He picked her up out of the dirt and turned her into the clod she was today.

-Alther, Lisa ne¤  e Reed
Original Sins, pt.4, ch.1.

   The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

-Brautigan, Richard
  Please Plant This Book,'Squash'.

There was no need to do any housework after all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

-Crisp, Quentin
  The Naked Civil Servant, ch.15.

Ulysses†is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

-Forster, E(dward) M(organ)
  Of  James  Joyce's1922 novel.  Aspects of the Novel, ch.6.

If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!

-Lamb, Charles
  Quoted in Leigh Hunt Lord Byron and his Contemporaries, p.299.

Pretty! in amber to observe the forms Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms! The things, we know are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the Devil they got there.

-Pope, Alexander
  'An Epistle to DrArbuthnot', l.169^72.

Then old age and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so painful and so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong. Huddled in dirt, the reasoning engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.

-Rochester,JohnWilmot, 2nd Earl of
  'A SatyrAgainst Mankind', l.25^30 (published1679).

   And what a congress of stinks!ö Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

-Rogers,Will
  The Lost Son,'Root Cellar'.

Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honeyand wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

-Swift,Jonathan
  The Battle of the Books.

   An unenviable reputation for dirt and ill odours.

-Thorne,James
  Of Brentford, Middlesex, now in Greater London. Handbook to the Environs of London.