Chisel Out Quotes & Sayings

I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails ... — Gloria E. Anzaldua

I think it's always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn't carry around a tape recorder ... I didn't chisel anything in stone ... Anybody can look and say, 'Well how do you know for sure?' And that's one of the most painful things about it. You don't. — Anne Heche

I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect. — C.S. Lewis

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. — Samuel Butler

Fear is a poor chisel with which to carve out tomorrow. — Andy Andrews

I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of tools flying. Patrick picked up a chipped chisel and looked at me as if I had attacked his son.
Have you never used a broom before? — Laurie R. King

Cartwright grooved the chisel's tooth into the base of the skull, where the spine would fuse, and lifted the hammer. The chisel jumped in his hand and half the skull turned to silt. It cascaded down the rock wall with the faintest sigh. The {nine-fingered} boy let out a string of oaths so profane, so unparalleled, that surely they'd been inspired by a hell so near.

Cartwright was glad to have a hammer in hand. — Matthew Neill Null

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf, And the world makes you King for a day, Then go to the mirror and look at yourself, And see what that guy has to say. For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife, Whose judgement upon you must pass. The feller whose verdict counts most in your life Is the guy staring back from the glass. He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest, For he's with you clear up to the end, And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test If the guy in the glass is your friend. You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum, And think you're a wonderful guy, But the man in the glass says you're only a bum If you can't look him straight in the eye. You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years, And get pats on the back as you pass, But your final reward will be heartaches and tears If you've cheated the guy in the glass. Dale Wimbrow — Shawn Jones

He wondered how Nathan felt about the killing. Granted that Richard had struck Bobby with the chisel, nevertheless, he asked, how had Nathan felt about the boy's death? It didn't concern him, Nathan replied. He had no moral beliefs and religion meant nothing to him: he was an atheist. Whatever served an individual's purpose - that was the best guide to conduct. In — Simon Baatz

Nearer:breath of my breath:take not they tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal
letting they tigers of smooth sweetness steal
slowly in dumb blossoms of new mingling:
deeper:blood of my blood:with upwardcringing
swiftness plunge these leopards of white ream
this pith of darkness:carve an evilfringing
flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.
Querying greys between mouthed houses curl
thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane,
the poetic carcass of a girl — E. E. Cummings

Davos had often heard it said that the wizards of Valyria did not cut and chisel as common masons did, but worked stone with fire and magic as a potter might work clay. — George R R Martin

When God wants to drill a man, And thrill a man, And skill a man, When God wants to mold a man To play the noblest part; When He yearns with all His heart To create so great and bold a man That all the world shall be amazed, Watch His methods, watch His ways! How He ruthlessly perfects Whom He royally elects! How He hammers him and hurts him, And with mighty blows converts him Into trial shapes of clay which Only God understands; While his tortured heart is crying And he lifts beseeching hands! How He bends but never breaks When his good He undertakes; How He uses whom He chooses, And with every purpose fuses him; But every act induces him To try His splendor out - God knows what He's about. SELECTED Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. GOETHE — Lettie B. Cowman

Great sculptors and artists spend countless hours perfecting their talents. They don't pick up a chisel or a brush and palette, expecting immediate perfection. They understand that they will make many errors as they learn, but they start with the basics, the key fundamentals first. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

I'm completely uninterested in the origins of Stonehenge. I don't care about the real story behind it or whether it should be saved or not. What I'm interested in is this: in the Victorian era, you could go there as an early cultural tourist and you were given a chisel to chip off a bit of the stones and take it with you. That's what you did in Victorian times. — Aleksandra Mir

Michelangelo wasn't the artist who began the sculpture - in fact, he hadn't even been born when it was commissioned. The nineteen-foot block of marble had originally been the project of an artist named Agostino di Duccio, but after shaping some of the legs, feet, and torso, he inexplicably abandoned the work. Ten years later, an artist named Antonio Rossellino was hired to complete it, but his contract was subsequently cancelled. It was nearly twenty-five years before Michelangelo, just twenty-six, picked up a chisel and dared to believe he could complete a masterpiece. — Lysa TerKeurst

Gavin said that writing novels with a PC was supposed to be easier than writing with a typewriter and bond paper, or with a pen and foolscap, or with a chisel and a granite obelisk imported from Greece. I shook my head with pity as he related this canard to me. — Gary Reilly

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Still, we made it back to the corn mill, and even though it felt like a dwarf with a chisel had taken up permanent residence in my frontal lobe, I managed to stagger all the way back to the house. — Rachel Hawkins

Life is a quarry, out of which we have to mod and chisel and complete character?" ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Matt Nelson

Liberals have shifted government into a position of being neutral between right and wrong. By concentrating power in government institutions, liberals chisel at the three pillars of society: the family unit, work ethic and faith. That's not good for America. — James G. Watt

Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

No, I'm telling this wrong. After all a person is herself and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me and you. — N.K. Jemisin

Writing is like sculpturing words out of a block of imagination. Sentences chisel the story, then characters make it their own. — Federico Chini

Cremation has become the most popular form of burial in the United States ... People used to want a big, thick granite stone, their names carved into with a chisel. I was here dammit! Cremation is like you're trying to cover up a crime. Burn the body. Scatter the ashes around. As far as anyone's concerned this whole thing never happened. — Jerry Seinfeld

The sculptor must paint with his chisel; half his touches are not to realize, but to put power into, the form. They are touches of light and shadow, and raise a ridge, or sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness. — John Ruskin

When carving stone, the sculptor removes everything that is not the statue. [ ... ] The art of revealing beauty lies in removing what conceals it. So, too, Patanjali [in the Yoga Sutras] tells us that wholeness exists within us. Our work is to chisel away at everything that is not essence, not Self. — Judith Hanson Lasater

But our good humour was restored when we saw Lord John Roxton waiting for us upon the platform, his tall, thin figure clad in a yellow tweed shooting-suit. His keen face, with those unforgettable eyes, so fierce and yet so humorous, flushed with pleasure at the sight of us. His ruddy hair was shot with grey, and the furrows upon his brow had been cut a little deeper by Time's chisel, but in all else he was the Lord John who had been our good comrade in the past. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Love and kindness are the hammer and chisel that gently chip through barriers and long-held beliefs to reveal the magnificent soul contained within every human. — Molly Friedenfeld

You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does. — John Ruskin

I am more likely to give help than to ask it" - Bagheera stretched out one paw and admired the steel-blue, ripping-chisel talons at the end of it - "still I should like to know. — Rudyard Kipling

Why should I deem myself to be a chisel, when I could be the artist? — Friedrich Schiller

There are some who say that Time is itself a hammer; that each slow second marks another tap that makes big rocks into little rocks, waterfalls into canyons, cliffs into beaches.
There are some who say that Time is instead a blade. They see the dance of its razored tip, poised like a venomous snake, forever ready to slay faster than the eye can see.
And there are some who say that Time is both hammer and blade.
They say the hammer is a sculptor's mallet, and the blade is a sculptor's chisel: that each stroke is a refinement, a perfecting, a discovery of truth and beauty within what would otherwise be blank and lifeless stone.
And I name this saying wisdom. — Matthew Woodring Stover

Rare and powerful harmonies exist,
Shaping both scent and contour in a flower.
Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until,
Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond.
And thus do images of fleeting vision,
Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky,
Once turned to stone live on from age to age,
Held always in a faultless, polished phrase.
("A Sonnet To Form") — Valery Bryusov

Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it. — Henry David Thoreau

A lifetime's experience urges me to utter a warning cry: do anything else, take someone's golden retriever for a walk, run away with a saxophone player. Perhaps what's wrong with being a writer is that one can't even say 'good luck'
luck plays no part in the writing of a novel. No happy accidents as with the paint pot or chisel. I don't think you can say anything, really. I've always wanted to juggle and ride a unicycle, but I dare say if I ever asked the advice of an acrobat he would say, 'All you do is get on and start pedaling'. — J.G. Ballard

Looking back, I could not point to one special time and say, There! That's what is amazing. We can change completely and not recognize it. We think terrible events have made us into stone. But love slips in like a chisel - and suddenly it is an ax, breaking us into pieces from the inside. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Logan couldn't remember when a few drinks became a bottle and then two bottles every night. He couldn't point to one single moment or event as the cause. From his first drink at fourteen, alcohol began soaking into his skin, the moisture rotting him on the inside. Every few years he'd use a chisel to hack away all the wet, unsound wood without trying to find the source of the moisture. The rot always came back, stronger than before. — J.D. Ruskin

But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasn't that nothin' would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know better'n that. I've thought about it a good deal ... And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I don't have no intentions of carvin' a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all. — Cormac McCarthy

Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off. — Charles Dickens

A marble cutter, with chisel and hammer, was changing a stone into a statue. A preacher looking on said: "I wish I could deal such changing blows on stony hearts." The workman answered: "Maybe you could, if you worked like me, upon your knees." — Arthur Tappan Pierson

With poetry and writing, the question isn't "do you know the right words?".
The real question is, "can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls? — Jacob Nordby

Don't accept the limitations of other people who claim things are 'unchangeable'. If it's written in stone, bring your hammer and chisel. — Peter McWilliams

Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?"
"Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside. — Christopher Moore

Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from. — Nicola Griffith

I can't believe how hard it is. The pain is indescribable. It's like I've been turned into sandstone and my insides are being slowly hollowed out by a chisel and mallet. — Lang Leav

To assume you have it all figured out is a warning signal that you aren't humble enough to listen to God and to others. If you refuse to chisel away at arrogant attitudes, trouble lies ahead. You know very little if you claim to have all the answers. — Thomas A Kempis

Wisdom is a sharp chisel to carve out your future. — Matshona Dhliwayo

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish. — Chris Crutcher

Let's here it for modern dentistry, eh? I said, and he grimaced. Actually, as much as people dislike going to the dentist now, try doing it two hundred years ago, when having a cavity meant some quack knocking it out with a chisel and a hammer in the market square. With no anesthetic. — Cate Tiernan

Only the mouth-hole piped out, Importunate cricket In a quarry of silences. The people of the city heard it. They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate, The mouth-hole crying their locations. Drunk as a fetus I suck at the paps of darkness. The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away. The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry Open one stone eye. This is the after-hell: I see the light. A wind unstoppers the chamber — Sylvia Plath

The patients often try to starve themselves, to hang themselves, to cut their arteries; they beg that they may be burned, buried alive, driven out into the woods and there allowed to die. One of my patients struck his neck so often on the edge of a chisel fixed on the ground that all the soft parts were cut through to the vertebrae. — Emil Kraepelin

Doubt is the chisel that causes the fissures to drive a solid relationship apart, — K. Bromberg

The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets.
He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence. — P.G. Wodehouse

Chess is more than a game or a mental training. It is a distinct attainment. I have always regarded the playing of chess and the accomplishment of a good game as an art, and something to be admired no less than an artist's canvas or the product of a sculptor's chisel. Chess is a mental diversion rather than a game. It is both artistic and scientific. — Jose Raul Capablanca

Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

A disease and its treatment can be a series of humiliations, a chisel for humility. — Laurel Lea

Inside you is a thing worth putting on a pedestal
worth putting out there for all the world to see. That piece of rock might been knocked around, roughed up a bit, considered scrap, and thrown on the trash pile ... but that's only because they don't know what's on the inside. They can't see like Michaelangelo. 'Cause if they could, they'd know that there's something in there that's just waiting to jump out. Like there is inside you. I'm sorry for the hammer and chisel. I wish life didn't work that way. Just remember ... the velvet cloth ain't far behind. — Charles Martin

Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen." He put his face close to Stephen's. "There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. 'Final advance and pursuit.' Don't tell me you don't want to put your name to those words. — Sebastian Faulks

Writing is the hammer & chisel that breaks down the established way of thinking. A concrete event, then an abstraction. An image, then a thought. Finally, writing builds another establishment with the fragments. — Diane Glancy

After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. — N.K. Jemisin

She did not arrive at Annandale without taking the chisel to herself more than once, without rubbing up against a few boys to smooth an edge or two. — Thomm Quackenbush

So this is love:
the Sculptor's chisel.
And stone, which in its whole life
does not utter a single word,
suddenly sings. — Milan Rufus

The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state. — Robert Henri

There is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession. — J.M. Coetzee

If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures. — Michelangelo

With today's work, I'm about one-fourth of the way through the whole cut. At least, one-fourth of the way through the drilling. Then I'll have 759 little chunks to chisel out. And I'm not sure how well carbon composite is going to take that. But NASA'll do it a thousand times back on Earth and tell me the best way to get it done. — Andy Weir

The mason stirs.
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write. — Basil Bunting

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear. — John Ruskin

To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies' arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies' arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself. — Audre Lorde

Ardent
yet chill and formal,
how I ache
to tempt a chisel
as a sculptor. — Hilda Doolittle

Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop — Gabrielle Zevin

In a sense, every tool is a machine
the hammer, the ax, and the chisel. And every machine is a tool. The real distinction is between one man using a tool with his hands and producing an object that shows at every stage the direction of his will and the impression of his personality; and a machine which is producing, without the intervention of a particular man, objects of a uniformity and precision that show no individual variation and have no personal charm. The problem is to decide whether the objects of machine production can possess the essential qualities of art. — Herbert Read

Sam, can you, you know, like burn that concrete off her hands?"
"No. I can't aim that precisely."
"I don't even know what can be done," Edilio said as he fed the girl another microscopic bite of food. "You try and break that stuff off with a sledge hammer or something, or even a hammer and a chisel, it's going to really hurt. Probably break every bone in her hands, man."
"Who would have done this to her?" Lana wondered.
"That's a Coates Academy uniform," Astrid answered. "We're probably not far from there. — Michael Grant

This was my first real lesson in politics ... If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, hatchet, and the chisel to make a boat with, why, go and make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't, so with men. — Theodore Roosevelt

Alexandros of Antioch took a block of marble and chiseled away from it everything that was not his masterpiece, the Venus de Milo. If you will chisel away one fault from your character every day, you may discover - a) that you're actually a statue of Margaret Thatcher. b) that you're still just a block of marble. c) that there are pigeon droppings on your shoes. d) that you, too, are a hidden masterpiece. — Robert Breault

I've chickened out. Because what if he says no? What if he says yes? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if the English guy is there? What if he isn't? What if he bludgeons me with a chisel? What if my m other breaks stone as easily as clay? What if this rash on my arm is leprosy? Etc. — Jandy Nelson

We are all like the clay Buddha covered with a shell of hardness created out of fear, and yet underneath each of us is a 'golden Buddha' a 'golden Christ' or a 'golden essence,' which is our real self....Much like the monk with the hammer and the chisel, our task now is to discover our true essence once again. — Jack Canfield

Britta wanted to try to turn a guard. Tamara thought it was idiotic.
"What are you going to do? Buy him beer and tell him about Kropotkin?"
I envisioned the conversation:
Vanguard: Wage Slave, are you aware that you are but a wire nail in the toolbox of capitalism?
Wage Slave: I thought I was a chisel.
Vanguard: No, the petit bourgeois are the chisels.
Wage Slave: What about a washer set? Can I be a washer set?
Vanguard: No, my ferret, run free! For I have unlocked your collar with knowledge!
Wage Slave: I want to be a chisel.
Vanguard pushes screaming ferret through hole in fence cut by the clippers of noblesse oblige.
"Well, maybe we could bribe him," said Britta. Tamara laughed.
"With what? Health insurance? — Vanessa Veselka

But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen, we will work for ourself and a woman, forever and ever, Amen. — Rudyard Kipling

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create. — William Butler Yeats

Essentially, people live in one of two ways. Either they live in awareness of their own worthlessness, or they live in their awareness of the worthlessness of the world. Two ways. Either you allow your value to be absorbed by the world, or you chisel away at the world's value and make it your own. Which should take precedence, the value of the world your own value? — NisiOisiN

Dawn's Spawn:
Cause and Effect
Criticizing the next generation reflects on us. We hold the power to carve out good citizens who will take over the planet and wrest control from us. Step up with your hammer and chisel to create a defined character. Give up your cowardly position as friend and brave the battle of good parenting.
Kamil Ali — Kamil Ali

The poet drafts his work as a writer but edits it as a sculptor, with his pen as a chisel and his mind a hammer. — Agona Apell

Had Kurt Cobain not committed suicide in 1994, would his genius have survived the continuous incisions of a media that was only too proud of its ability to chisel away at his fragile psyche in the years before he decided that he'd had enough off their invasions? And, had Jimi Hendrix not passed way in 1970, would he, too have eventually fallen into decline, first equalled, then eclipsed by the brilliant wave of new guitarists: Robin Trower, Ritchie Blackmore, Mick Ronson, who emerged during the early 1970s? In death, Hendrix led by example: in life he could have been left for the dead. — Dave Thompson

Now I knew why I had been hollowed out, why my insides were chipped away with a chisel and mallet. It was to make room for this new feeling, this love that was so vast, so expansive it could not have fit into the vessel I once was. — Lang Leav

What can a sculptor do without the chisel and the hammer? And what can an impostor politician do without the ignorant and the uneducated? — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The block of marble is not the sculptor, and doesn't see that he's about to become a masterpiece ... We're the block of marble and God is the sculptor, and the chisel is ... everything. — Peter Kreeft

Remember ...
Keystrokes are hammer taps. Get words on paper. Don't worry about connections, character or plot. Work for an hour. Promise yourself an hour. Do nothing else but move your fingers. Make coarse shapes. Follow any emotion that pops up but never impose emotion, never fake it, and don't make up your mind or your heart ahead of time. Understand you don't know what you're doing. That's why you're here. Rough it out. Anything goes. You can decide later what any piece of text looks like, what it might mean. Don't stop. Don't question. Don't quit. Don't stop to read what you wrote. Move your fingers. You mind will have no other option but to keep up. Remember that writer's block is merely the cold marble waiting for the chisel to heat up. — Bob Thurber