Wheelbarrows Quotes

It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I'm in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold ~ Mary Karr

The whispers inside the red wheelbarrow's dew. ~ Cameron Conaway

Death paused, his hand on the spine of the book. And why do you think I directed you to the stables? think carefully, now.

Mort hesitated, he has been thinking carefully, in between counting wheelbarrows. He'd wondered if it had been to coordinate his hand and eye, or to teach him the habit of obedience, or bring home the human scale, of small tasks, or make him realize that even great men must start at the bottom.
None of these explanations seemed exactly right.
I think ... he began.
YES?
Well. I think it was because you were up to your knees in horseshit, to tell you the truth.

Death looked at him for a very long time.Mort shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, snapped Death.Clarity of thought. Realistic approach. Very important in a job like ours. ~ Terry Pratchett

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves ... ~ Slavoj Zizek

That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the tool-shed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.
At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic Beggar."
"Titanic City" was born.

It's the song, they said.
No, the sea. The luxury. The ship.
It's the sex, they whispered.
Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo.
"Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead. ~ Khaled Hosseini

They walked, some of them for miles, from rural villages deep in the bush. They came in wheelbarrows, in wheelchairs. They came with babies on their back. They came the night before, some of them sleeping on the hard ground outside the polling booths so they could vote when morning came. The ~ Helene Cooper

Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which dopey, reductionist, simple-minded, pat, glib-thinking can circulate, like wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta. ~ Neal Stephenson

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt - industrial - modern - all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos - all these
entangled in your mummied roots - and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! ~ Allen Ginsberg

You know they invented wheelbarrows to teach FAA inspectors to walk on their hind legs. ~ Martin Caidin

And everyone loved sunsets. The light lost its sanity as it fell over the hills and into the Pacific--it went red and deeper red, orange, and even green. The skies seemed to melt, like lava eating black rock into great bite marks of burning. Sometimes all the town stopped and stared west. Shopkeepers came from their rooms to stand in the street. Families brought out their invalids on pallets and in wheelbarrows to wave their bent wrists at the madness consuming their sky. Swirls of gulls and pelicans like God's own confetti snowed across those sky riots. ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

We burst through the gardens, half leaping over wheelbarrows in the first, avoiding a crop of herbs in the second, and getting barked at by an evil terrier in the third. ~ Anonymous

The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued everywhere, and scattered about all countries, having no certain resting place. They sit as on a wheelbarrow, without a country, people or government ... but they are rightly served, for seeing they refused have Christ and his gospel, instead of freedom they must have servitude. ~ Martin Luther

Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor. ~ David Sedaris

I've always played cards. I can't remember when there wasn't a gambling game going on somewhere, even if it was a craps game in a wheelbarrow on the backside of the racetrack. ~ Wilford Brimley

My grandmother was unsurpassable at sitting. She would sit on tombstones, glaciers, small hard benches with ants crawling over them, fragments of public monuments, other people's wheelbarrows, and when one returned one could be sure of finding her there, conversing affably with the owner of the wheelbarrow. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

Are you familiar with Saint Cuthman?" Alfred asked me cheerfully.
"No, lord."
"He was a hermit," Alfred said. We were riding north, keeping on the high ground with the swamp to our left. "His mother was crippled and so he made her a wheelbarrow."
"A wheelbarrow? What could a cripple do with a wheelbarrow?"
"No, no, no! He pushed her about in it! So she could be with him as he preached. He pushed her everywhere."
"She must have liked that."
"There's no written life of him that I know of,' Alfred said, 'but we must surely compose one. He could be a saint for mothers?"
"Or for wheelbarrows, lord. ~ Bernard Cornwell

If your trashcan or wheelbarrow has dent in it, you don't buy a new one. Maybe that's because we don't use trashcans and wheelbarrows to communicate our social status or identity to others. ~ Randy Pausch

Gold standard, which the United States had dropped in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday the United States might wind up like Germany in the 1920s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage - the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.1 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler. ~ Alice Schroeder

The first days of January 1942 brought enormous amounts of snow. The reader already knows what snow meant for the clergy. But this time the torture surpassed the bounds of the endurable. At the same time the thermometer hovered between 5 and 15 degrees below zero. From morning till night we scraped, shoveled, and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of snow to the brook. The work detail consisted of more than 1,000 clergymen, forced to keep moving by SS men and Capos who kicked us and beat us with truncheons.

We had to make rounds with the wheelbarrows from the assembly square to the brook and back. Not a moment of rest was allowed, and much of the time we were forced to run.

At one point I tripped over my barrow and fell, and it took me a while to get up again. An SS man dashed over and ordered me to turn with the full load. He ran beside me, beating me constantly with a leather strap. When I got to the brook I was not allowed to dump out the heavy snow, but had to make a second complete round with it instead.

When the guard finally went off and I tried to let go of the wheelbarrow, I found that one of my hands was frozen fast to it. I had to blow on it with warm breath to get it free. ~ Jean Bernard