Chimney Sweep Quotes

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She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella.
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4))
Nick, fetch my car, fetch my clothes, sweep the chimney, make my bed, watch my psychopath, fetch my slippers.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Night Embrace (Dark-Hunter, #2))
Every head turned to see two more security guards appear, each holding a Bagshaw by the back of the neck (which might have been considerably less conspicuous had the Bagshaws not been dressed as chimney sweeps). Kat turned back to Hale. 'The Mary Poppins?' 'Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Ally Carter (Uncommon Criminals (Heist Society, #2))
The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.
Franz Kafka
Nick, fetch my car, fetch my clothes, sweep the chimney, make my bed, watch my psychopath, fetch my slippers.’ Yeah, I’ll fetch those slippers and stick them someplace real uncomfortable. I swear, my mother should have named me Fido. (Nick)
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Night Embrace (Dark-Hunter, #2))
Sebastian Grey. The worrds rang like a miserable moan in her head. On the list of men she ought not to be kissing, he had to rank at the top, along with the King, Lord Liverpool, and the chimney sweep.
Julia Quinn (Ten Things I Love About You (Bevelstoke, #3))
A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.
G.K. Chesterton (The Innocence of Father Brown)
I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Literature)
Apparently, he uses disguises sometimes in the course of his investigations. In his liaison with Mariah, he used them for discretion. He came to her once dressed as a chimney sweep. Quite invigorating, don't you think?
Deanna Raybourn (Silent in the Grave (Lady Julia Grey, #1))
He had never spoken to Uncle Richard, but he knew that he was a radiologist who put tubes into people's groins and pushed them up into their brains to clear blockages like chimney sweeps did and this was a glorious idea.
Mark Haddon (The Red House)
Blockades of Earth by the other planets meant as little to him as chimney-sweeping to a duck. J.M. Hushour, Eddies in the Space-Time Continuum
J.M. Hushour
No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me. Life among the dead. This was where I was meant to be!
Alan Bradley (As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce, #7))
No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me. Life among the dead. This was where I was meant to be! What a revelation! And what a place to have it! I could succeed at whatever I chose. I could, for instance, become an undertaker. Or a pathologist. A detective, a gravedigger, a tombstone maker, or even the world's greatest murderer. Suddenly the world was my oyster—even if it was a dead one.
Alan Bradley (As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce, #7))
But I see you're not standing in a bleedin' shadow, Perks, nor have you done anything to change your bleedin' shape, you're silhouetted against the bleedin' light and your sabre's shining like a diamond in a chimney-sweep's bleedin' ear'ole! Explain!" "It's because of the one C, sarge!" said Polly, still staring straight ahead. "And that is?" "Colour, sarge! I'm wearing bleedin' red and white in a bleedin' grey forest, sarge!
Terry Pratchett (Monstrous Regiment (Discworld, #31; Industrial Revolution, #3))
She’d become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she’d taken to it well. She’d sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she’d beat herself to death with her own umbrella.
Terry Pratchett (Hogfather (Discworld, #20))
What the deuce does he mean by all this? I thought I had found a clever man who would give me good advice, and I find a chimney-sweep, who, instead of speaking to me, plays at mora.
Molière (Delphi Complete Works of Molière (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 18))
Leave a chimney-sweep alone when you see him, Chiltern. Should he run against you, then remember that it is one of the necessary penalties of clean linen that it is apt to be soiled.
Anthony Trollope (The Prime Minister)
A lot of Britain’s secret war was fought at the end of long, sweeping drives like this one, running through neglected parks, between overgrown rhododendrons and dripping elms, to hidden country houses where codes were broken, special operations planned, the conversations of captured Nazi generals bugged, spies interrogated, agents trained. Kay had walked this drive for the past two years – always with an unwanted memory of school – and at the end of it stood Danesfield House, a mock-Elizabethan mansion, built at the turn of the century, as sparkling white as the icing on a wedding cake, with crenellated walls, steep red roofs and tall red-brick chimneys.
Robert Harris (V2: A Novel of World War II)
When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep![a] So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep. There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said, "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." And so he was quiet; and that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, - That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black. And by came an angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins and set them all free; Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river, and shine in the sun. Then naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind; And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father, and never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark, And got with our bags and our brushes to work. Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm; So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
William Blake (The Complete Poems)
Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground on either side and a few poorly-stocked little shops. Several ultra-fast staircases give access to the building, running up from the cellars to the roof-gardens. The comfort of this place leaves nothing to be desired and only the greatest luxury is acceptable, but every Friday the residents gather on the ground floor to read from a bible bound in the skin of a blind man. The psalmic words they intone rise up through the pipes, sigh in the stoves and sweep the chimneys coated inside with black grease which leaves dirt on the skin. Water runs constantly in the bathrooms and the showers beat down on the numbered bodies, peppering them with sand. On Sundays the bed linen unrolls by itself and nobody makes love. For this tower block, like an obscure phallus scraping the vulva of the sky, is usually a hive of sexual activity. The most beautiful woman lives there, but no-one has ever known her. It is said, that dressed in furs and feathers, she keeps herself shut away in a first-floor apartment as if in a white safe. Her windows are scissors which cut short both shadow and breath. Her name is AURORA.
Michel Leiris (Aurora)
So Nan told Charlie about the whole thing. How the baby Jesus was born in a basket and how a wicked king tried to kidnap him but then a big bearded angel named Father Christmas fought the king. “And then he tossed the baby Jesus down the chimney of a girl named Mary, and that was the first Christmas present.
Jonathan Auxier (Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster)
Her mind raced through the dark, throwing open doors, knocking over cabinets, searching for anything it ever remembered seeing. Then the lightning flashed again. Carolina captured it before it even struck land, a jagged scar of silver light suspended over the black chimneys of a sleeping city. She narrowed her eyes at the incomplete bolt until it shimmered and broke. With one sweeping glance, she cast the bits of light across the eastern sky as stars. Thunder roared in her ears and lightning cut the sky again. Her stars held steady over a ghostly desert. Another bolt charged down the night, but she caught it before it could turn the sand to glass, broke it into pieces, and lit the west.
Carey Wallace (The Blind Contessa's New Machine)
At such a time [at dawn] I would dream of being a baker who delivers bread, a fitter from the electric company, or an insurance man collecting the weekly installments. Or at least a chimney sweep. In the morning, at dawn, I would enter some half-opened gateway, still lighted by the watchman's lantern. I would put two fingers to my hat, crack a joke, and enter the labyrinth to leave late in the evening, at the other end of the city. I would spend all day going from apartment to apartment, conducting one never-ending conversation from one end of the city to the other, divided into parts among the householders; I would ask something in one apartment and receive a reply in another, make a joke in one place and collect the fruits of laughter in the third or fourth. Among the banging of doors I would squeeze through narrow passages, through bedrooms full of furniture, I would upset chamberpots, walk into squeaking perambulators in which babies cry, pick up rattles dropped by infants. I would stop for longer than necessary in kitchens and hallways, where servant girls were tidying up. The girls, busy, would stretch their young legs, tauten their high insteps, play with their cheap shining shoes, or clack around in loose slippers.
Bruno Schulz (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass)
I hate this complete obsession with class, especially at this place, you can hardly say 'hello' to anyone before they are getting all prolier-than-thou and telling you about how their dad's a one eyed chimney-sweep with rickets, and how they've still got an outside loo, and have never been on a plane or whatever, all that dubious crap, most of which is usually lies anyway, and I'm thinking why are you telling me this? Am I meant to feel guilty? D'you think it's my fault or something, or are you just feeling pleased with yourself for escaping your pre-determined social role or some self congratulatory bullshit? I mean, what does it matter anyway? People are people, if you ask me, and they rise or fall by their own talents and merits, and their own labours, and blaming the fact they've got a settee rather than a sofa, or eat tea rather tan dinner, that's just an excuse, it's just whining self-pity and shoddy thinking.... I don;t make judgements about other people because of their background and I expect people to treat me with the same courtesy... It's my parent's moeny and its not as if they got it from nicking people's dole or running sweatshops in Johannesburg or something. They worked fucking hard for what they've got. It's a privilege and they treat it as such and they do their best to give something back. But if you ask me, theres no snob like an inverted snob... Im just so fucking bored of people trying to pass plain old envy off as some sort of virtue.
David Nicholls (Starter for Ten)
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air. Torn posters flutter; coldly sound The boom of trams and the rattle of hooves, And the clerks who hurry to the station Look, shuddering, over the eastern rooves, Thinking, each one, "Here comes the winter! "Please God I keep my job this year!" And bleakly, as the cold strikes through Their entrails like an icy spear, They think of rent, rates, season tickets, Insurance, coal, the skivvy's wages, Boots, school-bills and the next installment Upon the two twin beds from Drage's. For if in careless summer days In groves of Ashtaroth we whored, Repentant now, when winds blow cold, We kneel before our rightful lord; The lord of all, the money-god, Who rules us blood and hand and brain, Who gives the roof that stops the wind, And, giving, takes away again; Who spies with jealous, watchful care, Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways, Who picks our words and cuts our clothes, And maps the pattern of our days; Who chills our anger, curbs our hope. And buys our lives and pays with toys, Who claims as tribute broken faith, Accepted insults, muted joys; Who binds with chains the poet's wit, The navvy's strength, the soldier's pride, And lays the sleek, estranging shield Between the lover and his bride.
George Orwell
Savoyard chimney sweep from Annecy and a statuette she and
Annie Ernaux (A Woman's Story)
Charcoal—the very thing Ban is made of—is so messy. I was covered from my brow to my waist like the chimney sweep in the poems of William Blake in every art class of my youth. As a teenager, I used to play truant every Wednesday and catch the train to Pimlico, still in my uniform and with my packed lunch, as if I was going to school. I went to the Tate—every Wednesday—like clockwork—to look—at the illuminated books—of Blake—in a very dark room intended to preserve—the golden ink and peacock green or blue embellishments. The error here is that I chose to write my book in place where these colors and memories are not readily available. There is no bank. Instead, I scream them—I scream the colors each to each—and this is difficult. It is difficult to work in simple, powerful ways with the proxy memories. For weeks at a time, I stopped writing—and when I returned, Ban was gone. She continued on without me, and what I had to do next will make you dislike me even more than you already do. I had to eat was on the floor. I had to make an artifact out of something that had left no artifacts. I had to put the charcoal in my mouth and choke it down.
Bhanu Kapil (Ban en Banlieue)
You’ve only talked like that since you became a horrid what’s-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?” “A saint,” said Father Brown. “I think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.
G.K. Chesterton (The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books])
In 1788, the Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in Parliament, preventing master sweeps from employing children under eight (children over eight were allowed to be apprenticed).
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
Oh, how many there are who are rich in their own good works and cannot therefore come to Christ! "I will not be saved," they say, "in the same way as the harlot or the swearer." What! go to heaven in the same way as a chimney sweep. Is there no pathway to glory but the path which led the thief there? I will not be saved that way. Such proud boasters must remain without the living water; but, "WHOSOEVER WILL, LET HIM TAKE THE WATER OF LIFE FREELY.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Morning and Evening Daily Devotions with Charles Spurgeon Book (Annotated))
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Baileysupplies
In quick succession came the sweeping of chimneys, the clearing of pantries, and the shrouding of furniture. It was just as if the family were returning to St. Petersburg for the season, except that the dogs were released from their kennels, the horses from their stables, and the servants from their duties. Then, having filled a single wagon with some of the finest of the Rostovs’ furniture, the Count bolted the doors and set out for Moscow.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
Both Phenomenology and Logic are engaged in a continuous project of self-purging. Both are engaged in cleaning activities—chimney-sweeping and whitewashing (although it is hard to say which is which). Both are involved in tasks of Herculean proportions: both are clearing out the Augean stables of tradition; both must clear away the debris of accumulated prejudice and presupposition.
Slavoj Žižek (Sex and the Failed Absolute)
For a well-tuned slave, the crudest cleaning woman or chimney sweep can have an overwhelming charm if the discipline is engulfing.
A.N. Roquelaure (Beauty's Punishment (Sleeping Beauty, #2))
Sitting in the courtyard, I watch the woman sweeping. I luxuriate in the sound of the bristles of her besom against the ground. She sweeps in an invisible pattern only she understands. I study her hands. They are blackened with chimney dust— not unlike the soft dust she’s now sweeping. It rises in a cloud above her, which makes me wonder: Where does it come from? The dust on our overworked hands and travelled shoes. The dust we inhale and cough into our handkerchiefs. The house dust, the road dust, the concrete dust, and cosmic dust. Where are they born? Perhaps they come from our aged bodies. We shed our skins like we shed our beauty— not all at once. And we walk freely on this blanket of dust without paying any mind to our ancestors, though we walk on them! Tread softly, for you tread on Yeats’s wrists and Poe’s elbows. You tread on van Gogh’s ears and Keller’s eyes. You breathe in your grandfather’s lover and the little girl you were when you were four. You smell them after the first rain in a long dry spell, or when an old lamp smoulders the bulb quite well. These all serve as reminders of our dusty secret: we are all dust under dust under dust. So next time it settles, remember to ask the dust!
Kamand Kojouri (God, Does Humanity Exist?)
Was this what it was like to be in love? Did it make a man stupid? It had certainly made Hartwell stupid, but if love was a plummet into idiocy, Hartwell had only been standing on a step stool to begin with. Gale was standing on a chimney sweep’s ladder and had a lot farther to fall.
J.A. Rock (A Case for Christmas (The Lords of Bucknall Club, #2))
A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.
Agatha Christie (British Mysteries Boxed Set)
But between the sweep of shore and the sky, a jagged interruption to the natural landscape, were the uncompromising grey Victorian roofs and chimneys and towers of Scallan Lodge.
Jane Renshaw (The Au Pair)
Everyone comes from somewhere, Twickham—even the lowest chimney sweep could trace his bloody lineage back six hundred years if he had the leisure and money to do so.
Minerva Spencer (Phoebe (The Bellamy Sisters #1))
Reformers and friendly societies spent more than a century trying to ban climbing until finally a boy named George Brewster suffered a horrific death on the job. The ensuing scandal changed the tide of public opinion and led to the passing of the Chimney Sweepers Act 1875—at long last marking the end of climbing across England.
Jonathan Auxier (Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster)
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air
George Orwell (Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
Hot Sauce Shrine" I used to be a high priestess of tail-feather feel-good mumbo jumbo, naysayer extraordinaire cobbling together some crazy quilt catechism to cling to as I tangled in the world's thorns, frantic, fearing the chill soon to come. I haven't turned holy roller or handler of snakes, but things changed slowly, or all at once. Maybe it was when I drove through a dust devil and inhaled its grit of cut grass and cigarette butts. I've taken to praying since the whirlwind shook me loose, or anyway I dip my head at stoplights until I get distracted by scenery, or birds, and the prayers come out confused. I'm clueless—my angel of place smokes blunts and speaks to me in bug bite braille. I know to visit Saint Roch and turn his statue to the wall, but I hunger for alone time on an island with an organ that plays itself, or to whisper all my secrets to the hot sauce shrine. I read that the world is a dream of God, and now I don't know what to do with my hands. The world is God's dream and I am a sparrow passing through song and the brass glow of fire, or maybe that is wrong, and I'm trapped inside, stunned against the glass or down the chimney, terrified of kind hands that sweep me to the door. When I wake I'm walking the moonlit labyrinth with wet feet, and the birds are quiet because I have terrified them with the thunder of my stumbling. Oh God of everything that creeps, I light a candle and ask my question: Is it pilgrimage enough if I spend my life remembering the few seconds I was a bird?
Alison Pelegrin (Waterlines: Poems)
I can assure you, Jane,” every time he said her name she felt a little zing down to her core, “that I have never met a Christmas project that I couldn’t handle. It’s always been my favorite holiday, and I can help with everything from stuffing your stockings to sweeping your chimney. I’ve got this season under wraps.
Laurelin Paige (Holiday for Hire)
The newspaper,” Chloe says. “Your picture’s on the front page.” I groan. “How bad do I look?” “Like the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins.
Riley Sager (Lock Every Door)
Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’ It is worth wondering what the blind spots of our age might be. What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps?
Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
On March 26, 1871, French workers cheered as the socialist red flag waved atop the Tuileries Palace. The Commune lasted less than three months against the army of the Third French Republic. Communard cannons were set amid barricades made from cobblestones and mattresses, some on the steep hills of Montmartre. The last barricades were smashed during the “Bloody Week” massacre beginning May 18. Immediate executions, death in prisons, and exile followed. “An orgy of killing took place. Many innocent were killed,” mistaken for Communards, including chimney sweeps “on the assumption that their hands had been blackened by gunpowder.” In two prisons, some 2,300 were said to be shot in two days. As reprisals continued, even anti-Communard newspapers implored “Let us kill no more!” Some 25,000 Communards were allegedly killed, another 6,000 were executed or died in prison, and 7,500 were exiled.
Myra MacPherson (The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age)
With films—as with novels, which I devoured with the regularity of a metronome—I gave myself no limits: I fell into every trap the author or director set for me, lost myself with relish in the labyrinths of a fictitious world. I think of that friend of Mary Poppins, the chimney sweep, and the amazing chalk pictures he drew: you could jump into them and become reincarnated. I dreamed of meeting him.
Jean-Philippe Blondel (Exposed)
fingernails; nostrils; shoelaces the gas line is leaking, the bird is out of the cage, the skyline is dotted with vultures; Benny finally got off the stuff and Betty got a job as a waitress; the chimney sweep was quite delicate and giggled up through the soot. I walked miles through the city and saw nothing as a giant claw ate at my stomach and the inside of my head felt airy as if I was about to go mad. it's not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there's no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters, stupid intellectuals. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are sawdust to the brain. I watch the boxing matches and take notes on futility. the gate springs open again and there are the beautiful silks riding against the sky. such a sadness: everything trying to break through into blossom. everyday should be a miracle instead of a machination.
Charles Bukowski
Betty looked over all the permed, hairsprayed, indignant heads.
Tamatha Cain (Song of the Chimney Sweep)