Trash Quotes

One man's trash is another man's treasure, and the by-product from one food can be perfect for making another. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

Fang can't stand to see trash & garbage lying around the house. He can't stand the competition. ~ Phyllis Diller

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

You don't have to get out. I know how to let myself in," she said.
"I'll get you at the door and walk you to it when I return you. It's part of my job, woman," he said.
Her temper flared. "Don't you ever call me woman. I'm not backwoods white trash. I have a name and don't you forget it. ~ Carolyn Brown

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife's edge. We're a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there's a dial tone, and your front yard isn't underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there's no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating. ~ Matt Taibbi

There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1. ~ David Suzuki

I open the box, and there are notes. Notes and notes and notes. Peter's notes. Peter's notes I threw away.
"I found them when I was emptying your trash," she says. Hastily she adds, "I only read a couple. And then I saved them because I could tell they were important."
I touch one that Peter folded into an airplane. "Kitty…you know Peter and I aren't getting back together, right?"
Kitty grabs the bowl of popcorn and says, "Just read them." Then she goes into the living room and turns on the TV.
I close the hatbox and take it with me upstairs. When I am in my room, I sit on the floor and spread them out around me.
A lot of the notes just say things like "Meet you at your locker after school" and Can I borrow your chemistry notes from yesterday?" I find the spiderweb one from Halloween, and it makes me smile. Another one says, "Can you take the bus home today? I want to surprise Kitty and pick her up from school so she can show me and my car off to her friends." "Thanks for coming to the estate sale with me this weekend. You made the day fun. I owe you one." "Don't forget to pack a Korean yogurt for me!" "If you make Josh's dumb white-chocolate cranberry cookies and not my fruitcake ones, it's over." I laugh out loud. And then, the one I read over and over: "You look pretty today. I like you in blue."
I've never gotten a love letter before. But reading these notes like this, one after the other, it feels like I have. It's like…it's like there's onl ~ Jenny Han

People are lot like peanuts...
It's not what's on the outside that matters, and that damn shell just gets shucked into the trash anyhow. ~ Alan VanMeter

Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs. ~ Richard Wright

There's definitely a lot of trash that comes with the prize of being famous. It's a nice gift, but there's a lot of wrapping and paper and junk to cut through. Back then, when a movie came out and people saw you on the street, their reaction was so supercharged that it was scary. It would frighten other people. It used to really rattle me. I mean, everybody would love to have their clothes torn off by a mob of girls, but being screamed at is different. ~ Bill Murray

Oh, it's just a trash can. Chill out." (Marco) BAM! BAM! BAM! "Okay, so it's four trash cans," (Marco) " BAM! BAM! BAM! "Do you hate trash cans? Is that your problem? Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?!!" (Jake) ~ Katherine Applegate

Sometimes it can feel awkward going into the neighbors his houses. I mean, we really take over their world, not just a room is being read decorated. Participants give up so much control when you're on Trading Spaces. They have to let go of expectations they have for their own room, they have to let go of doing things their way and if seen their house is a home. To some degree, their houses become TV sets. We leave runners on the floor, we keep up with the trash, and we're careful, but there is only so much you can do when every room is filled with TV equipment or catering or make up or supplies, not to mention 20 to 30 people running in and out. And let's not forget the tablesaws, hammers, compressors, and a construction madness going on outside. ~ Paige Davis

It is so hard to leave - until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world. ~ John Green

If people treat a cemetery like trash, it's a good indication of how they feel about the people buried there and those who are still receiving services," she said. ~ Darby Penney

And now of a sudden my illusion vanished. What was my body to me? A kind of flunkey in my service. Let my anger wax hot, my love grow exalted, my hatred collect in me, and the boasted solidarity between me and my body was gone.

Your son is in a burning house. Nobody can hold you back. You may burn up, but what do you think of that? You are ready to bequeath the rags of your body to any man who will take them. You discover that what you set so much store by is trash. You would sell your hand, if need be, to give a hand to a friend. It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you. Your body belongs to you: it is not you. Are you about to strike an enemy? No threat of bodily harm can hold you back. You? It is the death of your enemy that is you. You? It is the rescue of your child that is you. In that moment you exchange yourself against something else; and you have no feeling tat you lost by the exchange. Your members? Tools. A tool snaps in your hand: how important is that tool? You exchange yourself against the death of your enemy, the rescue of your child, the recovery of your patient, the perfection of your theorem...Your true significance becomes dazzlingly evident. Your true name is duty, hatred, love, child, theorem. There is no other you than this. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Prosperity is always built on slave labor. Ask any Ameri-can't. Or Bulgari-can. Yes, we can, eat from a trash can... ~ Will Advise

Avoid head trash. Don't be a garbage can for anything that does not feed your intellect, stimulate your imagination, or make you a more compassionate peaceful person. Refuse to open your mind to other people's trash. Tune out anything that promotes conflict or controversy. This can infect you with a mind virus of cynicism or defeat, and you won't even know it! ~ Les Brown

Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead: we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us--who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed.

But what about those who plant such clues, for us to stumble on? Why do they bother? Egotism? Pity? Revenge? A simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall? The combination of presence and anonymity--confession without penance, truth without consequences--it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.

Those who leave such evidence can scarcely complain if strangers come along afterwards and poke their noses into every single thing that would once have been none of their business. And not only strangers: lovers, friends, relations. We're voyeurs, all of us. Why should we assume that anything in the past is ours for the taking, simply because we've found it? We're all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others.

But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire. ~ Margaret Atwood

If you treat your mind like a trash can, don't be surprised when you reach for a thought and all you get is garbage. ~ Zero Dean

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner

The Girl Scouts is where I became acquainted with the idea that a woman can do anything. Learning that early on has a tremendous impact on the development of a young girl's personality. It had a huge impact on me. Girl Scouts is where I first learned about philanthropy and fell in love with the concept of helping others-in my troop this was very important. We did a lot of community service like picking up trash and feeding the homeless. Loving humankind was something that echoed throughout my time at Girl Scouts. ~ Lisa Ling

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet. ~ Phyllis McGinley

The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas. ~ Marie-Helene Bertino

That is why the ideal literary diet consists of trash and classics; all that has survived, and all that has no reason to survive - books you can read without thinking, and books you have to read if you want to think at all. ~ Anthony Lane

Sleepwalking"

I fell in love and
I needed a roadmap
To find out where you lived
So excited now
Sleepwalking, cuz I'm sleepwalking
The white trash boys
Listen to the headphones
Blasting white noise
In the convenience store parking lot
I hung around there
Wasting my time
Hoping you'll stop by
Cuz I'm sleepwalking, I'm sleepwalking
A mutual friend's parents
Left town for a week
So we raided their liquor stash
And walked down by the riverside
Sleepwalking, cuz I'm sleepwalking ~ Modest Mouse

There's nothing like white trash at the White House. ~ Dolly Parton

Alright. Let's get realistic now. You know and I know that the function of that number was just to provide some sort of warm-up trash before we do something HEAVY. Something a little bit harder to listen to, but which is probably better for you in the LONG RUN. The item in this instance, which will be better for you in the LONG RUN, and if we only had a little more space up here we could make it visual for you, is "Some Ballet Music," which we've played at most of our concert series in Europe. Generally in halls where we had a little bit more space and Motorhead and Kansas could actually fling themselves across the stage, and give you their teenage interpretation of the art of The Ballet. I don't think it's too safe to do it here, maybe they can just hug each other a little bit and do some calisthenics in the middle of the stage. ~ Frank Zappa

But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love. ~ Truman Capote

Your greatest accomplishments, no matter how impressive you think them to be, are some else's worst nightmare. Your most prized possession is another man's disgusting chunk of trash. Be careful what you brag about. ~ Jessica Hagy

It didn't smell so great, and pizza boxes and empty Coke cans had overflowed the trash can and spilled over a significant portion of the kitchen floor. You could barely walk without stepping on clothing that needed to be washed. My furniture was covered with scribbled-on papers and discarded pens and pencils. ~ Jim Butcher

Florida needs a special prison for tourists. Not all tourists - just the ones who trash the place, rob, shoplift, vandalize, drive drunk, assault the cops, puke in the alleys, pee in the medians, and so on. ~ Carl Hiaasen

I read trash. Empty cereal boxes, empty shampoo bottles, the bottoms of empty Kleenex boxes, and occasionally even a mystical self-help book. ~ Jarod Kintz

My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Go ahead, throw this book away. Spit on me. Revile me. I dare you. Cast me out of your intellectual orbit. Throw me out of your backpack. Pitch me in the airport trash bin. Leave me on a bench in Central Park!
What do I care?
No. I don't want you to do all that. Don't do that.
DON'T DO IT! ~ Anne Rice

Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is to learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you.
Dorothy Allison,
"Mama"
Trash ~ Dorothy Allison

True, men were mostly useless, but they served their purpose: trash removal, child rearing, and breeding. ~ G.A. Aiken

Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk. ~ Robert De Niro

If you look in the dictionary under 'white trash' there's a picture of my family."
from BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, p 37 ~ Michael Flynn

Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green.

But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over-and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am. ~ Peter Wohlleben

I've learnt that you shouldn't take people seriously, whether they praise you or trash you. ~ Ranveer Singh

Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight. ~ Camille Paglia

And then she started picking up trash behind the dumpster. It was ankle deep back there, blown in from all over the city to a kind of wind eddy between buildings. We picked up newspaper pages and hamburger wrappers, straws, cigarette packs, plastic bags, as well as shop trash that had fallen out when the dumpster was overflowing. There was so much, we would've needed snow shovels to make a real dent in it, but I didn't think about what we were doing, more than to believe in easing a nervous breakdown with small bursts of insanity. ~ Wayne Harrison

When you can't provide for them anymore, their true character comes out. They treat you like pure shit. To make matters worse, they talk trash behind your back, as if what you've done for them was useless. That's how some people are - they will use you up and break you down until you have nothing left to give them or yourself. People who do not have anything to lose will make sure you lose everything you've work so hard for. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place. ~ George Orwell

If people realized someone would be sorting through their trash, would they be more careful in what they throw away? ~ Camron Wright

I am fearful that the paper system will ruin the state. Its demoralizing effects are already seen and spoken of everywhere. I therefore protest against receiving any of that trash. ~ Andrew Jackson

YOU CAN ALWAYS GET THERE FROM HERE A traveler returned to the country from which he had started many years before. When he stepped from the boat, he noticed how different everything was. There were once many buildings, but now there were few and each of them needed repair. In the park where he played as a child, dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges. Empty trash bags littered the grass. The air was heavy. He sat on one of the benches and explained to the woman next to him that he'd been away a long time, then asked her what season had he come back to. She replied that it was the only one left, the one they all had agreed on. ~ Mark Strand

The truth is, we do not have addiction problems. We have misdirected worship. I'm convinced every human being is in recovery and being weaned from some form of addiction because of idolatry. Your addiction or mine may not have us eating out of trash cans, but our sin habit is hurting and diminishing God's glory in our lives. ~ Derwin L. Gray

Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and color? Since I became Dead I've recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I've lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I'll remember this one for the rest of my life. ~ Isaac Marion

If my kids were to make a talking doll of me as a mother, one of my recorded phrases would be 'I will throw that in the trash.' 'If you don't put that down right now, I will throw that in the trash.' It's very funny to hear myself say certain things - like noticing which phrases become the most popular to use. ~ Justine Bateman

A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame. ~ Ray Bradbury

But in the long run we're not going to be able to keep out of state trash away from Pennsylvania. ~ Ed Rendell

Quick, somebody call the caretaker!' Gemma's stage voice rang out loud and clear. 'There's some trash here that needs to be taken out.' She earned a chorus of laughs as she walked towards us, then came to a standstill right beside me. 'Christ, it reeks, too,' she said, pinching her nose. 'What did you do, Malice? Douse yourself in the whole bottle? Oh, never mind. I don't expect you to have heard of the adage "less is more". ~ Aurelia B. Rowl

My wife is a terrific Southern cook. My favorite of all the great things she cooks is 'trash potatoes.' That's mashed potatoes with sour cream, bacon, cheddar cheese, and horseradish. It's a total gut bomb. ~ Mike Vogel

Stop gawking and close your mouth before I decide to use it as a trash receptacle. ~ Heidi Schulz

The five stages of model development. - Donald Knuth, Stanford computer scientist Knuth discovered that computer program development goes through five stages. These steps also apply to building models, and I rigorously adhere to them in my consulting work. 1. Decide what you want the model to do. 2. Decide how to build the model. 3. Build the model. 4. Debug the model. 5. Trash stages 1 through 4 and start again, now that you know what you really wanted in the first place. Once you realize that step 5 is inevitable, you become more willing to discard bad models early rather than continually to patch them up. In fact, I recommend getting to step 5 many times by building an evolving set of prototypes. This is consistent with an emerging style of system development known as Extreme Programming.2 To get a large model to work you must start with a small model that works, not a large model that doesn't work. - Alan Manne, Stanford energy economist ~ Sam L. Savage

These things become the norm: that some homeless people die of cold on the streets is not news. In contrast, a ten point drop on the stock markets of some cities, is a tragedy. A person dying is not news, but if the stock markets drop ten points it is a tragedy! Thus people are disposed of, as if they were trash. ~ Pope Francis

Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of God that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of color and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood; some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day...but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope. ~ Philip K. Dick

There are dark sides of every fandom. The pockets filled with a certain kind of nostalgia where everything is sacred and shouldn't be tampered with. Where new things are always trash, or judged too harshly, or not up to some unknown holy standard. Where new people with new ideas can't touch an old sinking ship even if it'll repair it---make it better than before. ~ Ashley Poston

Cheating on a good woman is like choosing trash over treasure. ~ Audrey Hepburn

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible... ~ Rebecca Solnit

If you don't fight, you will grow lazy and discontent under the guise of wanting peace.
You will acquire money to acquire toys but the biggest ones will never be big enough.
You will fill your mind with trash because the truth is too ugly to look at. ~ Michelle Hodkin

Well I should be sitting in an air-conditioned office in a swivel chair, talking trash to the secretary. Saying, hey now mama, come on over here. ~ Jim Croce

To know our refuse is to know ourselves. We mark our own trail from past to present with what we've used and consumed, fondled, rejected, outgrown. ~ Jane Avrich

One organism's trash is another organism's treasure, as I like to say. ~ Bill Nye

Fine Knacks for Ladies

Fine knacks for ladies, cheap, choice, brave and new!
Good pennyworths! but money cannot move.
I keep a fair but for the fair to view.
A beggar may be liberal of love,
Though all my wares be trash, the heart is true.

Great gifts are guiles and look for gifts again;
My trifles come as treasures from the mind.
It is a precious jewel to be plain;
Sometimes in shell the Orient's pearls we find.
Of others take a sheaf, of me a grain.

Within this pack pins points laces and gloves,
And diverse toys fitting a country fair.
But in my heart, where duty serves and loves,
Turtles and twins, court's brood, a heavenly pair.
Happy the heart that thinks of no removes! ~ John Dowland

Newspapers abound, and though they have endured decades of decline in readership and influence, they can still form impressive piles if no one takes them out to the trash. ~ Jon Stewart

Perhaps the largest single trouble with our abundance of possessions is the fact that so many of them are owned, not because of what they are, but because of what they confer on us. They are there, but we seldom look at them. We have so much, but we love precious little of it for itself. After the itch of the mind has been scratched, matter itself goes into the discard; the junkyard is the true monument of our society. We have the most marvelous garbage the world has ever produced. Literally. Have you ever looked hard at a tin can? Don't. It will break your heart to throw it out, all silver and round and handy. But the truth is you have to throw it out. We produce so much that there isn't time or room to keep it. What is sad, though, is that the knack of wonder goes into the trash can with it. The tinfoil collectors and the fancy ribbon savers may be absurd, but they're not crazy. They are the ones who still retain the capacity for wonder that is at the root of caring ~ Robert Farrar Capon

I'm surprised when I walk right into yet another abandoned hunters' camp. Tattered plastic sheeting still hangs askew here and there. Blackened aerosol cans of Cheez Whiz sit in the fire pit, which sits in the middle of the trail. Assorted Styro-ware. Rotten leather boots. Where are these people? Are they back in civilization now, appearing to all observers to be as normal as pie, but inwardly ticking like time bombs and spreading their hot poisonous seed through the world like black-breathed plague? ~ Rick Bass

But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! ~ Milan Kundera

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 really want to do something in Europe. With a small movie, it can be an interesting challenge. But I have to get the right project. I don't think it's so important to go to Hollywood. All that trash that comes out of there! I don't want to do that. ~ Ziyi Zhang

Nykyrian shifted to one side of the door frame. "Stop stalling, asshole. Do you honestly think I'd be stupid enough to stand here until your partner comes up behind me?" He snapped his fingers.
An unconscious man was shoved through the door. Pitala cursed.
"I really hate taking out the trash." Syn joined Nykyrian as he wiped his hands together.
-Nykyrian, Pitala, & Syn ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

And I used to say, 'I'm black, too.' In other words, I - my whole life I've been called a half-breed, a convict, king of the trailer trash, this and that. I take that and stand. ~ Duane Chapman

This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he's supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire - a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks - and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life. ~ Janice Y.K. Lee

And then he's grabbing my hand, and pulling me into a storage room they use for art supplies. And he puts his finger to his lips, and the walls are filled with pads of paper and boxes of colored pencils and jars of paint,
and I'm laughing
and he shuts the door behind us
and leans up against it to stop anyone coming in
and like he's trying to get up his nerve now that he's started something,
before we've ever gone to the dumplings and the movies -
he leans in and kisses me.
His lips are cold. The kiss is soft. He has gum in his mouth, and he stops, and giggles nervously, and takes it out and throws it in the trash can,
and looks like he feels embarrassed to have kissed me with the gum,
but I don't care,
and so now I kiss him,
and he's tall enough that he has to bend down to get to me,
and I put my hand on his neck, which is smooth and warm,
and we kiss for a minute in the storage room,and I want to run my hands up his shirt suddenly -
but I don't.
He pulls away for a second and touches my cheek.
"I thought you'd never ask," he whispers.
"I thought I never would either," I say, "but I did."
"Good job," he says, and kisses me again. ~ E. Lockhart

Individuals of all ages can make an important difference in the overall health of our ocean by the actions they take every day. Simple things like picking up trash on the beach, recycling and conserving water can have a big impact on the health of our ocean. ~ Ted Danson

Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.' ~ Quincy Jones

After awhile you realize that putting your actions where your mouth is makes you less likely to have to put your money where your mouth is. ~ Criss Jami

They smile in my face, behind my back they talk trash,
Mad and stuff because they don't have cash. ~ Erick Sermon

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Right, so, quick, I mentioned Hawk. He's a scary-ass, motherfucking commando. When I say that, I do not lie. So I'll repeat, he's a scary-ass, motherfucking commando. So, when your mind conjures up a vision of a commando, that's Hawk. And Hawk likes kids. But he don't like kids bein' scared and bein' used for bullshit family dramas. I tell him this, which, by the way, I'm totally tellin' him this, even though he don't know those kids, like, at all, he's gonna go psycho badass, motherfucking commando. And the Trailer Trash Twins won't know what hit 'em. ~ Kristen Ashley

A world of wealth is trash if men are wanting; men who have no wealth never find fortune smiling as their strength deserves. ~ Aeschylus

Life is an endless attempt to word the unwordable, to make what cannot be touched walk on the ground, to embody what can never be fit inside a single lifetime.
We see reflections of ourselves in sunrises, hear our perfection in thunderstorms and babies' laughter--touch, taste and feel--and then try to somehow remember all of that while taking out the trash, paying bills and a million other ways we have invented to forget.
We weave together within ourselves mud and spirit, shadow and light, animal and angel.
No wonder humans feel crazy most of the time.

But you aren't crazy. You are doing a heroic thing by being here as yourself. ~ Jacob Nordby

On our second date, I picked up Missy at her house and told her we had to make a pit stop to pick up crawfish bait at the fish market. We'd figured out a way to speed up the process by using the fish market's gutbuckets instead of running nets ourselves. Through trial and error, we determined that the best crawfish bait was buffalo-fish heads. Unfortunately, when I pulled up to the market to get the garbage cans full of fish heads, I realized they had been outside for a couple of days. It was a warm day, and I could tell from the buzzing of hundreds of flies it was going to be nasty! I knew it was going to be the ultimate test of our relationship. The tubs were too heavy for one man to carry, so I told Missy, "I'm going to need your help on this." She crawled out the window, and I led her to the trash cans filled with buffalo heads waiting for us. Like an idiot, the first thing she did was open the lid of a trash can. Immediately, she started gagging and dry-heaving in the parking lot.
"Rule number two," I said. "Never pop the lid on a trash can."
Much to my surprise, Missy regained her composure and helped me load the trash cans into the back of my truck. Right then, I realized our relationship might work out. She was climbing through windows and hauling fish heads. ~ Jase Robertson

She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica's store sells in April.. there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida... but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrink-wrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica's little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then trows them in the same trash bin where her corn husks and citrus rinds go. ~ Rudolph Delson

We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will? ~ Joseph Jenkins

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state. ~ Chris Hedges

Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that "modernity" is ending proclaim a "postmodern age. ~ Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

The heart is like an ocean, it can create, feed, hold and purify all the beauties and trash of the world, and in the end, love them all. ~ Debasish Mridha

When you trash the opposition, you simultaneously demean yourself. ~ Frank Luntz

Number one I think we should impose a fee or a tax on the transportation of trash per mile. ~ Ed Rendell

That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.

It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.

Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinka ~ David Simon

I lost the love of all the homosexuals in the world by saying that Princess Diana was trash and got what she deserved. She could have been Queen of England - and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behavior. Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering. ~ Quentin Crisp

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

Trash talk ... Washington floats on a river of aspersion. ~ David Brooks

She looked like a hippie who'd been kicked to the side of the road maybe forty years ago, where she'd been collecting trash and rags ever since. She wore a dress made of tie-dyed cloth, ripped-up quilts, and plastic grocery bags. Her frizzy mop of hair was gray-brown, like root-beer foam, tied back with a peace-sign headband. Warts and moles covered her face. When she smiled, she showed exactly three teeth. ~ Rick Riordan

Just because you're trash doesn't mean you can't do great things. It's called garbage can, not garbage cannot. ~ Unknown

Our bodies were trash.
We leave them on the shore. ~ Anne Sexton