Coal Quotes

“Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

“As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.”
― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“Perhaps I should just bury myself and become a diamond after thousands of years of intense pressure”
― Lemony Snicket, The Lump of Coal

“Perhaps time’s definition of coal is the diamond.”
― Khalil Gibran

“A person that doesn't know their worth will never know yours. Therefore, the longer you hang onto hope that they will finally see your worth is the moment you start to depreciate in value.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Diamonds are only lumps of coal that stuck at it no matter how much heat or pressure they faced.”
― Jeffrey Fry

“Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not [...]. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here.”
― Sarah Palin

“Sometimes words ruin everything.”
― Jesikah Sundin, Elements

“A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Coloured Lands: A Whimsical Gathering Of Drawings, Stories, And Poems

“Coal mines, like a hard life, have seen the best diamonds of innovation, more than any jewel factory.”
― Vikrmn, 10 Golden Steps of Life

“we fought a lot in welch. Not just to fend off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; Maybe it was because life there was hard and it made the people hard...maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“The sound of diesel fuel rushing through grimy pistons and cylinders below a morning-fogged window bored through his ears like a deep-water drill bit, and the thump of his own heartbeat cursed him for breaking one of his many rules.”
― Luke Taylor, Shatterpoint Alpha

“I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water."

When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!”
― Sheldon Currie, The Glace Bay Miners' Museum: The novel

“A questo punto, a costo di interrompere il filo del discorso, viene spontaneo un contro tra il destino dell’Inghilterra e quello dell’Italia. L’Inghilterra si ritrovò tra le mani ottima lana quando (nel Medioevo) la lana era la materia prima più ricercata; si ritrovò tra le mani ottimo ed abbondante carbone quando (ai tempi della Rivoluzione Industriale) la materia prima più preziosa era il carbone; e si ritrovò tra le mani il petrolio del mre del Nord quando (ai giorni nostri) il petrolio divenne la fonte di energia più usata nell’attività produttiva. In contrasto l’Italia ebbe poca e grama lana nel Medioevo, pochissimo e gramissimo carbone nella Rivoluzione Industriale, e pochissimo e gramissimo petrolio nell’epoca corrente: in compenso ebbe sempre abbondanza di marmo che usò soprattutto per adornare chiese ed erigere monumenti funerari nei cimiteri.”
― Carlo M. Cipolla, Allegro ma non troppo. Con Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana

“The love of God is so hot than a burning coal. It burns the heart and warms the chest; while at the same time calming the mind like still water.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Couldn't it be said that it was in the seventeenth century that we started down the path that has brought us to where we are now? After all, it was then that Londoners began to use coal on a large scale, for heating, which was how our dependence on fossil fuels started. Would your Jacobean playwrights have written as they did if they hadn't had coal fires to warm them? Did they know that an angry beast, which had long lain dormant within the earth, was coming to life? Did Hobbes or Leibniz or any of the other thinkers of the Enlightenment have any understanding of this?”
― Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island

“To the rain over northern England, the coal under its top soil, and our ancestors who chanted to the winds.”
― Ruth Ann Oskolkoff, Zin

“Do gems burn, I wonder? ‘Tis said they’re kin to coal.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

“Gowen finally gave up on December 13, 1889. He secluded himself in a Washington hotel room, pulled out a gun and, in morbid imitation of his old enemies, killed a mine official—himself.”
― Mark Bulik, The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War

“Coals are sapphires that succumbed to ennui.”
― Rajesh`

“Та ніщо не може спинити вугілля, час якого настав. І воно продовжує свою переможну ходу — сліди хоч і брудні, але стежка та дуже важлива, бо зі згарищ вугілля постає індустріалізація і те, що ми розуміємо під сучасним містом.”
― Олександр Михед, "Я змішаю твою кров із вугіллям". Зрозуміти український Схід

“Хто прийде по вугілля, той від вугілля і поляже.”
― Олександр Михед, "Я змішаю твою кров із вугіллям". Зрозуміти український Схід

“Evil is a coal: if it does not burn, it blackens. (Le mal est un charbon: s'il ne brûle pas, il noircit)”
― Charles de Leusse

“If history belongs to the winners, legend belongs to the losers.”
― Mark Bulik, The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War

“Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The interface between coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of death. Death ancient, prehistoric, species we will never see again. Growing older, blacker, deeper, in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel rolls out fiery, bright. But to make steel, the coal tars, darker and heavier, must be taken from the original coal. Earth's excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“He had flowing coarse parted fiery crimson hair and with coals for eyes his entire smooth ruddy face seemed to be holding back a furnace that ignited the rest of his head; he utilized his umbrella as a poker to close the door and walked into the hearth of the house - the kitchen table.”
― J.S. Mason, Whisky Hernandez

“A gallows, at least, was honest. With a gallows, you knew exactly when you would die.

--Mike Doyle, from the opening paragraph of Anywhere But Schuylkill.”
― Michael Dunn

“«Inside every lump of coal there’s a diamond waiting to get out, right?»”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“Don't be coal in life to light people's fires, don't be snow to strengthen the storm because only you will perish.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih