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Quotes About Waste

Life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.
~ Virginia Woolf
Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?
~ Virginia Woolf
As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had been helped by the interests of a difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.
~ Virginia Woolf
Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fin turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fin of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time come to uncover and coax into words.
~ Virginia Woolf
She trailed her fingers along the book spines as she wandered around the room. "My father thinks reading is a waste of time." Hunter thought her father was a waste of space.
~ Larissa Ione
Most Americans could retire on what they waste on car loans.
~ Larry Burkett
Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.
~ Laura Miller
Si haces cuentas, puedes pasar entre tres y cuatro horas al día en actividades superfluas
~ Laura Vanderkam
We don't burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone's rear end a long time ago.
~ Celeste Ng
ground up into dingy gray, flushed down into the sewer in a mess of shit and piss. Something goes hot and liquid behind his eyes.
~ Celeste Ng
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
~ Charles Darwin
Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson," replied Miss Jellyby; "but what comfort is his family to him? His family is nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, confusion, and wretchedness. His scrambling home, from week's end to week's end, is like one great washing-day — only nothing's washed!
~ Charles Dickens
Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.
~ Charles Dickens
Competition and the accumulation of more than one needs are the natural response to a perceived scarcity of resources. The obscene overconsumption and waste of our society arise from our poverty: the deficit of being that afflicts the discrete and separate self, the scarcity of money in an interest-based system, the poverty of relationship that comes from the severance of our ties to community and to nature, the relentless pressure to do anything, anything at all, to make a living.
~ Charles Eisenstein
June, thy beauty is a snare, To waste time in visions rare; Of vain dreaming, oh, beware!
~ Caroline May, 1887
Please don't throw your cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light.
~ Author Unknown
The key is simply to uncover value in waste.
~ Gunter Pauli
Lust on this scale was rare: it seemed a crime to waste it.
~ Guy Bellamy
Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?
~ James Joyce
excrementitious intelligence...
~ James Joyce
A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle-bunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggling upwards from all the ordure through the bristling grey-green weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.
~ James Joyce
Most criminals are stupid. They creep $500,000 homes in the Garden District, load up two dozen bottles of gin, whiskey, vermouth, and Collins mix in a $2,000 Irish linen tablecloth and later drink the booze and throw the tablecloth away.
~ James Lee Burke
At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself—the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?
~ James Lee Burke
You put me in mind of a man who spent his last cent on Ex-Lax and forgot the pay toilet cost a dime.
~ James Lee Burke