Salvaged Quotes

Each year before the first rain after the harvest in Spring, I would look at the dry peach tree that I know so well at our backyard and anticipating that in summer it will be covered in an overgrown hedge unless my father who was a committed gardner of note take a weekend off from Jo'burg during the pruning season to prune it. Even now, I still remember with crystal clarity my childhood mood - warm days in Schoonoord with rich nostalgia of green scenery and flowers flowering everywhere.

One evening I was sitting at the veranda of our firehut looking at the orange tree between the plat (flat - roofed) house and the big L - shaped house - the tree served as a shelter from the sun for the drinking water pot next to the plat house - suddenly the weather changed, the wind howled, the tree swayed, the loose corrugated iron sheets on roof of he house clattered and clanged, the open windows shuts with a bang and the sky made night a day, and I was overwhelmed with that feeling of childhood joy at the approaching rain. All of a sudden, the deafening of steady pouring rain. The raging storm beat the orange tree leaves while I sat there remembering that where the orange tree stood used to be our first house, a small triangular shaped mokhukhu ((tin house) made of red painted corrugated iron sheets salvaged from demolishing site in Witbank, also remembering that my aunt's mokhukhu was also made of the same type and colour of corrugated iron sheets. The ashen ground drunk m ~ Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala

We were terrified to stop, stop anything, and admit that something was wrong. Activity, frenzied activity, seemed to be the thing we all felt we needed. Only Dad slowed down, and that wasn't until he was trapped in a hospital getting intravenous antibiotics. Everything would be all right, everything would be possible, anything could be salvaged or averted, as long as we all kept running around. ~ Will Schwalbe

Could there, I wanted to know, be any dignity in such a death? Can anything be salvaged of what once was, to bring a sense of himself to aman near his final hour, when he has been through so much? ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

In modern praxis lost positions are salvaged most often when the play is highly complicated with many sharp dynamic variations to be calculated. ~ Leonid Shamkovich

Presumably, the bells of the Church of the Ascension had been reclaimed by the Bolsheviks for the manufacture of artillery, thus returning them to the realm from whence they came. Though for all the Count knew, the cannons that had been salvaged from Napoleon's retreat to make the Ascension's bells had been forged by the French from the bells at La Rochelle; which in turn had been forged from British blunderbusses seized in the Thirty Years War. From bells to cannons and back again, from now until the end of time. ~ Amor Towles

We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

During normal cell metabolism, RNA is constantly being made and broken down. The purine and pyrimidine residues are reused by several salvage pathways to make more genetic material. Purine is salvaged in the form of the corresponding nucleotide, whereas pyrimidine is salvaged as the nucleoside. ~ Richard J. Roberts

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear.
I have never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail. The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.
They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load. ~ Seamus Heaney

I'm not going to be part of this," said Leo. He opened his hand and dropped the flowers. Fragrant, obedient, they beheaded themselves on Saina's salvaged-wood floors. ~ Jade Chang

Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted. ~ Anzia Yezierska

We're not in Khlong Prem Prison yet. So let's assume we're winning.
But inwardly, Anderson wonders. There are too many variables in play, and it makes him nervous. He remembers a time in Missouri when the Grahamites rioted. There had been tension, some small speeches, and then it had simply erupted in field burning. No one had seen the violence coming. Not a single intelligence officer had anticipated the cauldron boiling beneath the surface.
Anderson had ended up perched atop a grain silo, choking on the smoke of HiGro fields going up in sheets of flame, firing steadily at rioters on the ground with a spring rifle he'd salvaged from a slow-moving security guard, and all the while he had wondered how everyone had missed the signs. They lost the facility because of that blindness. And now it is the same. A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

For years I drove a big Ford F250 pickup. That was my ride because two-thirds of my work was wood work, and I'm always driving up to Northern California, where I harvest salvaged trees. ~ Nick Offerman

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him from his depression. Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact. ~ Alice Miller

I have not known of too many people who found Christ on their deathbeds. When we come to Christ in our youth, a life is saved. When we come in old age, a soul is salvaged and life eternal is assured; but the opportunity to live a life for Christ has been lost. ~ Billy Graham

It was a battle all day with our M&M's Camry. I don't know why, we just didn't have what we needed. We never seemed to have the ticket we needed today. We got better all day, which was a positive and salvaged something out of nothing
so all things considering it was okay. It's so late in the year, you're just running laps now and getting what you can get and seeing if you can win next weekend at Homestead to finish the year. ~ Kyle Busch

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal. ~ Conrad Black

Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgement on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which also amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom - the freedom to die in one's own way and in one's own time - has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities. ~ Al Alvarez

For three thousand years it had been the concent's policy to accept any and all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw one away. On one and only one occasion, this had turned out to be a wise policy: the millennial Apert of 3000, when 27,500 pilgrims had swarmed in through the gates to enjoy a square meal and see the End of the World. We had folding chairs made of bamboo, machined aluminum, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, hand-carved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal, and plaited grass. Tabletops could be made of old-growth lumber, particle board, extruded titanium, recycled paper, plate glass, rattan, or substances on whose true nature I did not wish to speculate. Their lengths ranged from two to twenty-four feet and their weights from that of a dried flower to that of a buffalo. ~ Neal Stephenson

Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, 'Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.' ~ Martin Amis

The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

Clearly if something is to be salvaged of the 'fight for true equality', the meaning of feminism must be clear. It must also recognize the way in which it has been colonized not only by warmongers, but also by consumerism and contemporary ideologies of work. ~ Nina Power

It's a bit burned," my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something - a much-loved pet perhaps - salvaged from a tragic house fire. "But I think I scraped off most of the burned part," she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.
Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad. ~ Bill Bryson

He had wanted marriage, children, and an upstanding life. He still had the children, thank God, but a man who had salvaged his greatest treasures from the smoldering ruins of his home remained in the middle of smoldering ruins. ~ Sherry Thomas

People say love is weak, but they're wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things - patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And every kind of love - the epic and the small, the noble and the base - the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I'll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything. ~ Terry Hayes

Some struggling marriages can be salvaged with hard work and counseling; others should be dismantled and stripped for parts. ~ Mallory Ortberg

The ambulance crews brought the victims to us before the tires on the wreck stopped spinning. They salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tried to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here. A ~ Abraham Verghese

The first woman who spent any amount of time aboard this ship was Elizabeth de Obregon, whom we salvaged from the wrack of the Manila Galleon at the same time as him who burned it, one Edouard de Gex."
"He's dead, by the way."
"Again? I am glad to hear it. ~ Neal Stephenson

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. ~ Tim O'Brien

The long gray two-story box was the newest structure on the property, having been built in the 1970s. The buildings up the hill had accumulated one by one since the 1920s, most of them incorporating bits salvaged from various torn-down hotels and movie sets. Their aunt Amity, affluent from the sales of her series of popular novels, had added to the architectural clutter after ~ Tim Powers

The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it. ~ Harvey Cox

Perhaps nuns felt like this, she thought, when they passed within convent walls and left the glitter of the world behind. But their renunciation was of the will, while circumstances beyond her control had stripped her of the people who meant everything to her. And yet was it not possible that they had endured the same impoverishment, so that when the glory that was life had become husks they found it good to exchange those dead things for service and whatever vicarious happiness could be salvaged? Maybe selflessness was only selfishness on another level. ~ Margaret Landon

Sometimes life has to strip us in order to save us. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders ... and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy
writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that? ~ Cynthia Ozick

There was no reason whatever to make a wholesale choice between handicraft and machine production: between a single contemporary part of the technological pool and all the other past accumulations. But there was a genuine reason to maintain as many diverse units in this pool as possible, in order to increase the range of both human choices and technological inventiveness. Many of the machines of the nineteenth century, as Kropotkin pointed out, were admirable auxiliaries to handicraft processes, once they could be scaled, like the efficient small electric motor, to the small workshop and the personally controlled operation. William Morris and his colleagues, who almost single-handed salvaged and restored one ancient craft after another, by personally mastering the arts of dyeing, weaving, embroidering, printing, glass-painting, paper-making, book-binding, showed superior technological insight to those who scoffed at their romanticism. ~ Lewis Mumford

Mark swings his own door open and meets us by the tailgate. "Why don't we ask Emma who she's coming with? I mean, it's her choice, right?"
The look Galen gives me is clear: Take care of this, or I will. Or maybe it's more like, It would be my pleasure to take care of this. Either way, I don't want Mark taken care of.
Standing between them, the testosterone-to-air ratio is almost suffocating. If I pick Galen, the chances of Mark ever calling me again are as good as Galen eating a whole cheesecake by himself. If I choose Mark, the changes of Galen not wielding his built-in brass knuckles are as good as Rayna giving someone a compliment.
My desire to salvage this date with Mark is almost as strong as my desire to salvage his face from certain disfigurement. But salvaging the date as opposed to his face would be selfish in the long run. I sigh in defeat. "I'm sorry, Mark."
Mark lets out a gust of air. "Ouch." Scratching the back of his neck, he chuckles. "I guess I should be more superstitious, huh?"
He's right. I screwed this up. I should have salvaged the date, his pride. And I should have broken Galen's Royal nose with my own Syrena fist. I turn to His Highness. "Galen, could you give me a minute please? You'll have the next hour to talk to me since you're taking me straight home."
Without a word, Galen nods and walks away.
I can't quite meet Mark's eyes when I say, "I'm so sorry. I don't know what his deal is. He never acts like this." Excep ~ Anna Banks

The Leningrad Public Library remained open throughout the siege and became a place for people to congregate. People came to the library to read, even when weak from cold and exhaustion ... Some died in their places, with a book propped in front of them ... In the course of the war, the librarians greatly expanded the collection, purchasing books from the starving, who were desperate to sell anything for food. Some of the city's librarians scoured bombed ruins for volumes, scrabbling over the piles of brick with their backpacks full of salvaged books. ~ M T Anderson

What can be salvaged from your life? A pain
that gently darkens over heart and brain,
a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain,
now makes me tremble at your right to live. ~ Robert Lowell

... It truly didn't matter if my flesh and bone never returned; the treasures of life could still be salvaged if I was brave enough to look. ~ Fred Venturini

From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I've salvaged not a word. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Perched up on salvaged bricks, the half-pipes made perfect planters with an industrial edge that oddly complemented Sugar's pretty favorites: pansies, lantana, verbena and heliotrope.
She laid two of them by the long wall of the taller building next door and planted a clematis vine at one end and a moonflower vine at the other: the clematis because the variety she picked had the prettiest purple bloom and the moonflower because it opened in the early evening and emanated a heavenly scent just when a person most felt like smelling one. ~ Sarah-Kate Lynch

Suddenly your whole life is like a car crash, no brakes, gaining momentum, piling up behind you. Your mistakes, missed opportunities, all the time you've wasted, a twisted, rusting heap of scrap metal that can't be salvaged. Overwhelming you. Crushing you. ~ Debbie Howells

I'd pieced my heart back together and salvaged what little dignity I had left by jumping back in the saddle with a man safer than a Katherine Heigl chick flick. Unfortunately for me, old wounds can be a bitch the same way straying cowboys can be heartbreakers." -Laneyism ~ Jodi Linton

Even though marriage is doomed, if you turned it into a job you like and really work at it - it can be salvaged. ~ Al Goldstein

It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipment
To be counted and signed for.
On occasion some of us break down,
And those parts which can't be salvaged
Are replaced with other GI parts, that's all. ~ Rolando Hinojosa

[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here. ~ Abraham Verghese