Kitchen Sinks Quotes

You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I'm given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one's own vision. ~ Kiki Smith

Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster. ~ Jimmy Buffett

Suddenly the air got colder, and a black cloud appeared - the black cloud that you saw before, since Snodrog was, at bottom, a cheapskate. Only this time the cloud looked like an overdone hamburger, and it hovered low over the Shuffly's head. Then Snodrog's devious machine spread under the Shuffly's unsuspecting feet a glistening patina of Generalizations, and the immobilized hulk slid the hill into the valley below, ricocheting off trees with a sound like wet sponges being slapped on kitchen sinks. ~ John Bellairs

The most wasteful "brain drain" in America today is the drain in the kitchen sink. ~ Elizabeth Gould Davis

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth. ~ John Guare

When you've got a mountain to climb you may as well throw everything into the kitchen sink. ~ David Pleat

We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Margaret Thatcher has one great advantage - she is a daughter of the people and looks trim, as the daughter of the people desire to be. Shirley Williams has such an advantage over her because she's a member of the upper-middle class and can achieve the kitchen-sink revolutionary look that one cannot get unless one has been to a really good school. ~ Rebecca West

But I can say just as surely that this minute, in a northern-California valley, I can taste-smell-hear-see and feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace. They were uneven in both thickness and color, probably made by a new apprentice in the hotel kitchen, and almost surely they smelled faintly of either chicken or fish, for that was always the case there. They were a little too salty, to encourage me to drink. They were ineffable. I am still nourished by them. That is probably why I can be so firm about not eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them. ~ Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary. ~ Roberto Bolano

Do we have a hand mirror?' I asked from the kitchen doorway.
'Never use one,' said Lester, examining the date on a carton of sour cream.
'Naturally, you're a male. What you see is what you've got,' I said resentfully.
'Huh?' said Lester. ~ Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

One did not know when Begum Jaan's life began - whether it was when she committed the mistake of being born or when she came to the Nawab's house as his bride, climbed the four-poster bed and started counting her days. Or was it when she watched through the drawing room door the increasing number of firm-calved, supple- waisted boys and delicacies begin to come for them from the kitchen! Begum Jaan would have glimpses of them in their perfumed, flimsy shirts and feel as though she was being raked over burning embers! ~ Ismat Chugtai

In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen. ~ Warren Buffett

The day he brought back those guys that raped me I think I lost my mind. I screamed for him over and over as they had their way with me. They left me bloody and I felt half-dead. After a few hours I hauled myself up to get cleaned up and he was in the kitchen still in his uniform, fuckin' eating a snack like nothing had happened. He started in on me. Calling me a faggot and telling me he wanted me out of his house immediately. He tried to fight me but I could hardly defend myself. He was beating the shit out of me when he pulled his service weapon." God took another shaky breath. "Leo, ~ A.E. Via

A good home must be made, not bought. In the end, it's not track lighting or a sun room that brings light into a kitchen. ~ Joyce Maynard

Sweetheart, the sound of a voice, sinks deeper than the most meaningful of texts. ~ Nitya Prakash

There is, in the Army, a little known but very important activity appropriately called Fatigue. Fatigue, in the Army, is the very necessary cleaning and repairing of the aftermath of living. Any man who has ever owned a gun has known Fatigue, when, after fifteen minutes in the woods and perhaps three shots at an elusive squirrel, he has gone home to spend three-quarters of an hour cleaning up his piece so that it will be ready next time he goes to the woods. Any woman who has ever cooked a luscious meal and ladled it out in plates upon the table has known Fatigue, when, after the glorious meal is eaten, she repairs to the kitchen to wash the congealed gravy from the plates and the slick grease from the cooking pots so they will be ready to be used this evening, dirtied, and so washed again. It is the knowledge of the unendingness and of the repetitious uselessness, the do it up so it can be done again, that makes Fatigue fatigue. ~ James Jones

A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances and recoils, is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I see a light in the kitchen. Let us not deprive Molly any longer of the chance to deplore how thin you are. ~ J.K. Rowling

My homies in Gadsden aren't as exposed as I am culturally, which is awesome - that's why I love going home. I'm in the kitchen with people who don't know anything but the simple life, what's important to them, and what's dope. ~ Yelawolf

Mom has reorganized the kitchen so that the one room that was everyone's room is foreign to me. My visits are punctuated with me whipping around, angrily demanding, "Where are the forks, WHY DID YOU MOVE THE FORKS?" and she has to calmly open the drawer on the other side of the kitchen as if she moved it just to ruin my life. I just found out where she puts the bowls and their new location feels like such a personal attack that I can barely talk about it without raising my blood pressure. ~ Scaachi Koul

You realize if you stand in my kitchen, I'm gonna put you to work, right?" Bunny asked after a minute.
"I'm at your service," he said.
She laughed. "My favorite words ever. ~ Laura Kaye

My girlfriend works at Hooters. In the kitchen. ~ Mitch Hedberg

If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

What is a woman's power then?" she asked.
"I don't think we know."
"When has a woman power because she's a woman? With her children, I suppose. For a while ... "
"In her house, maybe."
She looked around the kitchen. "But the doors are shut," she said, "the doors are locked."
"Because you're valuable."
"Oh yes. We're precious. So long as we're powerless. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle ... ~ Tennessee Williams

He stood in my quaint kitchen, looking somewhere between intrigued and mildly bored, the picture of sophisticated elegance in his obscenely expensive suit. Cufflinks reflected the light while his eyes captured it. Immortal. Ageless. Infinite. So toxic, he should come with a danger-of-death warning sign. ~ Pippa DaCosta

I'm not a trained academic. Neither am I a veteran social worker. I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table. ~ Shukla Bose

Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table. ~ Joe Hill

I enjoyed the side bars with fun facts and notable sources for where to get more help. Merrin's such a fun writer; I'd love to see her invite kids into her kitchen for cooking classes. She'd be perfect in the classroom and would entice children to try new foods. It's the adults that might need fooling. ~ Cindy Gay

Over the years I've learned that a surefooted and confident mapmaker does not a swift traveler make. I stumble and fall, and I constantly find myself needing to change course. And even though I'm trying to follow a map that I've drawn, there are many times when frustration and self-doubt take over, and I wad up that map and shove it into the junk drawer in my kitchen. It's not an easy journey from excruciating to exquisite, but for me it's been worth every step. ~ Brene Brown

But once, a cardinal alighted on the kitchen windowsill and he found himself squinting long after it had flown away again, trying hard to hold on to its beauty. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

I'd seen it happen, how hard it was to get out. Every year, one or two kids would visit from college for a long October weekend and simply never leave. They came home, cocooned themselves in the familiar radius of the town limits, and never broke free again. Years later, you'd see them working in the kitchen at the pizza place, or sitting at the bar in the East Bank Tavern. Shoulders hunched, jaw set, skin slack. And in the waning light of their eyes, the barest sensation that once upon a time, they been somewhere else ... or maybe it was only a dream. ~ Kat Rosenfield

Lilith returned to her cooking. She didn't let herself think about anything but preparing the food, one ingredient at a time, a pinch of this into a bowl of that, a vial of this into a jug of that, and so it went, while the sweat ran off her in rivulets and her hair and dress clung to her, and the kitchen hummed with the droning of flies. ~ Georgina Anne Taylor

I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will be able to scare me ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from water out there and explode the silence with its call. ~ Ingmar Bergman

One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual dinner-hour, to banquet upon a small joint of mutton - a pound and a half of the worst end of the neck - when Charlotte being called out of the way, there ensued a brief interval of time, which Noah Claypole, being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a worthier purpose than aggravating and tantalising young Oliver Twist. Intent upon this innocent amusement, Noah put his feet on the table-cloth; and pulled Oliver's hair; and twitched his ears; and expressed his opinion that he was a 'sneak'; and furthermore announced his intention of coming to see him hanged, whenever that desirable event should take place; and entered upon various topics of petty annoyance, like a malicious and ill-conditioned charity-boy as he was. But, ~ Charles Dickens

W-w-what?" I stepped aside or was forced aside as he entered my apartment, carrying something wrapped in tinfoil, a carton of eggs - huh? - and a tiny frying pan. "Cam what are you doing? It's eight in the morning."
"Thanks for the update on the time." he headed straight for my kitchen. "It's one thing I've never been able to master: the telling of time. ~ J. Lynn

Once you have tasted the nectar of Silence, then whether your eyes are open or closed does not matter. Once you have tasted the nectar of that dimension, then it does not matter whether you are sitting in a room or working in an office or the kitchen or talking to people. The quality of aloneness, the quality of motionlessness, the quality of thoughtfreeness does not get affected by physical or verbal movement. ~ Vimala Thakar

The main reason why serious historical studies of the Rosicrucian manifestos and their influence have hitherto been on the whole lacking is no doubt because the whole subject has been bedevilled by enthusiasts for secret societies. There is a vast literature on Rosicrucianism which assumes the existence of a secret society, founded by Christian Rosencreutz, and having a continuous existence up to modern times. In the vague and inaccurate world of so-called 'occultist' writing this assumption has produced a kind of literature which deservedly sinks below the notice of the serious historian. And when, as if often the case, the misty discussion of 'Rosicrucians' and their history becomes involved with the masonic myths, the enquirer feels that he is sinking helplessly into a bottomless bog. ~ Frances A. Yates

I was afraid of other people's houses. After school sometimes a friend might talk me into going to his house or apartment to do our homework together. It was a shock, the way people lived, other people, those who weren't me. I didn't know how to respond, the clinging intimacy of it, kitchen slop, pan handles jutting from the sink. Did I want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? Just walking past a bathroom, a woman's stocking draped over the towel rack, pill bottles on the windowsill, some open, some capsized, a child's slipper in the bathtub. It made me want to run and hide, partly from my own fastidiousness. The bedrooms with unmade beds, somebody's socks on the floor, the old woman in nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life gathered up in a chair by the bed, hunched frame and muttering face. Who are these people, minute to minute and year after year? It made me want to go home and stay there. ~ Don DeLillo

Even the kinds of ingredients you can find in your own kitchen can be used to make bombs. So the problem is with the people and not with the tools. ~ Michael Chertoff

I went into the bends. I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy, old boy, your little girl might want you to take her to the zoo. Ice cream bars, chimpanzees, tigers, green and red birds, and the sun coming down on top of her head, the sun coming down and crawling into the hairs of your arms, easy, old boy. ~ Charles Bukowski

I was bored at school and bored in a lot of the kitchens. It seemed like all I was doing was putting things into saute pans. ~ Homaro Cantu

Banish (the onion) from the kitchen and the pleasure flies with it. Its presence lends color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest delicacy to hopeless insipidity, and dinner to despair. ~ Elizabeth Robins Pennell

The first morning I really sat and watched him it was a Tuesday. I know that because Tuesday is trash day for our neighborhood. Unlike me, he leaves gathering up his trash for the morning of pickup instead of doing it the night before. My alarm went off at 6 AM and I went in to start the coffee maker, and as I went about selecting a bit of fruit from the bowl on my kitchen table I looked out the window. It was just a casual glance, and the human eye is attracted to movement. ~ Benjamin R. Smith

My recipe for dealing with anger and frustration: set the kitchen timer for twenty minutes, cry, rant, and rave, and at the sound of the bell, simmer down and go about business as usual. ~ Phyllis Diller

A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under adversity. A strong and deep mind has two highest tides - when the moon is at the full, and when there is no moon. ~ David Hare