Trash Quotes

“A fine glass vase goes from treasure to trash, the moment it is broken. Fortunately, something else happens to you and me. Pick up your pieces. Then, help me gather mine.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“When God takes out the trash, don't go digging back through it. Trust Him.”
― Amaka Imani Nkosazana, Heart Crush

“When someone you love makes compassion, kindness, forgiveness, respect and God an option, you can be sure they have made you an option, as well.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Rubbish!" screamed a fat, elderly woman, in Richard's ear, as he passed her malodorous stall. "Junk!" She continued. "Garbage! Trash! Offal! Debris! Come and get it! Nothing whole or undamaged! Crap, tripe, and useless piles of shit. You know you want it.”
― Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

“Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“If you ever wonder whether or not someone is too good for you, I'd advise going through their trash. Really. No one looks superior after that.”
― Ally Carter, I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

“It's called loitering, which is like littering with human beings as the trash.”
― Neal Shusterman, The Schwa Was Here

“She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

“On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.”
― Edward Conlon, Blue Blood

“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Compact trash into a cube. Then slice it into thin layers and BOOM—you’ve got pieces of modern art. Each sliver belongs in a museum, doing what it’s designed to do—launder money.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“Trash?" echoed Cadfael, mildly and thoughtfully.

"Oh, pleasant to have, and useful, I know. But once you have enough of it for your needs, the rest of it is trash. Can you eat it, wear it, ride it, keep off the rain and the cold with it, read it, play music on it, make love to it?”
― Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many

“Only Bob Dylan knows which of his songs belong in the trash and which belong in the garbage. I’m so ignorant, I’d say either one works.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks

“Cleaning up is expensive; arson is cheap.”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“As far as he was concerned, a kid who’d won life’s lottery because of his genes and not his own hard work wasn’t worth the trash in the gutter. He wasn’t about to address as equals those who had no interest in knowing the difference.”
― Rieko Yoshihara, Ai no Kusabi Vol. 4: Suggestion

“Movies are not good or bad because of their subjects but because of their treatments of their subjects. Any plot can be made into trash, and probably any plot can be made into greatness.”
― Roger Ebert

“If you have a garbage in head, house cleaners won't help you.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Jay got up and walked to the trash to scrape off his plate, but when the trash can popped open, he stopped and reached in. Mae got cold inside. Shit. That was where she had put everything from her satisfying clear-out earlier in the day, and she hadn't covered up the things she was discarding with other trash, as she usually did. Damn it! She knew exactly what was coming. Jay stood up with a ratty stuffed chicken in his hand.
"You can't throw this away. Ryder loves this."
He did, but Mae hated it. The little stuffed chicken---a gift from her sister when Ryder was born---had grown gray and smelly and was beyond washing, and Mae had been able to slip it away from Ryder's bed for several nights running. With the trip, she figured he would forget about it, although she'd felt a tiny twinge of regret as she'd stuffed it into the trash can. It was just that it was so gross now, and there were so many stuffies. If she didn't get rid of them, they'd take over.
"He doesn't care about it. Not really," she said. It sounded weak, even to her. "It's so filthy, Jay. He's little. He'll like other things. It's just junk, anyway."
Jay turned on her. "You don't always get to decide what's junk, Mae. You don't get to pick and choose everything we have and everything we do and everywhere we go."
"I don't. Just---some things. And it's not the same."
Throwing away a toy was not the same as making all their life decisions---and how could she not make decisions right now, when everything Jay wanted to do felt so precarious? Couldn't he see that they wanted the same things, for the world to stay nice and safe and solid around Madison and Ryder and around themselves? She knew Jay had moved around a lot as a kid, and that at least once his dad had handed him a shoebox and told him if it didn't fit in there, it couldn't come. But sometimes you had to get rid of those things, even things you once loved, to make room for better things.
And sometimes you made mistakes. Don't bring up the baseball glove. Don't bring up the baseball glove.
She hadn't known the baseball glove was a perfectly worn-in classic Rawlings. Or that Jay had been hoping Madison or Ryder might use it someday. All she'd seen was that it was old. And kinda moldy. She honestly hadn't thought he would notice it was gone.”
― K.J. Dell'Antonia, The Chicken Sisters

“When trash can be turned into food, man will have an abundance to eat.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“If you have not used it in the last year, it probably belongs in the trash!”
― Steven Magee

“There’s always room for Jello,” my mom laughs. “Yeah, in the trash can.”
― GLEN NESBITT, DELETE2

“If you use sex whenever you want with whomever you want, you’re treating it like trash, like it means nothing. Imagine a piece of duct tape. It’s got a purpose, it’s designed to stick to something, but if you stick it to the dog and rip it off, then the floor, the wall, the toilet, the neighbor’s pit, after that, it just won’t work right anymore. When you finally find your spouse and try to connect with them, there will be all sorts of crud in the way. It might be a physical STD, or it could be an emotional one that spreads through your relationship and life like an infection.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“The blight of our humanity rests in the fact that we have pushed aside the treasures of God in pursuit of the scrapes of men.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“You were the stray cat who wandered into my verses and finally found your way home—dumpster diving deep within yourself.”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones, Sleeping With Enormity: The Art Of Seducing Your Dreams & Living With Passion

“Death is trash. Love is a robust engagement
with the trash of another.”
― Joshua Bennett, The Study of Human Life

“My friends often state in the midst of otherwise
loving group chat missives that life is trash, though

we all keep trying to make one for some reason
or another”
― Joshua Bennett, The Study of Human Life

“Built-in obsolescence keeps the economy humming. Many economists argue it's a vital component of the system. We never stop replacing stuff, stores never stop selling stuff, and factories never stop making stuff. The downside, of course, is we also never stop throwing stuff away.”
― Derf Backderf, Trashed: A Graphic Novel

“Rolling the plastic can to the curb in pink light, she
imagines she might be the only person left alive--surprised that the
thought is not unbearable, surprised by how peculiarly her solitude has
tuned her.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems