Quotes & Sayings About From The Notebook

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere. — Cherrie Moraga

Sometimes the very best of all summer books is a blank notebook. Get one big enough, and you can practice sketching the lemon slice in your drink or the hot lifeguard on the beach or the vista down the hill from your cabin. — Michael Dirda

I found this." He put the briefcase on the table and opened the locks. She saw a stack of papers, an evidence bag with a red seal. He pulled a college notebook with a blue plastic cover from one of the pockets. Black fingerprint powder spotted the cover. "I tried to clean it up," he said, wiping the grime on the front of his sweater. "I'm sorry. It was in Allison's car and I..." He flipped through the pages, showing her the scrawled handwriting. "I can't," he said. "I just can't."
She realized that Will hadn't looked at her once since walking into the room. He had such an air of defeat about him, as if every word that came from his mouth caused him pain. — Karin Slaughter

I pull out my notebook from my bag and open it. I read through all the pages I've written. It makes me feel more substantial, somehow. I do exist. I am me. This is the story of my heart. — Julia Green

A gardener's best tool is the knowledge from previous seasons. And it can be recorded in a $2 notebook. — Andy Tomolonis

So, it's not gonna be easy. It's gonna be really hard. We're gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, you and me, every day. Will you do something for me, please? Just picture your life for me? Thirty years from now, forty years from now? What's it look like? If it's with him- go. Go! I lost you once, I think I can do it again, if I thought that's what you really wanted. But don't you take the easy way out. — Nicholas Sparks

My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl 'Write me! Write me now!' But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying 'Wait for me! Wait for me!' and waving my notebook in the air. — Robin McKinley

sun caught the edge of his belt buckle, projecting a flash that shimmered across the desert plain. A shrill whistle sounded, and as I stepped to the right I caught sight of his shadow spilling a whole other set of sophisms from an entirely different angle. - I been here before, haven't I? He just sat there staring out at the plain. Son of a bitch, I thought. He's ignoring me. - Hey, I said, I'm not the dead, not a shade passing. I'm flesh and blood here. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and started writing. - You got to at least look at me, I said. After all, it is my dream. I drew closer. Close enough to see what he was writing. He had his notebook open to a blank page and three words suddenly materialized. Nope, it's mine. - Well, I'll be damned, I murmured. I — Patti Smith

It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother's escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thimas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him. — Michael Chabon

Then let's do the interview over the phone. I've got a list of questions right-'
He hung up on me.
I stared at the phone in disbelief, then ripped a clean sheet of paper from my notebook. I scribbled Jerk on the first line. On the line beneath it I added, smokes cigars. Will die of lung cancer. Hopefully soon. Excellent physical shape. — Becca Fitzpatrick

Unless you turn out to be a shining and ballistic genius, then, trust me, if you want to do this then you're going to be spending the next few years doing little else. This is a thing you do at a table with a notebook and a keyboard, and there's no getting away from it. Put in the hours. You don't get to turn off 'being a writer.' — Warren Ellis

Once I have the idea for a story. I start collecting all kinds of helpful information and storing it in three-ring notebooks. For example, I may see a picture of a man in a magazine and say, 'That's exactly what the father in my book looks like!' ... I save everything that will help
maps, articles, hand-jotted notes, bits of dialogue from conversations that I overhear. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

'Letters From Home' is a 90,000-word WWII love story with a twist, aptly summarized as 'The Notebook' meets 'Saving Private Ryan.' — Kristina McMorris

Get a notebook, my young folks, a journal that will last through all time, and maybe the angels may quote from it for eternity. Begin today and write in it your goings and comings, your deepest thoughts, your achievements and your failures, your associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies. — Spencer W. Kimball

Peter Lake spurred the horse again, and extended his right arm like a lance, pointing it at the motionless officer. As they went by in a blur of white, he lifted the man's cap from his head, saying, "Allow me to take your hat." The enraged policeman pivoted, took out his notebook, and furiously wrote a description of the horse's buttocks. — Mark Helprin

(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderlinessand he would not be a German if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors ... — Stefan Zweig

After the three of them got back to the Portakabin, while Quill and Ross started to add the details from the manuscript pages to the Ops Board, Sefton got out his special notebook and checked through everything he'd written down about his encounter with ... whatever Brutus had been. I was proceeding in a mystical direction when I encountered a six-foot-two Roman male, with whom I shared a certain sexual tension. — Paul Cornell

Religion must now recognize that our deep antisocial impulses when denied and repressed do not disappear miraculously from reality; the more we treat them like criminals, the more vengeance they take against us. Adults who strive for total repression of their impulses in the realm of imagination wreak havoc either on their bodies or their spirits.
The religion of the future should take a page from the notebook of the psychotherapist, encouraging men to tolerate their unacceptable impulses, to sublimate them, and at the same time to discipline themselves to a finer and more generous program of action. It must strengthen mature men and women to realize that everyone has desires and fantasies antisocial in nature. Only when their presence is acknowledged rather than repressed can they be prevented from exercising dominion over us in the realm of action. — Joshua Loth Liebman

My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it's going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down. — Rita Dove

The lecture theatre - the place where information passes from the notebook of the lecturer to the notebook of the student without necessarily passing through the mind of either. — Jim White

People are curious. A few people are ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish. — Alice Munro

He hung up on me.
I stared at the phone in disbelief, then ripped a clean sheet of paper from my notebook. I scribbled Jerk on the first line. One the line beneath it, I added, Smokes cigars. Will die of lung cancer. Hopefully soon. Excellent physical shape.
I immediately scribbled over the last observation until it was illegible. — Becca Fitzpatrick

The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come. — Naomi Novik

I try to keep my gaze from drifting to her, but I find myself watching her as she taps away at the keyboard, completely oblivious. I twist my pen between my finger and thumb, staring at her. She tilts her head and looks down at her notebook, adjusting her glasses as her pen scribbles over the page. Her light blue eyes flick along as she writes. She bites the edge of her lip and suddenly looks up at me. — Dannielle Wicks

I have a friend who calls me the queen of the nightmares because I've always had really bad nightmares. I keep a notebook by the side of my bed, so I'll wake up in the night from a bad dream, and my heart's pounding, and I'm really scared, but I write it down, and sometimes I get ideas for books that way. — Jennifer McMahon

Schoolteacher didn't take advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a variety of corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them. — Toni Morrison

The logical statements entered into the notebook are broken down into six categories: (1) statement of the problem, (2) hypotheses as to the cause of the problem, (3) experiments designed to test each hypothesis, (4) predicted results of the experiments, (5) observed results of the experiments and (6) conclusions from the results of the experiments. This is not different from the formal arrangement of many college and high-school lab notebooks but the purpose here is no longer just busywork. The purpose now is precise guidance of thoughts that will fail if they are not accurate. The — Robert M. Pirsig

Excerpt from the Marquis's Mistake by myself.
"So what am I my Lord, an antidote, a bluestocking or on the shelf? I assume it is the last because I should have come out three years ago and am all of twenty and one."
"But you were not out so that doesn't count and I find you extremely desirable so you are far from an antidote. I think you very pretty and my taste has always been considered excellent. You are well educated but have other interests and ride well, so you fail to fit the criteria of a bluestocking. It might interest you to know my grandmother put you top of the girls she invited to her dinner party. Her opinion only confirmed what I had already concluded from examining your notebook and sketches. You eavesdrop and I sneak a peek at other people's private notebooks. You see I think we would be well-matched. — Giselle Marks

Sherlock Holmes had listened with the utmost intentness to the statement of the unhappy schoolmaster. His drawn brows and the deep furrow between them showed that he needed no exhortation to concentrate all his attention upon a problem which, apart from the tremendous interests involved must appeal so directly to his love of the complex and the unusual. He now drew out his notebook and jotted down one or two memoranda. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Was the pie good, luv?" she asked.
I'd forgotten the pie until that moment. I took a leaf from Dr. Darby's notebook.
"Um," I said. — Alan Bradley

And below, the notebook filled with fine cursive script, laying out in strict order conclusion and delusion, mingling myth and science, drawing from learned men and legends, all of it based on the power of dreams. To any casual observer, it could be either a muddle of half-thought-out nonsense or, at best, the outline for a clever-silly novel. Only to me did it have the look of a careful, deliberate plan. In — Diana Gabaldon

Is it easy for me to write from a female point of view? Yeah, I am a female. I'm a very sensitive type of guy. I try to put my female hat on and think how a female would think. If I'm watching 'The Notebook,' I'm definitely gonna cry. I cried during 'E.T.' too. — Benny Blanco

I've always said "Writer's Block" is a myth. There is no such thing as writer's block, only writers trying to force something that isn't ready yet. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. And then all of the sudden I'll get a rush of inspiration and you can't drag me away from my notebook. But I don't stress out if I don't hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something. — Julie Ann Dawson

They're headed for some place called the Great Barrier."
"A place that doesn't exist." Liv was shaking her head, checking the rotating dials on her wrist.
Link pushed away his plate, still covered with food. "So let me get this straight. We're gonna go down into the
Tunnels and find this moon outta time with Liv's fancy watch?"
"Selenometer." Liv didn't look up from copying numbers from the dials into her red notebook. — Kami Garcia

Our dreams are little stories or puzzles that we must solve to be free, Sebastian said. He was reading out loud from Wilson's notebook. My dream is me offering me a solution to the conundrum of my life. My dream is me offering me something that I need and my responsibility to myself is to try to understand what it means. Our dreams are a thin curtain between survival and extinction. — Miriam Toews

learned to read and write in the Slavic alphabet from a single sheet. Then, I proceeded to make up my own dictionary using a small notebook with every page a different letter. An added impediment was the difference between these two Slavic languages. The writing presented also slight differences, also the orthography. All this added to the difficulties and the confusion, at first. The new, Soviet administration never thought of offering language classes for the new citizens. — Pearl Fichman

'The Notebook' gets me every time. It's a great love story. Boy from the wrong side of the tracks. They get on each other's nerves, but they can't live without each other. It almost makes me shed a tear. — Michael Strahan

By attempting to "write bad" for twenty minutes, they'd somehow managed to produce remarkable work.
From AWP - The Writer's Notebook — Steve Almond

My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem. — Rita Dove

I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens - it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings, it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from. — Agatha Christie Mallowan

Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it - at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air. — Bill Gates

I didn't do anything wrong. I swear.'
He grunted. 'Like I've never heard that before. Funny, but I expected a little more originality from Moira's daughter.'
'Yeah, well, the dog ate my notebook with all my good excuses. — Mindee Arnett

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic
it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor. — John Taylor Gatto

John Roebling was a believer in hydropathy, the therapeutic use of water. Come headaches, constipation, the ague, he would sit in a scalding-hot tub for hours at a time, then jump out and wrap up in ice-cold, slopping-wet bed sheets and stay that way for another hour or two. He took Turkish baths, mineral baths. He drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine, and there were dozens of people along Canal Street who had seen him come striding through his front gate, cross the canal bridge, and drink water "copiously" - gallons it seemed - from the old fountain beside the state prison. ("This water I relish much . . ." he would write in his notebook.) "A wet bandage around the neck every night, for years, will prevent colds . . ." he preached to his family. "A full cold bath every day is indispensable — David McCullough

It's like if Ryan Gosling showed up at your door dressed like Noah from The Notebook, bearing flowers and whiskey. You'd be stupid not to take that bike for a ride. — Staci Hart

It came as a gift. A large gray bird flew up with a loud alarm call as he approached. As it gained height and wheeled away over the valley, it gave out a piping sound on three notes, which he recognized as the inversion of a line he had already scored for a piccolo. How elegant, how simple. Turning the sequence round opened up the idea of a plain and beautiful song in common time, which he could almost hear. But not quite. An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending-from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, and then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalizing afterimage and the fading call of a sad little tune ... These notes were perfectly interdependent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc. He could almost hear it again as he reached the top of the angled rock slab and paused to reach into his pocket for notebook and pencil. — Steven Pinker

I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages. — Sue Monk Kidd

[H]e went ahead and named them without her, pulling from the spiral notebook of names they'd been collecting, putting together first and middle names with no rhyme or reason ... names that obviously didn't flow. — Sheri Holman

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'. — Andrew Wilson

I couldn't sleep last night because I know that it's over between us. I'm not bitter any more, because I know that what we had was real. And if in some distant place in the future we see each other in our new lives, I'll smile at you with joy and remember how we spent the summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love. The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that's what you've given me
- Noah The Notebook — Nicholas Sparks

They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn't mention it. And it wasn't until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She'd written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a paragraph for her to find. — Keith Ridgway

For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means 'place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read. — Lemony Snicket

Sophie isn't leaving," Quentin asserted, his voice pure steel. "That woman sheds grace and light in every room she enters. Any man with a functional brain would try to catch a fragment of that grace and cherish it, rather than push her aside. I'm not sending her away. Were it in my power, I would cut the moon out of the sky and give it to her on a silver platter." Her notebook dropped from her nerveless fingers, splatting open on the tile floor. Quentin whirled around to see her standing in the doorway. If he was embarrassed to have been overheard, he gave no sign of it. On the contrary, his eyes that had been sparking with anger gentled the instant he saw her. She glanced away, rocked by the protective expression on Quentin's face. It shot straight to a vulnerable part deep inside and enveloped her with a sense of well-being. No man had ever spoken so passionately on her behalf, and a rush of wild, electrifying emotions stirred inside. — Elizabeth Camden

You could be attached to merely a description of a plant or a flower. Or a narrative of an event. Or rage at injustice. Isaiah and the other Hebrew prophets, in their rage, were being altogether attached - not at all detached, although as I think of the word "detachment," I also think of a sheet of paper, loose from its notebook, fluttering around somewhere in the wind trying to find its home again. — Gerald Stern

Within those confining walls, teachers - a bunch of men all armed with the same information - gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes. — Yukio Mishima

I reached for the notebook which was always close by. All thoughts of composing epic poems of Greek heroes had left me. The words that often burst from my onto the paper in recent days would be considered mere nothings to the world, but they were everything to me ... They were the pourings of my heart FOR my heart ... — Nancy Moser

You're breaking my heart."
At the sound of Rider's voice, I wheeled around, clutching my bag to my side. First thing I noticed was the faded Ravens emblem stretched over his broad chest, and then I forced my eyes up. The slight scruff along his jaw was gone. Nothing but smooth skin today.
No notebook. Hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, a familiar, crooked grin pulled at Rider's lips, causing the dimple in his right cheek to pop. He stepped forward, and my heart did a backflip as he dipped his chin. I felt his warm breath on the side of my cheek as he spoke.
"You didn't respond to my text last night," he said, and there was a light, teasing tone I didn't remember from before. "I thought maybe you didn't realize it was me, but that would mean someone else would be texting you good-night and calling you Mouse. I'm not sure how I feel about that. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

I stared at the phone in disbelief, then ripped a clean sheet of paper from my notebook. I scribbled ' Jerk ' on the first line. On the line beneath it I added, ' Smokes cigars. Will die of lung cancer. Hopefully soon. — Becca Fitzpatrick

My dad died, I write. almost a year ago. Car accident. My hand is shaking; my eyes sting and fill. I add Not his fault before pushing the notebook and pen back across the table, wiping a hand across my cheeks.
As he reads, my impulse is to reach out, grab the notebook, run outside, dump it in the trash, bury it in the snow, throw it under the wheels of a passing car - something, something, so I can go back fifteen seconds when this part ofme was still shut away and private. Then I look at Ravi's face again, and the normally white white whites of his eyes are pink. This causes major disruption to my ability to control the flow of my own tears. I see myself when I look at him right now: he's reflecting my sadness, my broken heart, back to me.
He takes the pe, writes, and slides it over. You'd think it's something epic from the way it levels my heart. It isn't.
I'm really sorry, Jill.
Four little words. — Sara Zarr

Whatever reason, an evening nodding and unconscious in my bedroom at Hobie's had begun to seem like a perfectly reasonable response to the holiday lights, the holiday crowds, the incessant Christmas bells with their morbid funeral note, Kitsey's candy-pink notebook from Kate's Paperie with tabs — Donna Tartt

Imagine going to Mexico with a notebook and trying to figure out the average wealth of the population from talking to people you randomly encounter. Odds are that, without Carlos Slim in your sample, you have little information. For out of the hundred or so million Mexicans, Slim would (I estimate) be richer than the bottom seventy to ninety million all taken together. So you may sample fifty million persons and unless you include that "rare event," you may have nothing in your sample and underestimate the total wealth. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I take pens and I write on the inside of my arm. When I'm with people and somebody says a really fascinating anecdote, or fact, or phrase, I'll write it on the inside of my arm. At the end of the day, I'll take the very best things that are on my arm and I'll copy them into a notebook that I always carry and only when the weather is absolutely terrible will I really key the very best of that notebook into the computer. At that point, it's all sort of censored twice - only the best things go from the arm to the book and only the best things go from the book to the computer. — Chuck Palahniuk

I received the grace of shadows. The grace of remaining in the dark.
- From A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook — Anna Kamienska

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart. — Willa Cather

I got home from the FBi that day, put on my pajamas got a pint of Chunky Monkey, and watched 'The Notebook'. Five times. Everyone left me alone. I suspect they were a little afraid of me.
I went up to my room and listened to Taylor Swift's 'White Horse' on replay, knowing she was the only person in the world who could relate. — Annabel Monaghan

For a day or two Fleury became quite active. He had his book about the advance of civilization in India to consider and this was one reason why he had taken an interest in the behaviour of the Collector. He asked a great number of questions and even bought a notebook to record pertinent information.
"Why, if the Indian people are happier under our rule," he asked a Treasury official, "do they not emigrate from those native states like Hyderabad which are so dreadfully misgoverned and come and live in
British India?"
"The apathy of the native is well known," replied the official stiffly. "He is not enterprising."
Fleury wrote down "apathy" in a flowery hand and then, after a moment's hesitation, added "not enterprising". — J.G. Farrell

The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. 'It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate, previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.' What the patient actually read was: 'An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido a that kekritest.' Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! What majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! 'An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo.' He repeated it to himself. 'I shall print it on the title page of my next novel,' he wrote in his notebook. — Aldous Huxley

I want you to start a brand-new section in your notebooks and call it Mr. Browne's Precepts." He kept talking as we did what he was telling us to do. "Put today's date at the top of the first page. And from now on, at the beginning of every month, I'm going to write a new Mr. Browne precept on the chalkboard and you're going to write it down in your notebook. Then we're going to discuss that precept and what it means. And at the end of the month, you're going to write an essay about it, about what it means to you. So by the end of the year, you'll all have your own list of precepts to take away with you. — R.J. Palacio

Mrs. Scott, do you mind my asking why the alarm wasn't on?" This was from Mayhew. He had taken out a notebook and pen. His shoulders were hunched, as if someone had asked him to mimic a character from a Raymond Chandler novel. — Karin Slaughter

He continued with his research until he found a book entitled The Ultimate Dating Guide: How To Find The Perfect Girlfriend and Keep Them. He flipped through the contents and found the chapter called flirting with confidence. He took out a pen and notebook from his back pocket and scribbled some notes. Praise her body the book advised. Tell her you find her attractive. He decided he would record the key phrases and chose the right moment to recite these to Katie. He wrote you have come to bed eyes. Your eyes were the key to the soul and I like what I see — Annette J. Dunlea

From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence
in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug ... I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
- from Harper's Notebook, November 2010 — Lewis H. Lapham

A little later, just for something to do, I picked up an old newspaper and read it. I cut out an advertisement for Kruschen Salts and stuck it in an old notebook where I put things from the papers that interest me. — Albert Camus

More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story. — Marissa Moss

Write it down. Not just to remember it, but to forget it in the right way. My notebook are a kind of materialized subconscious, a hard-copy memory and its invisible substrata, following their own rules. More than once I have been surprised to discover that an idea I thought was new and original, something I set down in a notebook yesterday, is already contained in another note from years before. Sometimes the second version repeats the first, almost word for word, across the space of a decade. The earlier version, once brought with clarity to the surface, has been covered over again by layers of yellowing paper. — Ivan Vladislavic

At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. — Hannah Arendt

And so when she left, she left for good. But I could not believe she had left for a perpetual journey. She had, I felt sure, left for a place - a place where she could stay long enough for it to matter, long enough for the next leaving to feel as good as the last one had. There is a corner of the world somewhere far away from here where no one knows what "Margo Roth Spiegelman" means. And Margo is sitting in that corner, scrawling in her black notebook. — John Green

I shook my head. "You need help. Just like your mom. My little sister kept fossilized lunches under her bed for the dust bunnies she raised there." I picked up a game from the neat stack. "Want to play some Battleship?" I wasn't leaving him alone with that thing in there. Chad armed himself with a notebook, and we went to war. Historically, war has often been used as a distraction for problems at home. Both of us — Patricia Briggs

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand
a center of gravity. — Adrienne Rich

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants ... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes. — Bronislaw Malinowski

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. — Ernest Hemingway,

I do hope to travel," he said. "But not alone." She swallowed. "Oh?" Henry pulled something from his coat pocket and unfolded it. "Here is my itinerary." He held the piece of paper toward her. "What do you think of it?" Emma accepted the single sheet and glanced at the list of Italian destinations - cities, churches, ruins, palazzos, and pensiones - preparing to offer some polite comment. Instead she stared. She turned to her aunt's desk, opened her notebook, and compared it to their own Italian itinerary - the one they'd had to discard. Except for the handwriting, the lists were identical. She glanced up at him, lips parted in astonishment. He stepped nearer. "I had hoped to travel with my wife, but she is, as yet, unavailable." Her neck heated. "Oh . . . why?" Henry dipped his chin and raised his brows. "Because she has yet to agree to marry me. — Julie Klassen

The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written. — Zachary Cole Smith

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand. — Charles De Lint

What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again. — R.M. Engelhardt

She didn't care anymore ... and she got no pleasure from the work she did, but she did it. Everything bored her. She found that when she didn't have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down. She sat very stupidly with a blank mind until finall 'I feel different' came slowly to her mind.
Yes, she thought, after a long pause. And then, after more time, 'Mean, I feel mean. — Louise Fitzhugh