Dishcloth Quotes

The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.

Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it home. Nutmeg arms leaned over windowsills, gnarled ebony legs carried groceries up double flights of steps, and saffron hands strung out wet laundry on backyard lines. Their perspiration mingled with the steam from boiling pots of smoked pork greens, and it curled on the edges of the aroma of vinegar douches and Evening in Paris cologne that drifted through the street where they stood together - hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women who threw their heads back when they laughed and exposed strong teeth and dark gums. They cursed, badgered, worshiped, and shared their men. Their love drove them to fling dishcloths in someone else's kitchen to help him make the rent, or to fling hot lye to help him forget that bitch behind the counter at the five-and-dime. They were hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place. They came, they went, grew up, and grew old beyond their years. Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story.

The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dishcloth.

You’re an English major, aren't you?” “Hey!” Immediately retreating, Keith swatted at him with a dishcloth. “Leave my brain alone. It’s resting.” “Sorry, sorry.” He leaned away, hands up to display his surrender. “I didn't mean it, I take it back.” “You’d better

I looked at the rusty-bottomed bread tin swiped too often by the dishcloth, and the pots sitting on the stove, washed but not put away, and the motto supplied by Fairholme Dairy: The Lord is the Heart of Our House. All these things stupidly waiting for the day to begin and not knowing that it had been hollowed out by catastrophe.

Do not waste....Don't waste the vegetable-washing water, splash it on the grapefruit tree instead....Don't waste anything made of glass or plastic because glass and plastic can be reused ad nauseam....Don't waste...a string for retying, a rubber band for conquering dry noodles or hair, rice bags for dishcloths, fish bones for fertilizer....Anything that comes out of the earth must be returned to the earth...."If everyone uses more than their share, how can the earth support us?"

On good days, Quinn and Eugene regard each other as pieces of strange furniture brought in by Yula to add further clutter to the house. Eugene likens his grandfather to a bookshelf put in front of a window, blocking all light, and Quinn thinks the boy is like a footstool pushed carelessly to the centre of the room, a booby trap, something to trip over and skin one's knee. Whirling around them like a dishcloth after dust is Yula, who serves them soup and wonders why her father and son can't see each other as she sees them.

He wouldn’t have understood. He wouldn’t have been able to understand in the least the desire, the pure quintessential need of my readers for escape, a thing I myself understood only too well. Life had been hard on them and they had not fought back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high wind. Escape wasn’t a luxury for them, it was a necessity. They had to get it somehow. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers. They could be taken in capsule form, quickly and discreetly, during those moments when the hair-dryer was stiffening the curls around their plastic rollers or the bath oil in the bath was turning their skins to pink velvet, leaving a ring in the tub to be removed later with Ajax Cleanser, which would make their hands smell like a hospital and cause their husbands to remark that they were about as sexy as a dishcloth. Then they would mourn their lack of beauty, their departing youth.… I knew all about escape, I was brought up on it.

Twenty-Five Ways to Be a Good Listener        1. Be patient.        2. Don’t complete his sentences.        3. Let him finish, even if he seems to be rambling.        4. Don’t interrupt.        5. Face your husband and make eye contact.        6. Lean forward, if you are seated, to show you are interested.        7. Stop what you are doing.        8. Ask good questions and avoid the word “why.”        9. Ask his opinion about something that happened to you.      10. Ask him for his advice on a decision you have to make.      11. Don’t jump to conclusions.      12. Don’t give unsolicited advice.      13. Don’t change the subject until he is finished with a subject.      14. Make verbal responses such as, “I see,” “Really,” “Uh-huh,” to show you’re paying attention.      15. Turn off the TV.      16. Put down the dishcloth, book, hairbrush, etc.      17. Encourage him to tell you more. “What else did he say?” “What did she do next?”      18. When he is telling of a struggle, rephrase and repeat what you heard. “What I hear you saying is that you felt your boss was being unfair when he asked you to take on three more clients with no extra compensation.”      19. Let the telephone ring if he is in the middle of telling you something.      20. Don’t glance at your watch or cross your arms.      21. Don’t ask him to hurry.      22. If a child interrupts, tell him or her to wait until daddy is finished talking.      23. Don’t tell him how he should have handled the situation differently.      24. Don’t act bored.      25. Thank him for sharing with you.

some point over the next few hours, she left some food and water for her children in their room and opened their bedroom window. She wrote out the name of her doctor, with a telephone number, and stuck it to the baby carriage in the hallway. Then she took towels, dishcloths, and tape and sealed the kitchen door. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the oven, and took her own life. 2. Poets die young. That is not just a cliché. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.

Yes, I can quite well believe that; I’m sure I shall never wish to escape you. But you are a mysterious Master.” “You seem to me rather an exacting servant. I have shaped myself like a jobbing gardener, I am sitting on the grass beside you (I’ll have one of your apples if I may. They are a fruit I am particularly fond of), I am doing everything in my power to be agreeable and reassuring… What more do you want?” “That is exactly what I complain of. You are too lifelike to be natural; why, it might be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. No! if I am really a witch, treat me as such. Satisfy my curiosity. Tell me about yourself.” “Tell me first what you think,” he answered. “I think”—she began cautiously (while he hid his cards it would not do to show all hers)—“I think you are a kind of black knight, wandering about and succoring decayed gentlewomen.” “There are warlocks too, remember.” “I can’t take warlocks so seriously, not as a class. It is we witches who count. We have more need of you. Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance. Do you understand?” He was silent. She continued, slowly, knitting her brows in the effort to make clear to herself and him the thought that was in her mind: “It’s like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees from the train. You know. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all. And all the time being thrust further down into dullness when the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull.

irons, ready to dip them in a bucket of extremely dirty water and dry them on the rag of a dishcloth. ‘Tomorrow is another day, as my dear old gran used to say, so comfort yourself, girls, with the fact that it can only get better.’ It had been warm, almost muggy, in the cookhouse, but the moment Maddy and Marigold followed their companions out through the open doorway they walked into a snowstorm. Maddy clutched Marigold’s arm and bawled directly in her ear, tilting her friend’s cap in order to do so. ‘Want to go to the NAAFI and write letters?’ Marigold shook her head and they dived into their hut and slammed the

It hurt my heart with a heaviness as though a damp and dirty dishcloth lay across it.

The no-slip condition makes trouble—if subtle trouble—in our everyday lives. One swipe of a dishcloth works as well as lot of flowing hot water. The dishcloth contacts the dish, sweeping away surface mess; the flowing water doesn’t make such effective contact. Hot water works better than cold, not just because more substances dissolve in hot water, but because hot water has a much lower viscosity; that means more fluid moves close to the dish. Dust accumulates on the surfaces of fan blades; the low flow right near a blade’s surface isn’t enough to dislodge it.

He called the operator from the phone in the kitchen and then left a message for Mr. Keane at his office. As luck would have it, the first kitchen drawer he pulled open was full of dish towels and he grabbed the lot of them. The next held the kitchen scissors and bakery string and even—she might have planned this—a turkey baster, all of which he gathered up, just in case. He wet one of the dishcloths with cool water at the sink, and then returned to her. She was not the housekeeper his own wife was—there were crumbs on the kitchen table and stained teacups in the sink—but there was a sweetness in the way she asked when he leaned over her if she could just take hold of his arm.

A dishpan with a jumbled, unfolded, heap of towels, dishcloths, and sponges provides sufficient organization. Dishwashing liquid sits next to the sink and old, extraneous kitchen cleaning supplies have been eliminated so that the cabinet contains only those supplies for which there is an imminent need.

The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over his instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouth-pieces; the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield. I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. “I don’t want to go, Clark, I don’t want to go!” I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.

Who’s Veronica then?” Jason paused his movements and inhaled a deep breath. “The girl from the photo?” “Uh-huh.” “Don’t trust everything you read.” “There must be some truth in here.” “Sure. Some. Most of it is crap. It’s publicity.” “She’s pretty.” “She was a mistake. That’s all.” She didn’t look like a mistake to Rhea. Her moist lips pressed against Jason’s cheek, somewhere in the French Riviera, overlooking the endless azure. Ah, no. Definitely not a mistake. Rhea swallowed hard, waiting for a believable explanation. Jason’s gaze shifted to her, and he dropped the knife, reaching for a dishcloth. Wiping his hands, he stepped closer and ran his fingers along her cheek. A strand of hair got caught in her lip balm and he brushed it off her face and tucked it behind her ear. “You have nothing to worry about, Rhea. There are things from my past I’m not proud of. But if it’ll make you feel better, you can ask me anything you want to know.

And since January I have been wearing four or five new pairs of pants a day, all of which will eventually take pride of place, when suitably soiled, in vending machines on the streets of Tokyo's most fashionable districts. My wife, of course, finds this turn of events ridiculous, but she will be laughing on the other side of her stupid face when the flyblown briefs she currently uses as dishcloths become priceless collector's items.

Well, I was sure this handsome buck would follow us both out, but when I got back to the kitchen, there he still was picking at some leftover Cajun popcorn in a bowl on the counter. "Oh, don't eat that!" I almost screamed. "It's awful cold. And, besides, you need to dip it in garlic mayonnaise for it to be really good." "I think it's pretty good as is," he said, and suddenly I began to wonder if maybe I looked too heavy in the loose harlequin pants and metallic gold shirt I was wearing. "What's it called?" "Cajun popcorn." "But it's fried shrimp, isn't it?" "Yeah, though over in Louisiana they usually use crawfish." "Why's it called popcorn?" "I have no earthly idea. Maybe 'cause people it fast as popcorn." "What all's in it?" I was now rinsing and drying some platters with a dishcloth and in a hurry to put out some more nutty fingers. "You do ask a lot of questions, Mr. Webster," I kidded him. "Sure you're not some hotshot chef out looking to steal recipes?" He laughed and said, "Jerry. Call me Jerry. And no, I'm no recipe thief. I simply love good food and am always looking for new ideas." "Okay, Jerry, there's everything in that battered popcorn except the kitchen stove." "Like what?" he kept on. "Like garlic and onion and a few hundred herbs and spices- and lots of love." He smiled and asked, "Deep fried?" "Yep, in peanut oil, but not too long- no more than about two minutes. Gotta be crisp on the outside but not overcooked.

Once the tables had been wiped clean, Mummer draped the dishcloth over the tap in the kitchen, Farther switched off the lights and we went out into the slush. It seemed an absurd ending to a life.