Jesmyn Ward Quotes

When you have to work with and exist amongst cynical, burned-out personnel on a set, it doesn't matter what you're shooting or how much you're being paid - it's not worth it.

I was a hot-dog stand lady, I was an orphan housemother, I was a waitress 3 or 4 times. All of those jobs did not have good bosses. They basically told you what to do, when to do and when to hop. And I just didn't like that very much.

Everyone who goes to a job he doesn't like is a lot weirder than I am.

Well, I've cleaned bathrooms in a warehouse. That was pretty terrible. But I can't complain because I'm sure other people have done worse.

When I had jobs, I was always doing manual jobs because I couldn't think. I worked at the docks, unloading trucks, and did ridiculous jobs.

I've never had a terrible job. I've been a cook, waitress, bookseller, teacher, freelance writer. I know what the bad jobs are, and I haven't done them.

The conditions for harassment are built into the very structure of the trucking business, beginning with the training process.

I know what I do for a living is ridiculous.

Like all wage slaves, he had two crosses to bear: the people he worked for and the people he worked with

Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another "Rosenkavailer."

Being discontented, we either seek a different job or merely succumb to environment...instead of causing us to question life, the whole process of existence.

My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.

She didn't want to run, period. It made her breasts feel like they were going to detach from her body.

Three weeks hadn't changed Cop Central. The coffee was still poisonous, the noise abominable, and the view out of her stingy window was still miserable. She was thrilled to be back.

Bodily labor alleviates the pains of the mind and from this arises the happiness of the poor

Whores get bow-legged and bankers get mean, which is strange when you think that if whores get bow-legged, bankers should get generous, but they never do.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

You have to have short fingernails or they'd just break off, and you can't wear red polish - it looks like your fingers are bleeding.

I felt very bad in Washington. . . I didn't like my job, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and I was cold and half-hungry, so I wrote a great many poems.

There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.

By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

Sometimes you're not in the best environment. Sometimes you're not speaking the same language and it's not a good place to work. It's a lot to give, actually. And for not a lot of money.

If you move furniture all day, if you're a construction worker, if you have a job that's real physical, this idea that there is a sport that involves the kind of conventional, traditional view of toughness, you see that still as a positive thing.

I don't know how you do it [working at office]; I would just get up and walk out. That's what I did for pretty much every job I've ever had.