody knows that he's a sort of janitor to the looney-bin. I mean to say, when your uncle the Duke begins to feel the strain a bit and you find him in the blue drawing room sticking straws in his hair, old Glossop is the first person you send for. ... Practically every posh family in the country has called him in at one time or another, and I suppose that, being in that position - I mean, constantly having to sit on people's heads while their nearest and dearest phone to the asylum to send round the waggon - does tend to make a chappie take what you call a warped view of humanity. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Of course our school life was not free from pranks. The property of the townspeople was moved to strange places in the night. One morning as the janitor was starting the furnace he heard a loud bray from one of the class rooms. His investigation disclosed the presence there of a domestic animal noted for his long ears and discordant voice. In some way during the night he had been stabled on the second floor. About as far as I deem it prudent to discuss my own connection with these escapades is to record that I was never convicted of any of them and so must be presumed innocent. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Just imagine how fast, innovative and excellent your business will be once every single teammate - from the janitor to the executive - begins to see themselves as the CEO of their own area of responsibility. ~ Robin S. Sharma

You're the healing janitor dude."
"Groundskeeper."
"Isn't that like a janitor?"
"No, it's like a groundskeeper. ~ Rachel Hawkins

I daydream about a high school where everybody plays the harmonica: the students, the teachers, the principal, the janitor and the cook in the cafeteria. ~ Richard Brautigan

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned. ~ Gary Shteyngart

I told her my father was a retired janitor who liked to go fishing. She told me her father was a podiatrist who liked to punch his wife and two daughters in the face. ~ Gary Shteyngart

JD: You're an actor!
Janitor: You're a fireman! What are we doing? ~ Scrubs

The colors black and white are my uniform, to honor the working class. People like my parents, who were janitors and had to wear a uniform every day. It keeps me grounded. ~ Janelle Monae

He hadn't meant to do it. That is to say, he hadn't set out in his car with the /intent/ to kill the janitor. But he /had/ unearthed Sykes's rotation schedule, and he /had/ gotten in his car at the same time that Sykes clocked out of his once-a-week night shift, and he /had/ seen him crossing the road, and he /had/ sped up. ~ V.E Schwab

We're taught to talk about the world as a world of as states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there's what's called "realist" IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their "national interest." It's in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don't want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. ~ Noam Chomsky

Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Rentals sank, living rose. I could not afford help. I must be owner, agent, landlady and janitor. I loathed landladying ... I tried in every way to augment my income. Small fruit, hens, rabbits, dogs - pottery ... I never painted now - had neither time nor wanting. For about fifteen years I did not paint. ~ Emily Carr

Thank you." A bright blush stained her cheeks. "For last night. For chasing the monsters away…"

"Anytime. It's kind of my job to protect you."

"A job sounds like you're forced."

"Nah," I argued. "Saying it's my job just means it's my identity in a way. You know how people go, 'Hey, I'm Rick. I'm a janitor.'" I smiled. "Now I can say, hey I'm Weston, and I kill monsters on behalf of my very sexy girlfriend so she can sleep at night. ~ Rachel Van Dyken

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer. ~ H.L. Mencken

This is a world where everybody's gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody's gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that ... Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don't wanna do. All the things that I don't wanna be. Places I don't wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned. Save the whale, all that, I don't understand that ... ~ Charles Bukowski

That's why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors - found the courage to keep it alive. ~ Barack Obama

Six: everyone - and when I say everyone, I mean absolutely,positively everyone, from the librarians to the students to the staff to the oldest, cruiser janitor - was piss-down-their-legs scared of Miles Richter.
Of all the crazy things I heard about East Shoal, that was the only thing I couldn't believe. ~ Francesca Zappia

Well, it all started when I figured out that the janitor at my high school was the Angel of Death ... ~ Matt Ruff

I've earned my living in all sorts of terrible ways - as a janitor, a copy editor, a psychotherapist. ~ Chad Harbach

I was a janitor for a while but I can never imagine a man calling himself a Floor Engineer when he has to walk into the woman's crapper and clean up what they leave behind. I couldn't get a hard-on for a year after working in that place. what they leave behind. and on the floor. and in that little compartment behind the seat. or alongside of it. or wherever it was. ~ Charles Bukowski

Microbes are just nature's janitors who work to clean up a poorly kept culturing medium. Trying to keep microbes off of and out of your body is like trying to keep the wind out of the trees. ~ Robert Morse

At awards time, The Exorcist was nominated in 11 categories, everybody but the janitor was up for an Oscar. There was no category for what I did. ~ Mercedes McCambridge

I'm so thankful when I have a job. I would say the worst job I ever had was the one I quit after the first night. I was an overnight restaurant janitor. And it wasn't because of the job. We had to do four restaurants in the night, overnight. But I was working with a den of thieves. I just quit the next day. ~ Wendell Pierce

In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was - even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan of action. I had joined a religious order, and made a great deal of money. In all that time I only killed a dozen people. ~ Ann Leckie

Whether it's the waitress who brings steaming hot food to a table of hungry people or the janitor who keeps an office clean and free of germs, each of us have the power to deliver joy and happiness to the people around us through the work we do. ~ Alex Kakuyo

'Community' is a great show. I love 'Raising Hope' with Martha Plimpton. And I love 'The Middle' - another Chicagoan in there is Neil Flynn, who used to play the janitor in 'Scrubs.' ~ Jim O'Heir

My younger brother runs a guesthouse, and my sister is a janitor. I have not given them money because they earn their own money. I pay for their children's school fees. ~ Chen Guangbiao

You don't mess with janitors, first of all, they have like 40 keys, and 1 is to a closet you don't want to be inside of. ~ Chelsea Handler

I've got keys to crap I've never owned. You put all my keys together I could be a high school janitor tonight. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

The Janitor: You're the only one around here that treats me like a real person.

Elliot: What did you say?

The Janitor: There was one other girl a few years ago: red-haired doctor. She used to eat lunch with me, until the other residents started making fun of her. They called her Janitor-lunch-eater. Not the most clever group...Anyway, I know that you don't think about me the way that I think about you. And I never really believed that you would or that you could. But just pretending for today made me feel good for a change.

Elliott: It's okay. I actually had a good time.

The Janitor: Thanks...Elliot. ~ Bill Lawrence

Empower the people around you, from the janitor to the athletic director. You do that by being sincere, caring about others, and then putting it into practice. ~ Sue Gunter

A calling is not some fully formed thing that you find," she tells advice seekers. "It's much more dynamic. Whatever you do - whether you're a janitor or the CEO - you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values. ~ Angela Duckworth

You are getting a wooden leg for your birthday, and you are going to love it. Incidentally, this means removing your leg below the knee. You'll make lots of friends. You can even attach a bundle of straw at the end, like a broom, and apply to be a janitor. ~ Jarod Kintz

In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. ~ Ayn Rand

If Mary had applied for a job as janitor, the doors to the school would swing wide open. As a professional engineer-in-training with a plan to occupy the building for the nefarious purpose of advancing her education, she needed to petition the city of Hampton for "special permission" to attend classes in the whites-only school. Mary ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

Oh how nice!" the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice & all. "I must tell Ernest we met," she said. "May I ask your name, dear?"
"Rudolf Schmidt," I told her. I didn't feel like giving her my whole life history. Rudolf Schmidt was the name of the janitor of our dorm. ~ J.D. Salinger

The American Left complains that we have no right to be the world's police force. On the contrary. We've been the world's janitor for almost a century, and after September 11, it became obvious it's better, safer, and more productive to change things instead of cleaning up after the mess. ~ Tammy Bruce

I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone. ~ Walter Mosley

I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won't. At age fifty-seven, I'm too damned old, and I'd look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I'm standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns.
So I'll graduate with this class, but I won't walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I'll have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I'll imagine what the rest would have been like. When you've had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things.
The ceremony is about to begin. It's a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other.
That banging sound.
It's Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold.
They've finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would. ~ John William Tuohy

I wrote these letters in the mornings before work, in the library, during my sessions of prolonged loitering in Commons, where I remained every evening until asked to leave by the janitor. It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, stepping from the world of warmth and people and conversation overheard, I felt the old familiar cold twist through my bones again and then it was all forgotten, the warmth, the lights; I had never been warm in my life, ever. ~ Donna Tartt

Developing a good work ethic is a key [to success]. Apply yourself at whatever you do, whether you're a janitor or taking your first summer job, because that work ethic will be reflected in everything you do in life. ~ Tyler Perry

In five days, you can turn the page on policies that put greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street. In five days, you can choose policies that invest in our middle class, and create new jobs, and grow this economy, so that everyone has a chance to succeed, not just the CEO, but the secretary and janitor, not just the factory owner, but the men and women on the factory floor. ~ Barack Obama

It's like my grandpa always used to say, 'A butter knife would make a deadlier weapon than a melting stick of butter.'"


"Your grandpa never said that."


"No, but he should have. He was a damn fool not to have uttered those words."


"My grandpa was a janitor, in the Great Depression. The greatest thing he ever said was, 'Greg, I just Gregged all over your floor. Do you have a mop I can use to clean it up?'"


"Who's Greg?"


"I don't know."


"What the shit kind of story is that? That story is bullshit. Greg doesn't exist. Nobody knows nobody named Greg. It's a unicorn name - it's complete mythology."


"What about Lou Greg, the baseball player?"


"Lou who? Lou Gehrig?"


"Here's a Lou for you. Greg Louganis."


"Bah, Greg Louganis doesn't exist. He was a myth created by the Soviets to push their divers to perfection. The Russians realized they couldn't be the best until they deceived their divers into believing there was someone who was always better."


"I've seen Greg Louganis, and he's as real as you or me."


"You've seen what they wanted you to see. They gave you a blindfold to wear and convinced you it would improve your eyesight." ~ Jarod Kintz

During his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. ~ Candice Millard

I saw Derzhavin only once in my life but shall never forget that occasion. It was in 1815 at a public examination in the Lyceum. When we boys learned Derzhavin was coming, all of us grew excited. Delvig went out on the stairs to wait for him and kiss his hand, the hand that had written 'The Waterfall.' Derzhavin arrived. Derzhavin entered the vestibule, and Delvig heard him ask the janitor: 'Where is the privy here, my good fellow?' This prosaic question disenchanted Delvig, who canceled his intent and returned to the reception hall. Delvig told me the story with wonderful bonhomie and good humor. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Parents teach in the toughest school in the world - The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor ... ~ Virginia Satir

Bruce Wayne's parents get killed and he goes to Tibet or whatever, and Superman is an alien, and Spiderman had that radioactive spider. Me? I kissed a janitor in the school bathroom. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Rowan grinned. "Come now, Your Excellency, there hasn't been a terrorist in hundreds of years. I'm just a janitor cleaning filth from dark corners. ~ Neal Shusterman

Talking science all the time, doesn't make a person any more human than a janitor who knows no science. A creature becomes human by helping others, regardless of his or her scientific knowledge. ~ Abhijit Naskar

And can you please have the janitor check my floor for fucking superglue?" ~ Andrew Hamilton ~ Whitney G.

I'm only stopped by people in uniform, whether it's customs people, janitors, or the FBI - they all watch 'The Wire.' Sadly, beautiful, glamorous women don't know anything about it. ~ Dominic West

I surveyed the others, who had all stopped in their tracks. So what was the plan, boys? You were all going to get a fuck in? The very definition of sloppy seconds - hell, sloppy thirds and fourths and fifths. Than what? Slit my throat? Leave me for dead? Let some school janitor find me stuffed in a dumpster? You would deny my children their mother for one night of cheap thrills? ~ J.R. Rain

Don't ask where I got this idea, because I couldn't tell you, but I knew precisely where we were going, and I was sure that this might officially make me a slut. But when we reached the door of the unused janitor's closet, I had no feeling of shame… not yet, at least.
I grasped the doorknob and noticed Wesley's eyes narrow with suspicion. I yanked open the door, checked that no one was watching, and gestured for him to go inside. Wesley walked into the tiny closet, and I followed, shutting the door stealthily behind us.
"Something tells me this isn't about The Scarlet Letter," he said, and even in the dark I knew he was grinning.
"Be quiet."
This time he met me halfway. His hands tangled in my hair and mine clawed at his forearms. We kissed violently, and my back slammed against the wall. I heard a mop-or maybe a broom-topple over, but my brain barely registered the sound as one of Wesley's hands moved to my hip, holding me closer to him. He was so much taller than me that I had to tilt my head back almost all the way to meet his kiss. His lips pressed hard against mine, and I let my hands explore his biceps.
The smell of his cologne, rather than the lonely, stale air of the closet, filled my senses.
We wrestled in the darkness for a while before I felt his hand insistently lifting the hem of my T-shirt. With a gasp, I pulled away from the kiss and grabbed his wrist. "No… not now."
"Then when?" Wesley asked in my ear, still pinning me to the ~ Kody Keplinger

What about Andrews? He doing any better? She spotted him near the entrance of the hangar, talking to one of the Afghan locals who worked as a janitor. The guys rarely talked to her ~ Kaylea Cross

I feel that directors at times are like the janitors on the set. I am the secretary, I am the organizer, I am the maid, and I ask if they have eaten or rested. The best things are always out of your control. It's those moments that surpass the imagination that are thrilling. ~ Jane Campion

So I think all comedians are earning their wings into heaven. We're all going to heaven, but everybody's not going to get their wings. Some people are just going to be regular angels. Doing cleanup, janitor work. In heaven, I'm going to sit on the couch with Oprah. ~ Tracy Morgan

Treat everyone on the organization with respect and dignity whether it be the janitor or the president. ~ Richard Moran

It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid ... These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school. ~ Newt Gingrich

I've been a DJ, janitor, ditch digger, waitress, computer instructor, programmer, mechanic, web developer, clerk, manager, marketing director, tour guide and dorm manager, among other things. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

If Cloverleaf McCarty loses his shamrock singlet one more time, he's fired," Lucille said, slicing one finger against her long, serpentine neck for effect. A janitor walking past her office window saw the move, flinched, and looked down before there was a chance that he and "The Boss Lady" could make eye contact. ~ Holly Tierney-Bedord

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective. ~ Maya Angelou

Death is the opposite of lonely, and lonely is the only thing the janitor owns. It is the only thing that's hers. And that makes loneliness beautiful, out here among the cold and bright beginnings. ~ Amber Sparks

If they had told me I was the janitor and would have to mop up and clean the toilets after the show in order to play, I probably would have done it. ~ Bruce Springsteen

The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor, but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother, the kid, who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on unintimidated is enormous, and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but morally speaking the least repellant person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction, because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction, and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything, upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade in arms than anyone else on earth. ~ Philip Roth

Well, I guess that early 12 string. The first Martin I bought. I bought it around 1957 with money I earned as a janitor assistant. I bought brand new. I still have that. ~ Roger McGuinn

Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering. ~ Steve Jobs

I've been very lucky in my employment over the years. You would think that the worst job I've ever had was as janitor, but it really wasn't, because I was a janitor at my dad's office building when I was younger. ~ Chris Carmack

And I wrote a story for private circulation, "Miss Lewis & the Giant Turd," about a painful bowel movement that began in class, as she was drilling us on prepositions. Suddenly she emitted a low scraping sound like a box of rocks being dragged across concrete--like a glacier moving!--and she let out an AIIIIEEEEEEE and bent over double and hobbled to the girls' room, where she fell to the floor and cried pitifully for the janitor, who rushed in with a plunger and tried to extract the fecal mass from her, but it was too immense, and then the fire department arrived and laid her over the sink and attached a suction pump, two men on either side of her skinny butt, working a lever, and they managed to suction the poop out of her, and when they were done, she weighed forty-five pounds. And she couldn't teach anymore, she just sat on her front step waving to passing cars.

This title passed from pupil to pupil, two grimy sheets of paper folded to pocket size.... The story found its way to Laura, Miss Lewis's pet, who handed it over to her, and she read it, thin-lipped, and tore it into tiny pieces and dropped them into the wastebacket. "This is so childish it doesn't bear talking about," she said. "It is beneath contempt. ~ Garrison Keillor

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

There exist the wealth and the working class. At Vassar I learned the two are not mutually exclusive. No matter how rich I might become, I will always be the daughter of a janitor. I will always look the woman who empties my garbage in the face. I will always say thank you to the man who serves me lunch. I am one of them, and I do not want to Get Out unless they can come too. ~ Frances Varian

God is the great janitor of the universe. Why things don't work is that we have a janitor in charge, and we keep looking for the landlord. ~ Richard Kadrey

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I'm a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you're going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. ~ Rand Paul

I peed on the floor to get hired. Now I'm the janitor. ~ Jarod Kintz

Brutality is boring. Over and over, hell night after hell night, the same old dumb, tedious, bestial routine: making men crawl; making men groan, hanging men from the bars; shoving men; slapping men; freezing men in the showers; running men into walls; displaying shackled fathers to their sons and sons to their fathers. And if it turned out that you'd been given the wrong man, when you were done making his life unforgettably small and nasty, you allowed him to be your janitor and pick up the other prisoners' trash.
There was always another prisoner, and another. Faceless men under hoods: you stripped them of their clothes, you stripped them of their pride. There wasn't much more you could take away from them, but people are inventive: one night some soldiers took a razor to one of Saddam's former general in Tier 1A and shaved off his eyebrows. He was an old man. "He looked like a grandfather and seemed like a nice guy," Sabrina Harman said, and she had tried to console him, telling him he looked younger and slipping him a few cigarettes. Then she had to make him stand at attention facing a boom box blasting the rapper Eminem, singing about raping his mother, or committing arson, or sneering at suicides, something like that⁠ - these were some of the best-selling songs in American history.
"Eminem is pretty much torture all in himself, and if one person's getting tortured, everybody is, because that music's horrible," Harman said. The general maintained his bearing a ~ Philip Gourevitch

The homosexuals fist fuck in the steam room
while the janitor isn't looking. He calls
and never speaks but you can hear Oahu rain.
Press your ear against the glass and heart another
life
not happening, the soundless blur of snow
on the plasma screen. ~ Eric Gamalinda

A man's home is his castle, and his wife is the janitor ~ Lucille Kallen

I've never been a fan of personality-conflict burgers and identity-crisis omelets with patchouli oil. I function very well on a diet that consists of Chicken Catastrophe and Eggs Overwhelming and a tall, cool Janitor-in-a-Drum. I like to walk out of a restaurant with enough gas to open a Mobil station. ~ Tom Waits

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard. ~ Ben Affleck

With the help of the janitor he screwed on to the side of the desk a pencil sharpener - that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

No one pays attention to the janitor. ~ C.A. Higgins

I lived through this, I needed to find a new fuckin' job. Janitor. Used car salesman. Guinea pig trainer. ~ Jessica Gadziala

In my early teens, I was a janitor. In high school, I got up early to deliver to accounts that required early service. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

You're not going to try to guess my name?" She smiled.
"I just realized that you weren't my janitor today. What do you have? ~ Whitney Gracia Williams