Quotes About Latrines

Bad drove out bad, and to imbibe foul odors was a useful protection. According to another contemporary writer, John Colle: "Attendants who take care of latrines are nearly all to be considered immune." It was not unknown for apprehensive citizens to spend hours each day crouched over a latrine absorbing the fetid smells.

The atmosphere of the night, the smell rising from the blocked latrines, overflowing with shit and yellow water, stir childhood memories which rise up like a black soil mined by moles.

Lissa lowered her voice and added, I might not even go to school anyway. I might defer and join the Peace Corps and go to Africa and shave my head and dig latrines. Shave your head? I said, because, really, this was the most ludicrous part of the whole thing. You? Do you have any idea how ugly most people's bare heads are? They've got all kinds of bumps, Lissa. And you won't know until it's too late and you're flat-out bald.

twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines.

He told me that in the hallways at Versailles, there hung a faint, ever-so-faint smell of human excrement, "because as the chambermaids hurried along a tiny bit would always splash from the pots." Many years later I realized that he was half-remembering a detail from the court of Louis XV, namely that the latrines were so few and so poorly placed at the palace, the marquesses used to steal away and relieve themselves on stairwells and behind the beautiful furniture...

Only children and fools, who confused tales of war with war itself, could think the task simple. For them, war was battle, and they always squinted in surprise when veterans spoke of latrines and cannibalism and gangrenous feet and so on.

In villages across the developing world, governments have provided reasonable enough latrines that have again and again been turned into storage spaces or simply abandoned. In India alone, millions of government-funded latrines have become goat-sheds. Some had been built near kitchens, a taboo in Indian households.

The only 18th-century writer to be revived by the admiration of our contemporaries is de Sade. Visitors to a palace who admire nothing but the latrines.