The Waste Lands Quotes

Shake the hand that shook the world. ~ Stephen King

The terror ran endlessly on in his mind, making him feel like a rat trapped on an exercise wheel. And when he tried to look ahead to some better, brighter time, he could see only darkness. ~ Stephen King

The Drawers are places of desolation," he said. "The Drawers are the waste lands. ~ Stephen King

He looked so strange without his guns.
So wrong.
'Okay? Now that the numb-fuck apprentices have the guns and the master's unarmed, can we please go? If something big comes out of the bush at us, Roland, you can always throw your knife at it.'
'Oh, that,' he murmured. 'I almost forgot.' He took the knife from his purse and held it out, hilt first, to Eddie.
'This is ridiculous!' Eddie shouted.
'Life is ridiculous.'
'Yeah, put it on a postcard and send it to the fucking Reader's Digest.' Eddie jammed the knife into his belt and then looked defiantly at Roland. 'Now can we go?'
'There is one more thing,' Roland said.
'Weeping, creeping Jesus!'
The smile touched Roland's mouth again. 'Just joking,' he said.
Eddie's mouth dropped open. Beside him, Susannah began to laugh again. The sound rose, as musical as bells, in the morning stillness. ~ Stephen King

Though wars can bring adventures which stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory. ~ Knut Lier-Hansen

The excellence and efficiency of any nation or of our global community at large is driven by the collective empowerment of individuals. Gross consumer waste, haphazard bureaucratic spending, and the careless consumption of natural resources are all reflections of the mismanagement of personal power common within the average citizen. ~ Scott Edmund Miller

If other people thought art was important, then it would be required to graduate. But no, I don't have to take art. I do have to take math, which is just a waste of time because the numbers get all switched up in my brain, plus, calculators exist for a reason. I do have to take history, which is basically memorizing tariff acts till your brain bleeds. I do have to take four years of gym class with a bunch of jerks who punch me if they don't like what I say. But art? Optional. Even though art and music and literature and all that are what make us human. Algebra doesn't make us human. Games don't make us human. ~ Laura Ruby

How I will cherish you then,
you grief-torn nights!
Had I only received you,
inconsolable sisters,
on more abject knees, only
buried myself with more
abandon
in your loosened hair. How we waste
our afflictions!
We study them, stare out beyond them
into bleak continuance,
hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas
they're really
our wintering foliage, our dark greens
of meaning, one
of the seasons of the clandestine
year -- ; not only
a season --: they're site, settlement,
shelter, soil, abode. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If we focus on the meat, this contrast is, financial death and warrior death, a split which Oswald Spengler calls 'hunger death' and 'hero death'.

The hungry human, in a 9 to 5 existence is threatened, dishonored, and debased by financial worry and the fear of mental starving, which stunts possibilities, chokes consciousness, produces darkness and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. You can lose your whole life-will through the gaping wretchedness of living in the modern world of debt and work. The tragedy is that in the modern world, you die of something (starvation, disease, boredom) and not for something (death by action).

In waring and fighting, you sacrifice for higher policies, you can die for something higher, you full for a metaphysics, a mode of consciousness higher than your meat body. On the other hand, economic life merely waste you away. Spengler writes, 'War is the creature, hunger the destroyer, of all things'.

In war life is elevated by death, often to the point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory. But in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, the vulgar, and wholly un-metaphysical form of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form of being a human miserably collapses and the naked struggle for survival of the human beast begins.

By the warrior, Evola isn't writing about what Henry Kissinger called 'dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign polic ~ Moesy Pittounikos

People search for the meaning of life, but this is the easy question: we are born into a world that presents us with many millenia of collected knowledge and information, and all our predecessors ask of us is that we not waste our brief life ignoring the past only to rediscover or reinvent its lessons badly. ~ Erik Naggum

the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. ~ William Gibson

One of the comics said he thought I was talented but wouldn't ever make it as a stand-up. It hurt. Looking back now, I can see clearly how experienced comics get bitter. It's a tough business, and often things don't work out the way you think they will. But rage and jealousy comics can feel for others' success is a highly toxic waste of time. ~ Amy Schumer

Penguins don't waste their time trying to fly. They're unique. They know they were built for the water. ~ Sidney Knight

I will waste not even a precious second today in anger or hate or jealousy or selfishness. I know that the seeds I sow I will harvest, because every action, good or bad, is always followed by an equal reaction. I will plant only good seeds this day. ~ Og Mandino

The Old Testament teems with prophecies of the Messiah, but nowhere is it intimated that that Messiah is to stand as a God to be worshipped. He is to bring peace on earth, to build up the waste places
to comfort the broken-hearted, but nowhere is he spoken of as a deity. ~ Olympia Brown

If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry - you just pull the trigger. Angry discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger. ~ Jim Allchin

They were all listening to him with the curiosity and, if the truth were known, the utter indifference of practical people who had lost their fear of his God of wrath and chastisement. Why be frightened and deferential and seek pardon when the idea of the devil now merely made them laugh and they no longer believed in an avenging Lord who sent the wind and the hail and the thunder? It was just a waste of time; it was much more sensible to keep your respect for the forces of law and order: they were stronger. ~ Emile Zola

There's tons of junk food for your mind on the Internet. You can sit there for three or 10 or 20 hours a day getting in online arguments with other people who also choose to waste their time. ~ Henry Rollins

Don't waste your precious time on people who do not appreciate your value. Learn to use your perfume on the pigs when they also learn to bath. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Eighty percent of global warming is the result of man's wrongful use of the resources of the planet and the dumping of millions upon millions of tons of nuclear and other waste in the world, creating great toxic areas all over our skies, our oceans, our rivers, and the earth. ~ Benjamin Creme

Think about how impossible it is to explain to the young what happens when you know you're not immune from death. Everything changes. You look at the world differently. When you're young, you have no perspective. You think life lasts forever - days and months and years stretching out to infinity. You think you don't have to choose. You think you can waste time doing drugs and alcohol. You think time will always be on your side. But time, once your friend, becomes your enemy. It gallops by as you get older. Holidays come faster and faster. Years fly off the calendar as in old movies. All you long for is to go back and do it all over, correct the mistakes, ~ Erica Jong

The way past despair and false hope is just letting go. It doesn't improve your odds of survival, but it doesn't waste mental energy. ~ James Alan Gardner

I'm gonna keep Social Security without change, except I'm going to get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse; same thing with Medicare. ~ Donald Trump

Dating is all about getting to know somebody, without wasting a lot of time or money. What is the price of love? You've got the cost of dinner, a movie, and cab fare for you and your date, as well as the entire film crew documenting your evening. So you add all that up, and subtract various coupons and bulk discount rates you might qualify for. But what about time? You can make more money, but you can't make more time if you waste it. That's why you have to be efficient with your dating. Don't date one on one. Take 10 women out at once, assembly line style, and forget the small talk. Focus on hard-hitting topics, and give them all questionnaires to fill out. I think the women will appreciate your honest and novel approach. Of course it's possible that nine out of ten women might be offended. But who cares? All you need is one. ~ Jarod Kintz

Around New York City, samples collected at dozens of beaches or piers have detected the types of bacteria and other pollutants tied to sewage overflows. Though the city's drinking water comes from upstate reservoirs, environmentalists say untreated excrement and other waste in the city's waterways pose serious health risks. ~ Charles Duhigg

Many of the activities we pursue, the resources we consume, and the waste products we create are the products of our desire to make our bodies a little more comfortable and carefree. Whether it's food, exercise, music, alcohol, sex, drugs - whatever the stimulus - ultimately what we seek is a feeling of satisfaction. In the end, though, true satisfaction arises from a balance of healthy, harmonious energy. And that harmonious, balanced energy is the core of the natural healing power. ~ Ilchi Lee

Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn't have to waste a lot of ammunition. ~ Rick Yancey

That is the way I have always worked. I draw a plan and work out every detail on the plan before starting to build. For otherwise one will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and the finished article will not have coherence. It ~ Henry Ford

A good manager focuses on managing impediments, process, team's health, protects the boundaries of self-organizing teams, promotes a healthy culture, and helps eliminate waste. ~ Salil Jha

I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
[Notebook, Oct. 10, 1842] ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

In order to awaken your best life, it's important that you "die while you are alive." Most people live as if they have all the time in the world. They wish they had more time in their days and yet they waste the time they have. They put off living until some event in the future occurs. In order to awaken to your best life, every day should be lived as if it were your last day on the planet. ~ Robin S. Sharma

As there is not in human observation proper means for measuring the waste of land upon the globe, it is hence inferred, that we cannot estimate the duration of what we see at present, nor calculate the period at which it had begun; so that, with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end. ~ James Hutton

Terrorism benefits the Arabs, it may lay waste the Yishuv and shake Zionism. But to follow in the Arabs' footsteps and ape their deeds is to be blind to the gulf between us. Our aims and theirs run counter: methods calculated to further theirs, are ruinous to us. ~ David Ben-Gurion

The Superfund legislation set up a system of insurance premiums collected from the chemical industry to clean up toxic wastes. This new program may prove to be as far-reaching and important as any accomplishment of my administration. The reduction of the threat to America's health and safety from thousands of toxic-waste sites will continue to be an urgent but bitterly fought issue-another example for the conflict between the public welfare and the profits of a few private despoilers of our nation's environment. ~ Jimmy Carter

Do not pity me, Beatrice De Novo. My life has been as fate dictated, and now I am master of it. Do not waste your regret on the past. ~ Elizabeth Hunter

At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: "The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang."

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra's breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don't you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don't you dare ~ Caitlin Moran

Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted" - "not permitted" - "this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read.
-Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

But what I really long to know you do not tell either: what you feel, although I've given you hints by the score of my regard. You like me. You wouldn't waste time or paper on a being you didn't like. But I think I've loved you since we met at your mother's funeral. I want to be with you forever and beyond, but you write that you are too young to marry or too old or too short or too hungry
until I crumple your letters up in despair, only to smooth them out again for a twelfth reading, hunting for hidden meanings. ~ Gail Carson Levine

A fire department isn't a waste of tax money, even if those assigned to it spend most of the time washing their cars. ~ David Drake

If the cultural standing of excrement doesn't convince them, I say that the material itself is as rich as oil and probably more useful. It contains nitrogen and phosphates that can make plants grow and also suck the life from water because its nutrients absorb available oxygen. It can be both food and poison. It can contaminate and cultivate. Millions of people cook with gas made by fermenting it. I tell them that I don't like to call it "waste," when it can be turned into bricks, when it can make roads or jewelry, and when in a dried powdered form known as poudrette it was sniffed like snuff by the grandest ladies of the eighteenth-century French court. Medical men of not too long ago thought stool examination a vital diagnostic tool (London's Wellcome Library holds a 150-year0old engraving of a doctor examining a bedpan and a sarcastic maid asking him if he'd like a fork). They were also fond of prescribing it: excrement could be eaten, drunk, or liberally applied to the skin. Martin Luther was convinced: he reportedly ate a spoonful of his own excrement daily and wrote that he couldn't understand the generosity of a God who freely gave such important and useful remedies. ~ Rose George

When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquillity in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness. ~ Washington Irving

I can't sleep without knowing there's hope. Half the night I waste in sighs. In a wakeful doze I sorrow. For the hands, for the lips ... the eyes. For the meeting of tomorrow. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Too long now things divine have been cheaply used
And all the power of heaven, the kindly, spent
In trifling waste by cold and cunning
Men without thanks, who when he, the Highest,
In person tills their field for them, think they know
the daylight and the Thunderer, and indeed
Their telescope may find them all, may
Count and may name every star of heaven.
Yet will the Father cover with holy night,
That we may last on earth, our too knowing eyes.
... Never will our
Free-ranging power coerce his heaven.
From "The Poet's Vocation" ("Dichterberuf") ~ Friedrich Holderlin

In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington. Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so. John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment. ~ Zell Miller

With a perfectly straight face he said, "If I need an item, I go into the store and buy it. Why would I waste time going into a store if I didn't need to buy anything?" "For sheer shopping pleasure? The joy of being a consumer?" she offered. Ronin continued to give her a blank stare. ~ Lorelei James

Being pretty is not my thing and I was stupid for testing the logical facts and practical boundaries. There are rules. And the number one rule is don't try to be someone you're not. I'm myself, no matter how ugly that is, and trying to be someone prettier is stupid, a waste of energy. I won't do that ever again, no matter how much I want to. It's not worth it. I will never be anything but ugly. And I've come to terms with that. I've made my peace with that. ~ Sara Wolf

The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it. ~ Henry Miller

Didn't waste a second thinking about why I'd passed out. In a crisis, the "why" is irrelevant. I needed to accept where I found myself and prioritize what mattered right that minute, which was getting back on the ground ASAP. ~ Chris Hadfield

A boundless continent, Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of night Starless expos'd. ~ John Milton

But I'm afraid to sleep!" Whispered Trista. "What if I fall to pieces before I wake up? What if tomorrow I'm just a pile of leaves and sticks tucked under a blanket? What if this is the last time I've got left, and I waste it all being asleep, then wake up dead?"
For a moment Violet looked conflicted. Then her jaw set, and she took Trista by the shoulders.
"You won't," she said gently but firmly. "I'll make sure you don't. I'll be watching you sleep. And if your hair starts to turn into leaves, or anything like that, I'll wake you up."
"You promise?" Trista felt the icy, titanic force of her terror recede a step or two. "You ... you won't leave me when I sleep and go out?"
"I promise," said Violet, with a firmness in her tone that allowed no doubt. Her dark grey eyes were resolute as flint. ~ Frances Hardinge

It sometime is so amazing to know, how the most ordinary day turns so extraordinary, in a flash of second. And depending on harshness of a sudden jolt of reality, sometime one has no option but to still be hopeful, listen to the heartbeat, still dream grand, still dream impossible; and keep one's inner self illuminated forever. After all, dream only turns into reality, if one is genuinely passionate and truthful to it. What a waste of life it would be otherwise. ~ Smishra

For an entire year he saved all of his trash. Except for what he actually ate, everything was sorted into bins. At year's end, his living room and kitchen were filled with nearly a hundred cubic feet of stuff. Some was compostable. But the vast majority was leftover food packaging. Derfel's experimentation shows what happens when someone intentionally holds onto everything. The point of his exercise was to raise consciousness about the environmental impact of one individual's consumer waste. At another level, it demonstrates that we readily discard most of what passes though daily life as useless trash. ~ Richard J. Borden