Thrift Shopping Quotes

You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop - the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership. Ill-fitting is always stylish. But be more creative - wear your clothes inside out, backward, upside down. Throw bleach in a load of colored laundry. Follow the exact opposite of the dry cleaning instructions inside the clothes that cost the most in your thrift shop. Don’t wear jewelry - stick Band-Aids on your wrists or make a necklace out of them. Wear Scotch tape on the side of your face like a bad face-lift attempt. Mismatch your shoes. Best yet, do as Mink Stole used to do: go to the thrift store the day after Halloween, when the children’s trick-or-treat costumes are on sale, buy one, and wear it as your uniform of defiance.

My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. To You WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true Soul and Body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago; I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside. There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

There are plenty of people in the world I don't dislike, some of whom I almost like; on the other hand, I almost hate some of those whom I don't dislike, too. But how many people did I truly love?

A year later we were in a coffee shop, the kind taking a last stand against Starbucks with its thrift-store chairs, vegan cookies, and over-promising teas with names like Serenity and Inner Peace. I was curled up with a stack of causes, trying to get in a few extra hours of work over the weekend, and Andrew sat with one hand gripping his mug, his nose in The New York Times; the two of us a parody of the yuppie couple of the new millennium. We sat silently that way, though there wasn't silence at all. On top of the typical coffee-shop sounds - the whir of an expresso machine, the click of the cash register, the bell above the door - Andrew was making his noises, an occasional snort at something he read in the paper, the jangle of his keys in his pocket, a sniffle since he was getting over a cold, a clearing of his throat. And as we sat there, all I could do was listen to those Andrew-specific noises, the rhythm of his breath, the in-out in-out, its low whistle. Snort. Jangle. Sniffle. Clear. Hypnotized. I wanted to buy his soundtrack. This must be what love is, I thought. Not wanting his noises to ever stop.

It was as if everyone doled themselves out in such small portions. Never completely open, not all at once.

These last few months Vida had started believing in all kinds of strange things she'd have laughed at when we lived back in Avalon. She'd tried every spell she could find in the dusty old books she brought home from thrift shops and garage sales; none of them ever worked, and it was awful watching her try.

I looked at it and decided it was not a check I would cash were I a teller and someone presented the check for payment. But a thrift shop dress is usually taken for high fashion when it's revealed under a mink coat.

You don’t need fashion designers when you are young. Have faith in your own bad taste. Buy the cheapest thing in your local thrift shop—the clothes that are freshly out of style with even the hippest people a few years older than you. Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents—that is the key to fashion leadership.

The whole thing smelled like a thrift shop that had been baked in a low oven and felt like a too-tight and too-long hug by a rejected Muppet.

Nash Prescott was thrift-shop beauty, threadbare and jaded, the memory of something once beautiful lingering as he looked on the world with war-torn eyes.

Having to worry about whether someone is healthy enough to tolerate my fierce hatred or criticism before I decide to blame them – that’s what I call getting old.

Closets should be completely emptied twice a year. […] Then inspect every item in your wardrobe. Things you’re doubtful about are probably wrong. […] Give things away to someone they do compliment, or send them to charity or a thrift shop and resolve not to make the same mistake again. That old saw, 'When in doubt, don’t,' is never so true as when it comes to clothes. Or getting married.

Jim purchased a brand-new book called How to Fix Damn Near Anything. In horror I discovered a $15.95 price tag on the inside of the jacket. Upon interrogation he confessed that he purchased it at the thrift shop for $.25.

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the great wide nothingness and out of our lives - sure, that would be nice - but so would a new Cadillac - quit dreaming - it just doesn't work that way. . .

She patted her hair, which she wore swept up and held in place with spangled pins. The dress was a dramatic strapless red sheath she and her friend Ariel had found in a church thrift shop. Ariel swore that, after alterations, the dress would look as though it had been tailor-made for Rosa. The bright cherry-red was delicious, the open-toed ruby and rhinestone sandals made her look taller and she felt wonderful.

And something about the rawness of life with the baby was like the rawness of travel, the way it laid you open to the clear blue nerves. You were the five senses pouring down an unknown street; you were the slap of your shoes and hot paper of your palms, streaming past statues of regional Madonnas. The indelibility of a certain thrift shop in Helsinki, the smell of foreign decades in the lining of one leather coat. The loop of "Desert Island Disk" in a certain coffee shop in Cleveland, where the owner warned her not to have a second detoxifying charcoal latte because it would "flush the pills out of her system and get her pregnant". The bridges of other cities, where she would watch their drab green rivers buoy up their rainbow-necked ducks, where she would drink espresso until there was a free and frightening exchange between her and the day--- she was open, flung open, anything could rush in.

On the way to the cake shop I kept stopping to shake the wet leaves off the soles of my brown suede Whistles boots. I bought them at Sue Ryder, the charity shop in Camden Town. [...] I know how to find good clothes in those places. First scan the rails for an awkward colour, anything that jumps out as being a bit ugly, like dirty mustard, salmon pink or olive green with a bit too much brown in it. A print with an unusual combination of colours – dark green and pink, bright orange and ultramarine – is also worth checking out. If the quality of the fabric is good, pull the garment out and check the label. Well-cut clothes can look misshapen on a hanger because they're cut to look good on the body. I'll buy a good piece if it fits, even if it doesn't sometimes. Even if it's not my style or has short sleeves, or I don't like the shape or the buttons. I learn to love it. I never tire of clothes I've bought that I've had to adjust to. It's the compromise, the awkward gap that has to be bridged that makes something, someone, lovable.

OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign

I loved all the Hardy Boy books. Once I collected my paperboy money each Friday I'd walk into town, make the rounds of all the local thrift shops (where you could buy a used hardback for a quarter.) I'd always get excited swinging open the front cover of a newly discovered book in the series. Let's solve a mystery! And investigate the long-abandoned water tower north of town. They were a lot of fun. And science fiction, although these were paperbacks. I stopped going to church when I was about ten. I'd get dressed and go out the front door telling my mom I was going to church, but I'd have a science fiction paperback jammed in the back pocket of my trousers. Once I got near the church (St. Mary's on Greenwich Avenue), I'd veer down a side street, pull out my book, and stumble along the sidewalks for an hour, visiting another planet, sometimes another galaxy. My mother eventually found out about my deception - a friend told her she had spotted me walking, reading, when I was supposed to be at mass. I explained to my mother I didn't want to attend church anymore, and she accepted that. If it made her sad, she never showed me. She was actually an incredibly good mother, which I realize more and more as I age.

The topic Walking with Christ daily The object Shoes of all styles, sizes, and colors—the more bizarre, the better. You can find a wide selection for next to nothing at a thrift shop. Try to get at least these kinds: work boots, bedroom slippers, dress shoes, running shoes, a pair that is totally worn-out, a pair with holes in the soles. The lesson Show the shoes one pair at a time, explaining how they can help us consider where we are in our walk with Christ: Dress shoes I have a nice, shiny faith on the outside—but I only bring it out on Sundays and special occasions. Bedroom slippers I’ve made a commitment to Christ, but I’ve been pretty lazy in terms of trying to serve him.

Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans, in a hope that the new would offset the old. Each new purchase of mortgage bonds (which was identical to making a loan) was like the last act of a desperate man. The strategy was wildly irresponsible, for the fundamental problem (borrowing short term and lending long term) hadn’t been remedied. The hypergrowth only meant that the next thrift crisis would be larger. But the thrift managers were not thinking that far in advance. They were simply trying to keep the door to the shop open. That explains why thrifts continued to buy mortgage bonds even as they sold their loans.

I never buy anything new. I mostly shop the dollar rack at thrift stores, and I always find what I need. I cycle through dresses and then sell them back to thrift stores. I don't need to hold on to them.

AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary (AIG FP), where its mammoth CDS business was housed, managed to get itself regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) because the corporate parent company had acquired a few small savings banks. Savings banks? Aren’t those the stodgy thrift institutions on the corner that take savings deposits and grant mortgages to homeowners? Seems like a funny place to lodge one of the world’s largest derivatives operations. Well, AIG FP was not actually lodged there, but merely lodged there for regulatory purposes. Call it skillful regulatory shopping.

thrift shops make you a king for five bucks.

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.

His suit today was clearly a first cousin to the one he’d worn to see me at TGK. It was a lighter shade, but the same unearthly fabric: light, supple, and very nearly self-aware. Kraunauer turned to face me as I came in, gave me his polite-shark smile, and waved at a chair that almost certainly cost more than a new Cadillac Escalade. I sat in it carefully, determined to avoid wrinkling it, while at the same time savoring the luxury. There wasn’t a lot to savor. It didn’t feel much different from the chair I had at home that cost twenty-nine dollars at a thrift shop.

No one understood how Chanel made all that money but still shopped at Burlington’s, Target, and even thrift stores. She knew what it was like to starve, to be dirt poor, and to literally only have forty-nine cents to your name.

You make James Bond look like he shops at a thrift store and cuts his own hair.

Sell your art, crafts, or any handcrafted item on etsy.com Develop a travel concierge service to help people when they miss their flights Offer online tutoring services in your field of expertise Host a networking event (charge a low ticket price and get sponsors to provide food) Create and sell a visitors’ guide to your town or city, or build a web resource for tourists, supported by advertisers Create an online (or offline) course in some quirky subject you happen to know a lot about Publish a blog with a new lesson on a specific topic every day Start a podcast and sell sponsorship Visit yard sales or thrift shops and buy items to resell Offer a simple freelance service—anything from fact-checking to tech support or something else entirely Become a home, office, or life organizer Manage P.R. or social media accounts for small businesses Buy and sell used textbooks to college students Sell your musings on business, art, or culture as a freelance writer Start a membership website, where people pay a monthly or annual fee to access useful information about a specific topic Write and publish a book (if I can do it, you can too!)

Having to worry about whether someone is healthy enough to tolerate my fierce hatred or criticism before I decide to blame them -that’s what I call getting old.

You know what I mean? The newly opened bottle of wine clinked against the rim of my teacup, sounding a clear ring

surprise

I’d always fantasized about indulging in a nervous breakdown. I watched Girl, Interrupted with a twisted, jealous fervor, felt envy when I saw celebrities enter rehab. What entitlement. What privilege, to just let life fall to the wayside, to stop working and pretending and just fall apart. To let my grief-swollen brain split at the seams and spend my days crying and sitting in therapy and drinking lemonade in meditative silence on a manicured lawn. And what impossibility. Because rent. I didn’t have the money to enter some elite facility with groomed grounds and full-time therapists. But after ten years of constant work, buying the least expensive entrées, and thrift-store shopping, I had finally saved enough money to not work for several months. At last, a burnout of my very own.

Thrift shop smell to a young fairy formatting normalcy is basic Not in the sense of boring but Elemental A thing yr composed of n composing A face in the mirror makin mirror-face Have you ever wondered why thrift stores always smell the same? The musk settles like a dusty comfort feeling Feel the tide of decision swell in and roll out never quite catching it

We’re taught we can pay for everything we need. Our very lives can be purchased, and by extension, we can buy the rights to a fragmented community of like-minded consumers. Our unifying activity as a culture is shopping, and the one thing we all are is consumers.

All year long I collect pretty plates from thrift shops and garage sales. I try to get ones that fit the personalities of my friends and neighbors and then I load them with goodies.

Lonny Cane looked a lot like Daddy, if Daddy were for sale in a thrift shop.

When I was young, and my mother began filling my hope chest with bed sheets and serving spoons and cuttings of colorful fabrics, and saving pictures from the JC Penney catalog of china hutches and dinnerware and lush comforters for someday, I created shadow boxes for places I dreamed of visiting. I’d spend birthday money on bags of seashells and craft sand from the hobby shop for a Hawaiian beach scene, create a Swiss ski village with cotton balls and thrift store sweaters cut into tiny versions for Popsicle stick skiers, prop toothpick tents on top of papier-mâché Kilimanjaros and Everests. These adorned my room, anointing my dresser and the fake wood paneling of our trailer walls with my fantasies. My mother once came in while I was dusting them and said, “It’s all well and good to dream. Dreaming keeps a body moving.

But it's a good thing to earn money,'I said. Masayo laughed. 'Hitomi, you sound like an old lady! I am an old lady! "Oh, come off it! You're barely thirty! And then, even though we were already in our cups, we clinked a toast.

My game is the Goodwill and Big Lots!, but the compulsion is the same; I have often used thrift shopping as a distraction from life. I could easily have frittered our family’s fortune away $20 at a time.

I guess everyone is secondhand,” he said. “We’re all just thrift shop finds. We’re not perfect. We come with baggage. Scuff marks. Chips. But sometimes you get lucky and you find that one piece that someone threw out that happens to be perfect for you.

thrift shop.

During an early break from the road in Buffalo, New York, Stevie and Chris were shopping for vintage clothes in a thrift store when Stevie came across an antique black silk top hat, the kind a gentleman once wore to the opera. She tried it on and decided it gave her a dramatic, even operatic look. Within months it would become her trademark.

which is more of less a thrift shop.

I’ve heard of women who started beauty parlors in a spare room, or thrift shops, or who took courses to become real-estate brokers. Others have special talents or college training that they can put to use on a part-time basis. Any woman can start a childcare center.

If sexual desire wasn’t the origin of Masayo and Mr. Maruyama’s relationship, then what was their love based on?

My own way. Clutching the bouquet as I walked home, I repeated these words in my head. I had spent time with these young women for eight months. Some of them were a little mean, some of them were quite kind, some of them were slightly particular, and some of them were a bit odd. Did that mean that I was the one among them who did things ‘my own way’?

Could Takeo have died on the side of a road? That would serve him right! I thought at the idea of such a thing. But my smugness was soon dampened by the realization of how troublesome it was, just to feel that way—how troublesome it was, really, just to be alive. I wanted nothing to do with love! I wanted the stiffness in my shoulders to go away. I could probably put a bit of money into savings this month. These thoughts drifted by one by one, like tiny bubbles. The flowers I had put in the vase looked as though they were artificial.

The one I love most in this world. I had no one to say those words to. I hadn’t even felt the desire to say them to someone, ever, I thought as I ran. There was still time before the last train, but I kept running all the way to the station, without stopping to catch my breath. The

Takeo and I had some good memories . . . Yes, I would eat a diet rich in vegetables, seaweed, and legumes, and every day would be sparkling and bright, my life brimming with health and vitality.

Kraunauer turned to face me as I came in, gave me his polite-shark smile, and waved at a chair that almost certainly cost more than a new Cadillac Escalade. I sat in it carefully, determined to avoid wrinkling it, while at the same time savoring the luxury. There wasn’t a lot to savor. It didn’t feel much different from the chair I had at home that cost twenty-nine dollars at a thrift shop.