Packing Up Quotes

Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died. ~ E.B. White

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. ~ Khaled Hosseini

In chemistry class I write Peter a note
You were right about Josh.
I tap him on the back and slip the note in his hand. When he reads it, he sits up straight and immediately scrawls something back.
Be more specific.
He kissed me.
When Peter stiffens, I am ashamed to say that I feel a little bit vindicated. I wait for him to write back, but he doesn't. As soon as the bell rings, he turns around and says, "What the hell? How did that even happen?"
"He came over to help us trim the tree."
"And then what? He kissed you in front of Kitty?"
"No! It was just the two of us at the house."
Peter looks really irritated, and I'm starting to regret mentioning it. "What the hell is he thinking, kissing my girlfriend? It's fucking ridiculous. I'm gonna say something to him."
"Wait, what? No!"
"I have to, Lara Jean. He can't just get away with it."
I stand up and start packing up my bag. "You'd better not say anything to him, Peter. I mean it."
Peter watches me silently. And then he asks, "Did you kiss him back?"
"What does it matter?"
He looks taken aback. "Are you mad at me for something?"
"No," I say. "But I will be if you say anything to Josh."
"Fine," he says.
"Fine," I say back. ~ Jenny Han

You have to leave town to claim your life, to birth yourself, to take possession of the world. If you do not leave town, sooner or later, ten minutes from now, if not ten years hence, you wake to find you were never alive, that your town exists against a nothing background. You have to leave your town before you can claim it - this is something my father and his friends came to realize in the fifties, when it seemed the entire borough was packing up and moving off. Dead or out of town. Dead or out. Out or dead of town. Dead town out of. And of course, years later, when they did try to come back, when they stood on the corner and closed their eyes, they realized the old town was gone, had died while they were off living their lives. ~ Rich Cohen

I was still Quinn-kiss-tipsy enough to feel no mortification when I asked, "If you could have magic sperm, what kind of creatures would you want to create?"

His smile widened; he shook his head looking around at the people packing up, "I don't know how much good magic sperm would do me without a snake haired girl to put it in."

Quinn reached for his own water and took a gulp but he choked when I said, "You could use me!"

He abruptly set his drink down, sat back on his heels, and picked up a napkin; his eyes were wide as he coughed. ~ Penny Reid

I came very close to quitting my job for the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign. I seriously considered packing up my office and heading home to Colorado. ~ Mary Cheney

Someday I'm going to get to live my happily ever after. No more packing up and driving away from the man that I love. Everyone has their time. I will find mine. ~ Jewel E. Ann

Incredibly, oil and gas companies don't have to pay certain environmental costs that amount to small change to them, while an offshore wind project start-up is faced with fees that could mean the difference between building a wind farm and packing up and going home. ~ Chellie Pingree

Prayer and staying positive is certainly a good start toward a happier a life, but it is not enough. The way out of Egypt requires packing up, moving on and wandering around until you find Canaan. ~ Shannon L. Alder

'Five, Six, Seven, Nate!' opens on my 13-year-old protagonist packing up a duffel bag and bidding his Midwestern town goodbye, heading off to start rehearsals for his New York City debut in 'E.T.: The Musical.' ~ Tim Federle

There is always a sadness about packing. I guess you wonder if where you're going is as good as where you've been. ~ Richard Proenneke

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know it's not going to."
I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.
"I don't know," he says. "Something. Anything. ~ Joan Didion

Fine. You win. I quit. You two deal with this. I'm going home. Packing up all my personal items, and when you, Caleb, end up dead because the coach has your jockstrap or something else I didn't steal but someone else did, don't call me. I'm done and I'm going to hide in a bunker until all of this is over with." – Nick
"I hate you, Nick." – Caleb
"Feels mutual, Demon." – Nick ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin's belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier 'one day' that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars. ~ Stephen M. Irwin

I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people's lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others' voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines. ~ Nicholson Baker

Also, there are seats in the diner that always fall off the table. If you have a scene where you're packing up at the end of the day and putting them on the table, they just slide off. ~ Dannii Minogue

There's no pain in packing up a life you don't remember. ~ Dani Atkins

I didn't have to go. I could fade into the crowd, be pushed along through the tunnel, into the city. I could roll along in my bubble ball.
I was used to moving, used to packing up and following along like a robot, but I was tired of it. I wanted to stop moving and I wanted to be somewhere and stay somewhere and I wanted my family. ~ Sharon Creech

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed talking about getting out, Packing up our bags, maybe heading south. I'm thirty-five, we got a boy of our own now. Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said, Son, take a good look around, This is your hometown. ~ Bruce Springsteen

I'm used to packing up and leaving, to condensing myself into a digestible version because people don't have much time to get to know me. ~ Halsey

It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packing-crate slats - an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She'd decided in favor of that, all right. ~ Richard Yates

I have only a few really enviable skills, but packing - condensing just the right amount of stuff into a single bag, whether the trip is for a weekend or, as in this case, seven weeks - is one of them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody;
I read because the words that build the story become mine, to build my life;
I read not for happy endings but for new beginnings; I'm just beginning myself, and I wouldn't mind a map;
I read because I have friends who don't, and young though they are, they're beginning to run out of material;
I read because every journey begins at the library, and it's time for me to start packing;
I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready. ~ Richard Peck

On game day, I'm as nervous as a pig in a packing plant. ~ Darrell Royal

On Packing My Own Lunch
You have to pack a sandwich. It can't just be cookies and bullshit ... No, I said if you packed it yourself, you could pack it how you want it, not pack it like a moron. ~ Justin Halpern

For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects. ~ Adam Sisman

I had a group of Hispanic Americans come into my office in 1976 who worked in a Denver packing plant. They had just been fired by their employer who turned around and hired illegal aliens for a lot less money. That had a big impact on me. ~ Richard Lamm

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil. ~ Sinclair Lewis

I've seen it too many times in Hollywood. Talking about a relationship in public can jinx it. And if you have your picture taken together, you might as well start packing your bags. ~ Gina Gershon

It took me a while to realize--but thankfully realized before it was too late--that a fancy house, car, and cable television don't bring much happiness if you're dead. If you're at the weight that I was--or close to it--and you put your love of food and laziness ahead of the love of your family, you're being selfish. Nothing else you've ever done will matter if your family is left alone with that fancy house, car, and cable television when you're gone. It's one thing to leave this world unexpectedly in some tragic accident, but it's stupid and selfish when you're packing your bags every time you sit at the dinner table. ~ Shawn Weeks

We don't have a farm-to-table food safety system. I keep saying this. It came as a big surprise to the FDA that tomatoes were being grown in the United States, sent to Mexico for packing, and then sent back. I mean, they had no idea that our food chain worked like this. ~ Marion Nestle

Never insult seven men when all your packing is a six-shooter. ~ Zane Grey

His own eyes fluttered when he got a good feel of what Michaels was packing in those sexy jeans. A cock just as thick and long as his own. Fuck. ~ A.E. Via

I like to think of Doritos as emotional packing material to safeguard the feelings I've swallowed. ~ Dana Gould

In 1969 my parents, my sister, my brother Jin-ming, and I were expelled from Chengdu one after another, and sent to distant parts of the Sichuan wilderness. We were among millions of urban dwellers to be exiled to the countryside.

In this way, young people would not be roaming the cities with nothing to do, creating trouble out of sheer boredom, and adults like my parents would have a 'future." They were part of the old administration which had been replaced by Mao's Revolutionary Committees, and packing them off to the sticks to do hard labor was a convenient solution.

According to Mao's rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside 'to be reformed." Mao advocated 'thought reform through labor' for everyone, but never explained the relationship between the two. Of course, no one asked for clarification. Merely to contemplate such a question was tantamount to treason. In reality, everyone in China knew that hard labor, particularly in the countryside, was always punishment. It was noticeable that none of Mao's henchmen, the members of the newly established Revolutionary Committees, army officers and very few of their children had to do it.

The first of us to be expelled was my father. Just after New Year 1969 he was sent to Miyi County in the region of Xichang, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, an area so remote that it is China's satellite launch base today. It lies about 300 miles from Chengdu, four days' journey by truck, as there was no ~ Jung Chang

Leaving?" she squeaked, bemused, as Max opened her wardrobe. "You're abducting me?"
"Eloping. Eloping involves hurried packing. Abducting involves masked men and a burlap sack. ~ Kate Noble

Just imagine -- this night week I'll be in Avonlea -- delightful thought!" said Anne, bending over the box in which she was packing Mrs. Rachel Lynde's quilts. "But just imagine -- this night week I'll be gone forever from Patty's Place -- horrible thought! ~ L.M. Montgomery

I hate traveling with amateurs. ~ Rachel Caine

I'm obsessed with packing in as much work as possible during each day, simply because there is only so much time you have in a lifetime. There is nothing better than to go home at night and know that you've done everything that you could do to accomplish your work ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

But when it comes down to actually packing and leaving, I can't bring myself to do it. Can you see what I mean?If the town's really going to die, then the urge to stay on and see the town to its end wins out. ~ Haruki Murakami

Dark City Blue is a freight train of a thriller crashing through some madhouse city night while a bomb's ticking down to zero. It's the cage fighting equivalent of a police procedural: violent, gaudy, and packing heat. ~ Trent Jamieson

There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius. ~ Hannah Arendt

When you get back from a trip, make a note of what you didn't wear. This will avoid packing it unnecessarily next time. ~ Robert Powell

He began rubbing my foot again. We'll fly out at four on Friday. Don't bother packing, I want you naked as much as possible next weekend. ~ Adriane Leigh

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities. ~ Robert Duvall

Then it dawned on Kramer. The cops weren't all that much different from the assistant D.A.s. It was the muck factor. The cops got tired of packing blacks and Latins off to jail all day, too. It was even worse for them, because they had to dive deeper into the muck to do it. The only thing that made it constructive was the idea that they were doing it for somebody - for the decent people. So they opened their eyes, and now they were attuned to all the good people with colored skin ... who rose to the top ... during all this relentless stirring of the muck ... You couldn't exactly call it enlightenment, thought Kramer, but it was a fucking start. ~ Tom Wolfe

Smokers always waxed poetic about the ritual of it, how a large part of the satisfaction was packing the box and pulling the foil wrapper and plucking an aromatic stick. They claimed they loved the lighting, the ashing, the feeling of being able to hold something between their fingers. That was all well and good, but there was nothing quite like actually smoking it: Leigh loved inhaling. To pull with your lips on that filter and feel the smoke drift across your tongue, down your throat, and directly into your lungs was to be transported momentarily to nirvana. She remembered- every day- how it felt after the first inhale, just as the nicotine was hitting her bloodstream. A few seconds of both tranquility and alertness, together, in exactly the right amounts. Then the slow exhale- forceful enough so that the smoke didn't merely seep from your mouth but not so energetic that it disrupted the moment- would complete the blissful experience. ~ Lauren Weisberger

Most of her feelings she deemed insubstantial and she sent them packing with barely a nod of recognition. But her feelings for her daughter she recognized as inevitable, irresistable, and she reveled in them. ~ Cathleen Schine

If woman wants to have kids and work a little less she has a big disadvantage compared to a male colleague who has a stay-at-home wife packing his suitcases. ~ Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

In Oklahoma, the CEO of the company that makes McDonald's apple pies told me that she had trouble finding enough Americans to handle modern factory jobs-during a recession. The days of rolling out dough and packing pies in a box were over. She needed people who could read, solve problems and communicate what had happened on their shift, and there weren't enough of them coming out of Oklahoma's high schools and community colleges. ~ Amanda Ripley

I realized early on, maybe better than some of my competitors did, that a textile business can run only if you have scale. I decided to horizontally and vertically integrate, adding everything from spinning, dyeing, weaving, and stitching to processing and packing. ~ Mian Muhammad Mansha

I lived by a bay for a while, and I shucked oysters. Some packing things. You know, just whatever odd job you can find whenever you're moving around. I never really cared much for the franchise kind of work, so I'd try to find things that I considered to be a little more honorable. ~ Frank Fairfield

If I was in Heaven, I would be on a throne and its King would be packing. ~ Lionel Suggs

The girl next door was meowing. What in the world was my neighbor packing to make that happen? ~ Alice Clayton

Packing the basket was not quite such pleasant work as unpacking the basket. It never is. ~ Kenneth Grahame

Jack Hogenbaum, a.k.a. "Leo D. Nardo, Your Titanic Lover," was the star of Ladies' Nights at the club. He'd been packing them in since the movie. He looked like Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, sort of. At least his brown hair hung down over his forehead on the left side, he had soulful eyes, and when he danced, he could do stuff with a life preserver you never dreamed. ~ Elaine Viets

Packing is my pet hate. ~ Seal

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays ... , more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more ... Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Scarlett, I'm a bad influence on you and if you have any sense you will send me packing - if you can. I'm very hard to get rid of. But I'm bad for you. ~ Margaret Mitchell

My Father Comes Home From Work"



My father comes home from work

sweating through layers of bleached cotton t-shirts

sweating through his wool plaid shirt.


He kisses my mother

starching our school dresses

at the ironing board,


swings his metal lunchbox

onto the formica kitchen table

rattling the remnants

of the lunch she packed

that morning before daylight:


crumbs of baloney sandwiches,

empty metal thermos of coffee,

cores of hard red apples

that fueled his body through

the packing and unpacking of sides

of beef into the walk-in refrigerators

at James Allen and Sons Meat Packers.


He is twenty-six.

Duty propels him each day

through the dark to Butcher Town

where steers walk streets

from pen to slaughterhouse.


He whispers Jesus Christ

to no one in particular.

We hear him-- me,

my sister Linda, my baby brother Willy,

and Mercedes la cubana's daughter

who my mother babysits.

When he comes home

we have to be quiet.


He comes into the dark living room.

Dick Clark's American Bandstand

lights my father's face

white and unlined

like a movie star's.
Barbara Brinson Curiel

Larry had brought me blue jeans, a red polo shirt, jogging socks, my white Nikes, an extra cross from my suitcase, the silver knives, the Firestar complete with inner pants holster, and the Browning and its shoulder holster. He'd forgotten a bra, but hey, except for that it was perfect. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

A werewolf tossed me against a giant packing crate while I was trying to rescue a frightened young girl who'd been kidnapped by an evil witch and a drug lord. ~ Patricia Briggs

I killed four flies while waiting. Damn, death was everywhere. Man, bird, beast, reptile, rodent, insect, fish didn't have a chance. The fix was in. I didn't know what to do about it. I got depressed. You know, I see a boy at the supermarket, he's packing my groceries, then I see him sticking himself into his own grave along with the toilet paper, the beer and the chicken breasts. ~ Charles Bukowski

I've worked everywhere. I worked in a warehouse packing surf supplies, a restaurant washing dishes, in retail, and I was a 'sandwich artist' at Subway. ~ Margot Robbie

He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about. ~ Jon McGregor

He's coming for you, is all she says. This is how he always does it. He's coming for you, Kat, and I don't know how to save you. I'm packing Bibles and I'm burning papers, but they know you have been reading and writing, and they are changing the law ahead of me. I can't make sure you obey the law because they are changing it faster than we can obey. ~ Philippa Gregory

With Eva, I had given no though to the world of adulthood that awaited us. But she had crossed some secret threshold while I was facing the other way, absorbed still by the childish fantasies she had cultivated for us: our talk of traveling the world together; of having a salon in Paris or on the Riviera, where all the famous writers and artists were; of becoming artists ourselves, marrying exotic European strangers and always living close to one another; of how, when our husbands died, we would move together into a great crumbling mansion and be visited by amazing people from around the world. Now, I saw so clearly that all of that had been a silly game. She had a lover, presumably, while I did not even truly know what this vague and glamorous term entailed. She had become a woman, with no thought to warn me that I should be packing away my own childhood, dismantling it piece by piece like a rotten tree house, and preparing myself for the new world. ~ Emily Bitto

Of course, we should all be aware of what we're packing in our carry-on luggage - anything that might be considered dangerous could be confiscated at a security checkpoint. ~ David Neeleman