Dump Truck Quotes

Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me. You’ll be happier.

The man has a dump truck and I want to sink my teeth into it.

Or perhaps your marriage is more of a covalent bond,” she said, sketching a new structural formula. “And if so, lucky you, because that means you both have strengths that, when combined, create something even better. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen combine, what do we get? Water—or H2O as it’s more commonly known. In many respects, the covalent bond is not unlike a party—one that’s made better thanks to the pie you made and the wine he brought. Unless you don’t like parties—I don’t—in which case you could also think of the covalent bond as a small European country, say Switzerland. Alps, she quickly wrote on the easel, + a Strong Economy = Everybody Wants to Live There. In a living room in La Jolla, California, three children fought over a toy dump truck, its broken axle lying directly adjacent to a skyscraper of ironing that threatened to topple a small woman, her hair in curlers, a small pad of paper in her hands. Switzerland, she wrote. Move.

I had my own dump truck of bad karma waiting for me somewhere ahwad. I had certainly earned it, but I raced to avoid it if I could; there was no way I wanted to fell that.

Don't you go and dump reality on us like a garbage truck.

Ter refused to ride buses. The people depressed him, sitting there. He liked Greyhound stations though. We used to go to the ones in San Francisco and Oakland. Mostly Oakland, on San Pablo Avenue. Once he told me he loved me because I was like San Pablo Avenue. He was like the Berkeley dump. I wish there was a bus to the dump. We went there when we got homesick for New Mexico. It is stark and windy and gulls soar like nighthawks in the desert. You can see the sky all around you and above you. Garbage trucks thunder through dust-billowing roads. Gray dinosaurs.

But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

The morning after I’d dumped the Easy-Bake Oven on the guesthouse porch, I’d walked out of my front door and nearly tripped on the box on the way to my truck. She’d returned it with a butter knife sticking through the side, and despite myself, I smiled.

I know a lot of hot, unconventionally beautiful ladies who kick ass and have sex with rock-star dudes and aren't sorry about it at all. I need to say this loud for the girls in the back of the class: if a dude doesn't want to have to use both hands to grab your ass, that's totally cool; its his choice. But that doesn't make you a piece of shit. You hoist up your saddlebags and go find some dude who thinks you're rad and doesn't mind wiping the sweat off your bottom stomach when you switch sex positions. Don't be all down in the dumps (like a truck truck truck) and let opportunists and perverts take advantage of some low self-esteem you're absolutely too awesome to have.

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit? I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you.

Again, this week as I walked on Broadway, in front of giant photographs of voluptuous supermodels at a Victoria Secret mega-store, who was rebuilding the sidewalks? With sweaty headbands, ripped-up jeans, and dust on their brown faces? Their muscled hands quivered as they worked the jack-hammers and lugged the concrete chunks into dump trucks. Two men from Guanajuato. Undocumented workers. They both shook my hand vigorously, as if they were relieved I wasn’t an INS officer. I imagined how much money Victoria Secret was making off these poor bastards. I wondered why passersby didn’t see what was in front of their faces. We use these workers. We profit from them. In the shadows, they work to the bone, for pennies. And it’s so easy to blame them for everything and nothing simply because they are powerless, and dark-skinned,and speak with funny accents. Illegal is illegal. It is a phrase, shallow and cruel, that should prompt any decent American to burn with anger.

The bodies were cremated in twenty minutes. Each crematorium worked with fifteen ovens, and there were four crematoriums. This meant that several thousand people could be cremated in a single day. Thus for weeks and months—even years—several thousand people passed each day through the gas chambers and from there to the incineration ovens. Nothing but a pile of ashes remained in the crematory ovens. Trucks took the ashes to the Vistula, a mile away, and dumped them into the raging waters of the river. After so much suffering and horror there was still no peace, even for the dead.

In 1969 my parents, my sister, my brother Jin-ming, and I were expelled from Chengdu one after another, and sent to distant parts of the Sichuan wilderness. We were among millions of urban dwellers to be exiled to the countryside. In this way, young people would not be roaming the cities with nothing to do, creating trouble out of sheer boredom, and adults like my parents would have a 'future." They were part of the old administration which had been replaced by Mao's Revolutionary Committees, and packing them off to the sticks to do hard labor was a convenient solution. According to Mao's rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside 'to be reformed." Mao advocated 'thought reform through labor' for everyone, but never explained the relationship between the two. Of course, no one asked for clarification. Merely to contemplate such a question was tantamount to treason. In reality, everyone in China knew that hard labor, particularly in the countryside, was always punishment. It was noticeable that none of Mao's henchmen, the members of the newly established Revolutionary Committees, army officers and very few of their children had to do it. The first of us to be expelled was my father. Just after New Year 1969 he was sent to Miyi County in the region of Xichang, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, an area so remote that it is China's satellite launch base today. It lies about 300 miles from Chengdu, four days' journey by truck, as there was no railway. In ancient times, the area was used for dumping exiles, because its mountains and waters were said to be permeated with a mysterious 'evil air." In today's terms, the 'evil air' was subtropical diseases.

Now ease off the brake, I mean flip-flop.” The truck crawled backward. “Now, when you’re far enough back, step on the brake again.” The edge of the woods came closer. “Good. Just a little more.” We went another few feet. “Okay, stop.” The truck kept going. “Brake Morgan.” “Which one’s the brake?” “Left, I mean, flip-flop.” The truck jerked to a stop. I slammed my hand against the dash to keep from getting thrown around. “You’re not a very good copilot, Grant.” “You’re not a very good pilot.” “That’s because I don’t know how to drive.” Morgan flexed his hand on the steering wheel. I counted to ten before saying anything. “Now you need to put the truck in drive and make a right… I mean bare foot.” The truck shot forward. “Stop, Morgan. Stop. Flip-flop.” It jerked to a stop hard enough to dump me into the floorboard and crack my head on the dash. “Fuck.” I struggled to get back into the seat. “Should have brought a helmet.” “If I’d known you were going to try to kill me, I would have.” “You’re the one who said bare foot.” “I meant direction.” “We didn’t discuss direction, just flip-flops and bare feet.

sandy-haired, friendly, smiling, small-town attorney of Pennington, had been born in 1950 in a roach-infested Newark slum. His father had been a construction worker fully employed through World War II and Korea creating new factories, dockyards and government offices along the Jersey Shore. But with the ending of the Korean War, work had dried up. Cal was five when his mother walked out of the loveless union and left the boy to be raised by his father. The latter was a hard man, quick with his fists, the only law on many blue-collar jobs. But he was not a bad man and tried to live by the straight and narrow, and to raise his toddler son to love Old Glory, the Constitution and Joe DiMaggio. Within two years, Dexter Senior had acquired a trailer home so that he could move where the work was available. And that was how the boy was raised, moving from construction site to site, attending whichever school would take him, and then moving on. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and the Beatles, over from a country Cal had never heard of. It was also the age of Kennedy, the Cold War and Vietnam. His formal education was fractured to the point of near nonexistence, but he became wise in other ways: streetwise, fight-wise. Like his departed mother, he did not grow tall, topping out at five feet eight inches. Nor was he heavy and muscular like his father, but his lean frame packed fearsome stamina and his fists a killer punch. By seventeen, it looked as if his life would follow that of his father, shoveling dirt or driving a dump truck on building sites. Unless . . . In January 1968 he turned eighteen, and the Vietcong launched the Têt Offensive. He was watching TV in a bar in Camden. There was a documentary telling him about recruitment. It mentioned that if you shaped up, the Army would give you an education. The next day, he walked into the U.S. Army office in Camden and signed on. The master sergeant was bored. He spent his life listening to youths doing everything in their power to get out of going to Vietnam. “I want to volunteer,” said the youth in front of him. The master sergeant drew a form toward him, keeping eye contact like a ferret that does not want the rabbit to get away. Trying to be kindly, he suggested

Your future refuses to behave.” Coo-yôn yanked off the jacket he’d sourced for me. Up was down. Then he stepped back. And released me— I toppled over, falling out of my seat onto the ground. Was the sosie dumping me on the side of the road? ’Cause I was about to die? “Now, let’s just talk . . . ’bout this, coo-yôn.” He caught hold of my good ankle, then dragged me farther away from the truck. He’d hauled me into . . . a bank of snow. Jack and I had marveled at the snow. I spun in circles as flakes fell, dizziness overwhelming me. I’d known this was going to send me spiraling. Gasping for breath, I collapsed, tears streaking down my face. I lay in the snow and lifted my hand to the sky. Flakes landed on my damp face. Each one was a cool kiss good-bye. Lying in that bank of snow, I gazed up at the falling flakes. They drifted over my face. Soft, soft. Like Evie’s lips. With effort, I lifted my scarred hand to the sky. I closed my eyes and pretended my Evangeline was caring for me. J’ai savouré. I savored each cold kiss. . . .

The candy-colored pavillions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles and honeycombs, the Italian pavillion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Washington and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom had been peeled, stripped, prized apart, knocked down, bulldozed into piles, loaded onto truck beds, dumped into barges, towed out past the mouth of the harbor, and sent to the bottom of the sea. It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and Utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon - he was too young to have such inklings - but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.

The Hunter: “Your future refuses to behave.” Coo-yôn yanked off the jacket he’d sourced for me. Up was down. Then he stepped back. And released me— I toppled over, falling out of my seat onto the ground. Was the sosie dumping me on the side of the road? ’Cause I was about to die? “Now, let’s just talk . . . ’bout this, coo-yôn.” He caught hold of my good ankle, then dragged me farther away from the truck. He’d hauled me into . . . a bank of snow. _______________ The Empress: I’d thought the sight of snow—and all the emotions it brought—would make me less likely to be with Aric. Just the opposite; because I could see my future so clearly. If he died before I did, some symbol—like snow—would mark the end of his existence. Later I would experience that waypoint (because everything was connected) and wish to God I’d taken a different path. I decided then that I would map my own journey and mark my own waypoints. The snow would symbolize both the end of one story and the beginning of another. A new slate. But not a blank one. The red ribbon would be a cherished remembrance, but I wouldn’t keep it with me at all times. I lay in the snow and lifted my hand to the sky. Flakes landed on my damp face. Each one was a cool kiss good-bye. _____________ The Hunter Lying in that bank of snow, I gazed up at the falling flakes. They drifted over my face. Soft, soft. Like Evie’s lips. With effort, I lifted my scarred hand to the sky. I closed my eyes and pretended my Evangeline was caring for me. J’ai savouré. I savored each cold kiss. . . .

Delbert was the only Bumpus kid in my grade, but they infested Warren G. Harding like termites in an outhouse. There was Ima Jean, short and muscular, who was in the sixth grade, when she showed up, but spent most of her time hanging around the poolroom. There was a lanky, blue-jowled customer they called Jamie, who ran the still and was the only one who ever wore shoes. He and his brother Ace, who wore a brown fedora and blue work shirts, sat on the front steps at home on the Fourth of July, sucking at a jug and pretending to light sticks of dynamite with their cigars when little old ladies walked by. There were also several red-faced girls who spent most of their time dumping dishwater out of windows. Babies of various sizes and sexes crawled about the back yard, fraternizing indiscriminately with the livestock. They all wore limp, battleship-gray T-shirts and nothing else. They cried day and night. We thought that was all of them—until one day a truck stopped in front of the house and out stepped a girl who made Daisy Mae look like Little Orphan Annie. My father was sprinkling the lawn at the time; he wound up watering the windows. Ace and Emil came running out onto the porch, whooping and hollering. The girl carried a cardboard suitcase—in which she must have kept all her underwear, if she owned any—and wore her blonde hair piled high on her head; it gleamed in the midday sun. Her short muslin dress strained and bulged. The truck roared off. Ace rushed out to greet her, bellowing over his shoulder as he ran: “MAH GAWD! HEY, MAW, IT’S CASSIE! SHE’S HOME FROM THE REFORMATORY!” Emil

Niobe earned the ire of the gods by bragging about her seven lovely daughters and seven “handsome sons—whom the easily offended Olympians soon slaughtered for her impertinence. Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. Still, while elusiveness and loss tortured Tantalus and Niobe, it is actually a surfeit of their namesake elements that has decimated central Africa. There’s a good chance you have tantalum or niobium in your pocket right now. Like their periodic table neighbors, both are dense, heat-resistant, noncorrosive metals that hold a charge well—qualities that make them vital for compact cell phones. In the mid-1990s cell phone designers started demanding both metals, especially tantalum, from the world’s largest supplier, the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire. Congo sits next to Rwanda in central Africa, and most of us probably remember the Rwandan butchery of the 1990s. But none of us likely remembers the day in 1996 when the ousted Rwandan government of ethnic Hutus spilled into Congo seeking “refuge. At the time it seemed just to extend the Rwandan conflict a few miles west, but in retrospect it was a brush fire blown right into a decade of accumulated racial kindling. Eventually, nine countries and two hundred ethnic tribes, each with its own ancient alliances and unsettled grudges, were warring in the dense jungles. Nonetheless, if only major armies had been involved, the Congo conflict likely would have petered out. Larger than Alaska and dense as Brazil, Congo is even less accessible than either by roads, meaning it’s not ideal for waging a protracted war. Plus, poor villagers can’t afford to go off and fight unless there’s money at stake. Enter tantalum, niobium, and cellular technology. Now, I don’t mean to impute direct blame. Clearly, cell phones didn’t cause the war—hatred and grudges did. But just as clearly, the infusion of cash perpetuated the brawl. Congo has 60 percent of the world’s supply of the two metals, which blend together in the ground in a mineral called coltan. Once cell phones caught on—sales rose from virtually zero in 1991 to more than a billion by 2001—the West’s hunger proved as strong as Tantalus’s, and coltan’s price grew tenfold. People purchasing ore for cell phone makers didn’t ask and didn’t care where the coltan came from, and Congolese miners had no idea what the mineral was used for, knowing only that white people paid for it and that they could use the profits to support their favorite militias. Oddly, tantalum and niobium proved so noxious because coltan was so democratic. Unlike the days when crooked Belgians ran Congo’s diamond and gold mines, no conglomerates controlled coltan, and no backhoes and dump trucks were necessary to mine it. Any commoner with a shovel and a good back could dig up whole pounds of the stuff in creek beds (it looks like thick mud). In just hours, a farmer could earn twenty times what his neighbor did all year, and as profits swelled, men abandoned their farms for prospecting. This upset Congo’s already shaky food supply, and people began hunting gorillas for meat, virtually wiping them out, as if they were so many buffalo. But gorilla deaths were nothing compared to the human atrocities. It’s not a good thing when money pours into a country with no government.