Quotes & Sayings About Embroidery

I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do ... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery. — Lillian Hellman

Dad wore a very smart suit, with a long black jacket and grey pinstripe trousers. He had a waistcoat too, black silk with gold embroidery. Dad never wore fancy clothes. It was hard work imagining him in anything but jeans or his suit for work, but it was his wedding after all and I wanted him to look wonderful. I — Jacqueline Wilson

The fall couture presentations in Paris are usually my favorite moment on the fashion calendar: beautiful weather, a busy rather than manic schedule, and, let's face it, seeing the artistry, the embroidery, and handmade magnificence that goes into every dress. — Elisabeth Von Thurn Und Taxis

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. — Siri Hustvedt

Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. — Mao Zedong

She sifted, sighed, and stared up at the ceiling, trying to think about anything but Lord Maccoon, her current predicament, or Lord Akeldama's safety. Which meant she could do nothing but reflect on the complex plight of her mama's more recent embroidery project. Thins, in itself, was a worse torture than any her captors could devise. — Gail Carriger

Humility is the embroidery of chiefs. — Bill Vaughan

Although the threads of my life have often seemed knotted, I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown.. — Corrie Ten Boom

I begin to want things I've never wanted before: braids, a dressing-gown, a purse of my own. Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I've done these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly. Partly this is a relief. — Margaret Atwood

The magical embroidery of your destiny will not unfold if you do not plunge into the unknown. — Lyna Jones

Poppy was busy with needlework, stitching a pair of men's slippers with bright wool threads, while Beatrix played solitaire on the floor near the hearth. Noticing the way her youngest sister was riffling through the cards, Amelia laughed. "Beatrix," she said after Win had finished a chapter, "why in heaven's name would you cheat at solitaire? You're playing against yourself."
"Then there's no one to object when I cheat."
"It's not whether you win but how you win that's important," Amelia said.
"I've heard that before, and I don't agree at all. It's much nicer to win."
Poppy shook her head over her embroidery. "Beatrix, you are positively shameless."
"And a winner," Beatrix said with satisfaction, laying down the exact card she wanted. — Lisa Kleypas

This is beautiful." Eugenie ran her fingers along a massive mahogany sideboard, on the top of which rested a red velvet sash with fine embroidery on it and, on top of the sash, a silver dagger. That little vignette was Jean Lafitte in a nutshell. Refined gentleman and renegade. Velvet and violence. — Suzanne Johnson

As for Nina, Genya had offered up a glorious red kefta from her collection and they'd pulled out the embroidery, altering it from blue to black. She and Genya were hardly the same size, but they'd managed to let out the seams and sew in a few extra panels.
It had felt strange to wear a proper kefta after so long. The one Nina had worn at the House of the White Rose had been a costume, cheap finery meant to impress their clientele. This was the real thing, worn by soldiers of the Second Army, made of raw silk dyed in a red only a Fabrikator could create. Did she even have a right to wear such a thing now?
When Matthias had seen her, he'd frozen in the doorway of the suite, his blue eyes shocked. They'd stood there in silence until he'd finally said, "You look very beautiful."
"You mean I look like the enemy."
"Both of those things have always been true."
Then he'd simply offered her his arm. — Leigh Bardugo

We always felt divine in this place, tasting a desired view of the world, knowing a voracious appetite for the love that dare not speak its name, my soul sewn to your soul. Our fortunate embroidery. — Lisa O'Donnell

The male is colored much more gorgeously than the female so that he can be shot and made into feather embroidery. — Will Cuppy

The '60s had edge; the '70s had embroidery. — Gina Barreca

Seeing that no more Xana champions took to the air, Kuni and Mata's men jeered at Namen's camp from atop the walls: "Who's the girlie now?" "Tanno Namen is an old lady more skilled with the embroidery needle than the sword!" "Namen, what's for dinner?" "Maybe the girls from Xana should go back to Pan before it's too late." Some — Ken Liu

NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time. — Vivian Swift

Still teenagers, Harry and Peter Brant II have never disappointed when I've seen them out and about in New York, Paris, and Venice (Which is where all schoolkids go on field trips, right?) They're not afraid of wearing brooches, capes, embroidery, and even a dab-bing of makeup. — Derek Blasberg

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery. — Lynn Abbey

The fellows who amuze me are the Albanians. An Albanian on the mash is almost exactly like the medieval swells of the Italian frescoes & the first ones we met quite startled us. They wear the tight-fitting trunk hose made of woolen stuff hooked up the back of the leg. It is white with long black stripes of embroidery down the leg & at the top in front the shirt is pulled through slashes. They are long slim chaps with dandy little moustaches & are most theatrical in effect. — Edith Durham

Julia and Sallie and I all had new dresses. Do you want to hear about them? Julia's was cream satin and gold embroidery and she wore purple orchids. It was a DREAM and came from Paris, and cost a million dollars. Sallie's — Jean Webster

The Donald Fraser of The Story Girl was Donald Montgomery, and Neil Campbell was David Murray, of Bedeque. The only embroidery I permitted myself in the telling of the tale was to give Donald a horse and cutter. In reality, what he had was a half-broken steer, hitched to a rude, old wood-sled, and it was with this romantic equipage that he hied him over to Richmond Bay to propose to Nancy! — L.M. Montgomery

Perhaps it's rather revealing to say so, but while I cannot for the life of me recall what I was wearing that evening, I nonetheless remember every little stitch of black embroidery on her red dress. — Suzanne Rindell

Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France. — Ashley Warlick

Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be to create for themselves, in the course of their lives, the same illusions that have companioned and at times illuminated ours. The fabric is eternal; eternal, the embroidery. A universe dies when we die; another is born when a new creature comes to earth with a new sensibility. If, then, it is very true that nothing begins all over again, it is very just to say, too, that everything continues. One may fearlessly advance the latter statement or the former, according to whether one considers the individual or the blending of generations. From this second point of view, everything is coexistent; the same cause produces contradictory, yet logical effects. All the colors and their shades are printed at a single impression, to form the wonderful image we call life. — Remy De Gourmont

The Queen's wedding dress in 1947, there was some embroidery on the train which was definitely there to illustrate new dawn/post-war optimism, that sort of thing. — Kate Reardon

How can I?" Kennedy asked. "How can I trust someone again?"
Sabrina adjusted her veil and squeezed her fist around the white-with-blue-embroidery handkerchief in her hand. "You just do. I don't know how to explain it. You just reach a point where you realize this man is the one, and you are going to put all of your trust in him because you are so in love you don't really have a choice. — Tami Lund

If you take away print and embroidery, you have to challenge yourself a bit more on the cut. — Joseph Altuzarra

Oh, I wish it were in my power to put men in the place of fashionable women for one six months! They should curl their hair, consult the milliner, make spongecake, do a little embroidery, wear long skirts, and dress so tightly that they could scarcely breathe. — Lucy Stone

When we put the antlers on the model and then draped over it the lace embroidery that we had made, we had to poke them through a £2,000 piece of work. But then it worked because it looks like she's rammed the piece of lace with her antlers. There's always spontaneity. You've got to allow for that in my shows. — Alexander McQueen

Embroidery? I sucked at embroidery. Aunt Hyacinth had tried to teach me, but we'd both given it up as a lost cause.Lucy, strangely, had picked it up really quickly and embroidered a tapestry of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow for my last birthday. — Alyxandra Harvey

There are days when I think there really is some huge great tapestry of a plan out there and we're all woven into it - this fabulous, complex pattern of life and death, full of recurring motifs and waves of color, and we're each one tiny thread in the weave. — Jane Johnson

There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I'd grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights out, the stiff hair, the cardigans grown over with a fungus of secondary sexual characteristics--bristling with embroidery and drooping with labial frills. — Joanna Walsh

One can't help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman- whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge- is fundamentally and always interested in clothes. — Jean Webster

At first I followed her deliberately soft voice, which had the timber of a zurna,* and listened to her speech, which resembled embroidery or a string of pearls, words and phrases completely different from those of the townspeople, somewhat withered yet ornate, with the aura of those old chambers and something enduring. — Mesa Selimovic

In the theatre, words are eighty to eighty-five percent of the importance of what is happening to you for your comprehension. In film, words are about twenty percent. It's a different figure, but it's almost an opposite ratio. For the words are only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework. — Nicholas Ray

With her toddler playing on the floor by her feet, his widow now nursed her new baby on the porch of her homeplace, attended by comforting women who sat with their knitting and embroidery and spoke only of happy things. — Lois Lowry

Helda's been trying to impress me with the embroidery on the sheets. One more minute and I thought I might use them to hang myself."
"My mother did the embroidery," Bittterblue said.
Katsa clapped her mouth shut and glared at Helda. "Thank you, Helda, for mentioning that detail. — Kristin Cashore

Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans our of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly. — Margaret Atwood

The embroidery came later, in the retelling, as the story was told again and again by the men, taking on its own character as it passed over camp.
The Prince had ridden out, with only one soldier. Deep in the mountains, he had chased down the rats responsible for these killings. Had ripped them out of their hiding holes and fought them, thirty to one, at least. Had brought them back thrashed, lashed and subdued. That was their Prince for you, a twisty, vicious fiend who you should never, ever cross, unless you wanted your gullet handed to you on a platter. Why, he once rode a horse to death just to beat Torveld of Patras to the mark.
In the men's eyes the feat was reflected as the wild, impossible thing it was
their Prince vanishing for two days, then appearing out of the night with a sackful of prisoners thrown over his shoulder, tossing them at the feet of his troop and saying: You wanted them? Here they are. — C.S. Pacat

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. — John Milton

In London, she'd overheard more than one matron decrying what they considered Esme Byron's inappropriate eccentricities, aghast that she was allowed so much personal freedom and the ability to voice opinions they considered unsuitable for an unmarried young woman barely out of the schoolroom. But her family always stood by her, proud of her artistic talent and uniformly deaf to the complaints of any critics who might say she needed a firmer hand.
'What must Ned and Mama be thinking now?' Were they regretting that they had not listened to those critics? Wishing they'd kept a tighter rein on her activities rather than letting her venture out as she chose?
But she would have gone mad being constrained and confined the way she knew most girls her age were. She could never have been borne the suffocating restrictions, the smothering tedium of being expected to go everywhere with a chaperone in tow, or worse, being cooped up inside doing embroidery or playing the pianoforte. — Tracy Anne Warren

Popular Prejudice, having decided that woman is a poor, weak creature, credulous,
easily influenced, holds that she is of necessity timid; that if she were allowed as
much as a voice in the government of her native country, she would stand appalled if
war were even hinted at. If it be proved by hard facts that woman is not a poor, weak
creature, then she must be reprimanded as being masculine. To brand a woman as being
masculine, is supposed to be quite sufficient to drive her cowering back to her
embroidery-frame and her lute. — Ellen C. Clayton

As far as we could tell, the face of the revolution was a sea of embroidering women, patiently waiting the resignation of their repressive governor. — Diana Denham

And oh, how she pitched herself into things. She would draw pictures all day long for weeks on end, then throw out the pencils and never draw another thing. Then it was embroidery with her, she had to learn it, and she'd make the most beautiful thing, fussing at herself for the least little mistake, then throw down the needles and be done with that forevermore. I never saw a child so changeable. It was as though she was looking for something to which she could give herself, and she never found it. Least ways not while she was a little girl. — Anne Rice

It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence. — Samuel Johnson

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. — Mao Tse-tung

Thanks to His Majesty, the magus said, and my father seemed startled at the correction but not displeased. He looked thoroughly satisfied and very much like Ina when she has all her embroidery threads arranged to her satisfaction. He looked so pleased that I checked over my shoulder to see if there might be someone else behind me who had drawn his attention. — Megan Whalen Turner

I meant to learn something," Sophie said, impatient. "Something else than embroidery or dancing, or playing pretty tunes on the pianoforte. I am not a decorative object, Father. I have an intellect, also, and I wish to make good use of it. — Sylvia Izzo Hunter

For clothes, I like this little store on Fountain, Matrushka Construction. Beth Ann Whittaker and Laura Howe make amazing things. You can get a designer skirt with cool embroidery for 40 bucks instead of $400 or $4,000. — Jill Soloway

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a
rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently
and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

From here to Jerusalem no woman has a more beautiful neck;
it was smooth and soft to the touch.
She had a bosom as white has the snow upon a branch,
when it has just fallen.
Her body as well made and svelte;
you would not have had to seek anywhere on earth to find a woman with a more beautiful body.
She had a pretty chaplet of gold embroidery. There was never a girl more elegant or better arrayed;
nor would I have described her right. Above the chaplet of gold embroidery was one of fresh roses, and in her hand she held a mirror,
and she had arranged her hair with a rich head-band. — Guillaume De Lorris

In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous. — Hans Arp

Now the Earth with many flowers puts on her spring embroidery — Sappho

Hello, darling. Did Fulton leave?" "Yes," Emma answered, smoothing her skirts before she sat in the chair opposite Chloe's. "Good. I can't think what you see in that lumbering baboon." Emma was used to Chloe's blunt opinions, and she was unruffled. Indeed, there were times when she herself thought Fulton rather awkward. "He's a gentleman," she said, overlooking the fact that she'd had to spear the man with an embroidery needle to make him remove his hands from her person. — Linda Lael Miller

Yet they sense that something is wrong. They can't quite put their finger on the problem. As time passes, they grow more and more dependent on each other; they are getting older; any opportunities to make a new life are vanishing fast. They try to keep busy doing reading or embroidery, watching television, seeing friends, but there is always the conversation over supper or after supper. He is easily irritated, she is more silent than usual. They can see that they are growing further and further apart, but cannot understand why. They reach the conclusion that this is what marriage is like, but won't talk to their friends about it; they are the image of the happy couple who support each other and share the same interests. She takes a lover, so does he, but it's never anything serious, of course. What is important, necessary, essential, is to act as if nothing is happening, because it's too late to change. — Paulo Coelho

I learned embroidery," Kaede said, "But you can't kill anyone with a needle."
"You can," Shizuka said offhandedly. "I'll show you one day. — Lian Hearn

The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spiderweb of the micrometer. — Maria Mitchell

Will watched her go with regret. His attraction to the dark-haired lady with her execrable embroidery had taken him by surprise. She'd been laughing at his brothers - that was what had done it. Her eyes had sparkled with humor, her smiling lips just begging for a kiss. — Eve Edwards

The human heart is like a big mess of embroidery silks, and the more you pull, the more they tangle. The thing is, the threads have only got one end, if that. You can't sort them all out into colors. You just pick the ones you want and hold one to them as best you can. — Rose Lerner

None of us can be proof against the influences that proceed from the persons he associates with. Wherefore, in books and men, let us look out for the best society, that which yields a bracing and wholesome influence. We all know the person for whose company we are the better, though the talk is only about fishing or embroidery. — Charlotte M. Mason

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears. — John Milton

Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness. — Noam Shpancer

She knew that what made Sr. Adria decide had been the delicate way she had taken the book that he handed her by surprise: she took it delicately, almost lovingly, just as Elisa picked up the embroidery box when she found out about the death of her lover in Elisa Grant by Ballys (Pittsburg, 1883). — Jaume Cabre

I open my eyes and for the first time stare openly at my own reflection. My heart rate picks up as I do, like I am breaking the rules and will be scolded for it. It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.
... Looking at myself now isn't like seeing myself for the first time; it's like seeing someone else for the first time. Beatrice was a girl I saw in stolen moments at the mirror, who kept quiet at the dinner table. This is someone whose eyes claim mine and don't release me; this is Tris. — Veronica Roth

In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;
Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee;
Fairies use flower for their charactery. — William Shakespeare

My go-to gifts are scarves from my friend Matin Maulawizada's nonprofit organization, Afghan Hands, which supports disenfranchised women in Afghanistan. In exchange for their beautiful embroidery, the women are given financial aid and classes in math and literacy. The scarves are all stunning and one of a kind. — Claire Danes

An we, inhabitants of the great coral of the Cosmos, believe the atom (which still we cannot see) to be full matter, whereas, it too, like everything else, is but an embroidery of voids in the Void, and we give the name of being, dense and even eternal, to that dance of inconsistencies, that infinite extension that is identified with absolute Nothingness an that spins from its own non-being the illusion of everything. — Umberto Eco

I'll hold the baby," Daniel announced, then narrowed his eyes in case anyone wanted to argue the point. "You can do another next year,lass," he added to Gennie when there was no opposition, "and I'll be holding two." He beamed at Diana before he shifted his look to Shelby. "Or three."
"You should have Dad sitting in his throne-chair," Alan amended quickly, giving Gennie one of his rare grins. "That'd make the clearest statement."
"Exactly." Her eyes danced as she kept her features sober. "And Anna, you'll sit beside him. Perhaps you'd hold your embroidery because it looks so natural."
"The wives should sit at their husband's feet," Caine said smoothly. "That's natural."
There was general agreement among the men and definite scorn among the women. — Nora Roberts

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery. — R. Buckminster Fuller

He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebecca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amarana Ursula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The door of the jail being flung open, the young woman stood fully revealed before the crowd. It seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom that she might conceal a certain token which was wrought or fastened to her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush and yet a haughty smile, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head, dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being which cannot be secured until the last note is in place. — Russell Sherman

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta.
But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless. — Alison Bechdel

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. — Wendell Berry

Using my own hand as a base material, I considered it a canvas upon which I stitched into the top layer of skin using thread to create the appearance of an incredibly work worn hand. By using the technique of embroidery, traditionally employed to represent femininity and applying it to the expression of it's opposite, I hope to challenge the pre-conceived notion that 'women's work' is light and easy. Aiming to represent the effects of hard work arising from employment in low paid ancillary jobs such as cleaning, caring, and catering, all traditionally considered to be 'women's work' — Eliza Bennett

Hennick's iliac artery and vein, as well as the artery and vein of the new kidney, were spliced together with neat embroidery stitches. Then the surgeon took a deep breath, stretched his arms like a stage conjurer, and said to me: "You're about to witness the most wonderful sight in the history of medicine." He removed the arterial and venous clamps in sequence, and Hennick's blood began to pump into the withered kidney. Each beat of his heart, visible in the pumping of the arteries, caused the kidney to swell. It was like watching a process of reanimation: a refutation of death. As the kidney grew, its defeated, dimpled surface began to fill out to a lucent pink. The surgeon held up the ureter of the new kidney (the tube that carries urine to the bladder) and I watched as a bead of urine began to grow at its cut end. — Gavin Francis

Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child's. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I hate to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves, she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her...and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace...she has nothing...she expects nothing...' A tear at last sneaks from Henry's eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard. — Hilary Mantel

Then allow me to finish it. Categorically. I am happy for you to pursue all the adventure you like. Here. In this house. Under this roof. Drink until you can no longer stand. Curse like a dockside sailor. Set your embroidery aflame, for God's sake. But, as your elder brother, the head of the family, and the earl," he stressed the last words, "I forbid you from frequenting taverns, public houses, or other establishments of vice. — Sarah MacLean

Life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together — Arthur Schopenhauer

Success is not fame or money or the power to bewitch. it is to have created something valuable from your own individuality and skill a garden, an embroidery, a painting, a cake, a life. — Charlotte Gray

He told me and Rafe to stay put in case you came home, burn the note and get hot water and disinfectant and bandages ready - '

'Which would have come in useful, Rafe said, lighting another cigarette, 'if we'd been delivering a baby in Gone with the Wind. What on earth was he picturing? Home surgery on the kitchen table with Abby's embroidery needle? — Tana French

When we put his kippah into the museum, everyone was talking about how much money it was worth and the embroidery by some famous artist and how it was a national relic, and all this -- but I was just thinking of Shabbat, and seders, and -- and it didn't mean any of those things to me. It meant lighting candles. It meant he'd hid the afikomen in the palace for me and joking with his advisors as he waited around for me to find it so he could give me a new book. National treasure? I--' She blinked away new tears, but this time the look on her face was one of indignation. — Shira Glassman

But of course a man like Burke could not imagine what that was like. To live, day after day, as a shadow - to speak and be ignored, as though one's words made no sound. To protest and be patted on the head, as though one's concerns were a child's. Her uncle had not burned the embroidery in an outrage, Jane thought suddenly, but in the righteous grip of moral duty. His niece's role was to be used, not to think or speak or feel. And so, in the very act of communicating an opinion, she had committed the egregious offense of insisting on her humanity. — Meredith Duran

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever. — Wendell Berry

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors. — Florence King

I'd always felt that one could read a woman's discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery. — Amy Stewart

But here there were houses full of *stuff*, fancy sheets woven with silk floss as soft as a baby's bum; fancy washstands carved of dark wood that glowed like cherries where the light hit it; curtains the shade of the summer sky, heavy and glossy and smooth to the touch. The velvet-flocked wallpaper was so soft beneath her fingertips that had her eyes been closed, she might have thought she was brushing the belly of a rabbit.
And the stool in the corner! One wouldn't imagine you'd get too fancy with such a piece, but this stool was covered with embroidery so fine that her knuckles ached just looking at the stitches. Unbelievable. The rich even spoiled their arses! — Meredith Duran

She noticed this time that his eyes weren't really gray, but green, and that perhaps they were set too close together. His forehead was awfully high, and when he smiled, his teeth were slightly crooked. And there was something cocky in his manner, but that might just be the salesman in him, she thought. Honora laid these flaws aside as one might overlook a small stain on a beautifully embroidered tablecloth one wanted to buy, only later to discover, when it was on the table and all the guests were seated around it, that the stain had become a beacon, while the beautiful embroidery lay hidden in everybody's laps. — Anita Shreve

But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. Sometimes — Wendell Berry

Four people wheel out a huge wedding cake from a side room. Most of the guests back up, making way for this rarity, this dazzling creation with blue-green, white-tipped icing waves swimming with fish and sailboats, seals and sea flowers. But I push my way through the crowd to confirm what I knew at first sight. As surely as the embroidery stitches in Annie's gown were done by Cinna's hand, the frosted flowers on the cake were done by Peeta's. — Suzanne Collins

She was passionate about knitting because it allowed her to reach a state of peacefulness, and she loved to embroider because it let her express her creativity. Both activities were liberating. They allowed her to exist outside of time. — Laura Esquivel