Ditch Digger Quotes

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.

There are better and worse ditch diggers and garbage collectors. People who work in industry know that no matter how apparently mindless a job is, the job can still be done better or worse, with significant economic consequences.

You begin to suspect, as you gaze through this you-shaped hole of insight and fire, that though it is the most important thing you own — never deny that for an instant — it has not shielded you from anything terribly important. The only consolation is that though one could have thrown it away at any time, morning or night, one didn't. One chose to endure. Without any assurance of immortality, or even competence, one only knows one has not been cheated out of the consolation of carpenters, accountants, doctors, ditch-diggers, the ordinary people who must do useful things to be happy. Meander along, then, half blind and a little mad, wondering when you actually learned — was it before you began? — the terrifying fact that had you thrown it away, your wound would have been no more likely to heal: indeed, in an affluent society such as this, you might even have gone on making songs, poems, pictures, and getting paid. The only difference would have been — and you learned it listening to all those brutally unhappy people who did throw away theirs — and they do, after all, comprise the vast and terrifying majority — that without it, there plainly and starkly would have been nothing there; no, nothing at all.

McKinsey partners tend to be designers of ditches, not diggers of ditches. When it comes to executing their lofty theories, well, consultants lean toward leaving those messy realities to the companies themselves.

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all of those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave to the paper-mines for all time.

(Charles Morgan, Jr., Southern Director of the ACLU in 1966, upon seeing conditions in the Jefferson County jail): ...I knew that [Southern whites] would have annihilated blacks had they been more literate and less useful. In Hitler's Germany armbands identified Jews. Those with black skin could have been annihilated more easily. But they were the labor pool with which to break strikes. They served as the pickers of cotton, the diggers of ditches. They emptied bedpans and cleaned the outhouses of our lives. Uneducated, property-less, disenfranchised, and excluded from justice, except as defendants, they were no threat to whites. While they remained useful and didn't get 'out of line,' their lives were assured, for no matter how worthless lower-class white folks said blacks were, the rich, well born, and able upper-class whites knew that they and black folks were really the only people indispensably required by Our Southern Way of Life. (188)

Sons of ditch-diggers aspired to be bastard sons of kings and thieving aristocrats rather than of rough handed children of dirt and toil. The immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enabled a guild of millionaires to engage the greatest engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and at the same time to have left enough surplus to make more and thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America, but in Asia and Africa. The world wept because within the exploiting group of New World masters, greed and jealousy became so fierce that they fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war. The fantastic structure fell, leaving grotesque profits and poverty plenty and starvation empire and democracy staring at each other across world depression. And the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876--Land light and leading for slaves black brown yellow and white...

designer of ditches, not a digger of ditches,

I learned that money was the object of life, and I wanted money. I wanted the servants, the fine clothes, the respect in the street, and a horse of my own. I wanted to ride into Stratford and spit on Thomas Butler and his sour wife, to spit on all those who had told me to work harder, work harder, work harder. To wok harder for what? To become a carpenter? a cobbler? A glove maker or a ditch-digger? To be someone who was forever pulling my forelock? To be always bowing, snivelling and flattering? And so I began to thieve, and I found I was good at it.

even if we owned the world with a hog-tight fence around it, we could eat only three meals a day and sleep in one bed at a time—even a ditch digger can do that; and he will probably eat with more gusto and sleep more peacefully than Rockefeller.

I can’t tell my dad that there’s no way I’m crashing some collegiate party covered in sweat and dirt. I look like a ditch digger, not a Rose & Grave Digger.

I pitted two ditch diggers against each other, to see who could dig a pit the fastest.

For the kids at Chaff, the annual Career Day, held about two weeks before the summer break, was enough to make most of them at contemplate career suicide before they'd even taken an aptitude test or a written resume. Held outdoors on the schoolyard blacktop, the assemblage of coal miners, driving-range golf-ball retrievers, basket weavers, ditch diggers, book-binders, traumatized fire-fighters, and the world's last astronaut never does much to inspire.

I started seeing poetry from a strictly consumerist perspective as poets serving up beverages. Most, maybe like 97 percent or something, serve lemonade. You can consume their work and it will teach you nothing, and it will leave a sticky unpleasant feeling in your mouth and a slight nausea in your stomach. There are all kinds of home-made lemonades, milky lemonade, watery lemonade, some throw pepper in it or even puke in the lemonade, but its still lemonade, just a puky sort. Then there are a few that offer stronger drinks. Some say the secret is the cellar, but I think that's just a propaganda story. If you leave a bottle of lemonade in the cellar for 10 years it won't turn into wine. But some of these fools are doing exactly that. Stinky old lemonade full of dust. And then there's those that think the problem is the Lemonade isn't smooth enough and they start filtering it with a sieve, imagining to be gold-diggers or something. No no no, the secret isn't cellars. The secret is rather a sincere hate for lemonade. As long as you don't hate lemonade with every pore in your body, as long as a part of you accepts the lemonade, then forget about the cellars. But if your soul says 'Fuck the Lemonade' then it starts to search. You will find that a small percentage of poetry offered is like a strong beverage. Most then, again, are like cheap beer or wine. To find a wine that's actually good or even a decent whiskey you have to sift to tuns of poems, and then you find some. There are just a few people. Just a few. I dont know if the secret of the cellar applies here either. It might. It might not. I often suspect all these blokes with distilleries are fooling the hell out of everyone. Think about it. Twenty years on a barrel of whiskey and it will sell like gold. Anyone with a sense of business would want to speed that shit up. And yet they're all flaunting the secret of their cellars, I don't believe a word of it. There's simply too much whiskey in these world and too few cellars. So I sincerely believe that the road to great poetry is to say 'Fuck the Cellars' in your soul, and start to search. There's a minute speck of poems out there that are beverages, but of a different, narcotic kind. They are almost impossible to find or create. Poetry clubs and societies do their utter best to ignore it, ban it, destroy it. These are poems that by nature make the reader say 'Fuck Beverages!' in his soul. I wish i never used this shit. Fucking hell, whats wrong with the guy who made this? That's the sort of poetry I would call a honorable beverage. But you have to ditch Lemonade, Cellars, and Beverages to get there. And you can't do that because you have not enough thirst in your soul. That's what it all starts with: thirst. And the secret of thirst is very simple: it requires a desert in your heart.

In what other job can a person be inventor, scientist, landscape gardener, ditch digger, researcher, problem solver, artist, exorcist, and on top of all that eat one’s successes at dinner?

You've become a bystander, and this article you wrote is no more than lodging a complaint. Where's your interview with migrant families who lost someone?... Where's your investment?... [Bill Mulholland whose career ended after St. Francis Dam collapse ] Without his work, his vision and inventiveness, Los Angeles couldn't have grown the way it has... self-taught immigrant ditch digger who became one of the richest and most powerful men in L.A. That's America... "Even if it is not the whole truth?" "Because it is the truth too.

You know, Chris … I have a definition of success, and what success is to me is when an individual finds that thing which fulfills himself, when he finds that thing that completes him and when, in doing it, he finds a way to serve his fellow man. When he finds that he is a successful person. It doesn’t make any difference whether you are a ditch-digger or a librarian or someone who works at the filling station or the President of the United States or whatever, if you’re doing what you want to do and in some way bringing value to the life of others, then you’re a successful human being. It so happens that in my area, which is entertainment, that success brings with it a lot of other things, but all of those other things, the money, the fame, the conveniences, the ability to travel and see the rest of the world, all of those are just icing on the cake and the cake is the same for everybody.

You think just because you start out with a bunch of farmers and ditch diggers that things will actually stay that way? Human nature is what it is, my friend. There are always haves and have-nots, and that’s code you can’t rewrite. It might take a hundred years, it might take a thousand, but you’ll end up right back where you started.

MUR LAFFERTY is an award-winning author and Hall of Fame podcaster. She’s the author of the Nebula- and Hugo-nominated Best Novel finalist Six Wakes, along with the Shambling Guides series, and host of the popular Ditch Diggers and I Should Be Writing podcasts. She also co-edits the Hugo-nominated podcast magazine Escape Pod. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, daughter, and two dogs, where she runs, plays computer and board games, and bakes bread.

Skilling also had a tendency to oversimplify, and he largely disregarded—indeed, he had an active distaste for—the messy details involved in executing a plan. What thrilled Skilling, always, was the intellectual purity of an idea, not the translation of that idea into reality. “Jeff Skilling is a designer of ditches, not a digger of ditches,” an Enron executive said years later. He was often too slow—even unwilling—to recognize when the reality didn’t match the theory. Over time his arrogance hardened, and he became so sure that he was the smartest guy in the room that anyone who disagreed with him was summarily dismissed as just not bright enough to “get it.

Our secondary vocation is what we do on the path to holiness. And our job is part of what we do. Whatever our work may be—doctor, ditch digger, or diaper changer—it doesn't matter. That work is part of our journey towards heaven. It's one of thing that help us get to God.