Picking Up Quotes

“Garbage Is, always. We will die, civilization will crumble, life as we know it will cease to exist, but trash will endure, and there it was on the street, our ceaselessly erected, ceaselessly broken cenotaphs to ephemera and disconnection and unquenchable want.”
― Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City

“Imagine if we were capable of a form of empathy that lets us know one another by savoring the aura we leave on the things we have touched. We would go to a dump to get drunk on one another's souls.”
― Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City

“Though I own the road—few motorists will play chicken with a garbage truck—fifty miles an hour is plenty fast enough for me.”
― Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City