Hand Carved Quotes & Sayings

Being inside this cottage, with dark wooden walls and hand-carved furniture like my own home, cast a darkened stain onto my heart. — Katherine McIntyre

Josh isn't in love with me and I'm not in love with him."
"Sell it to someone who's buying, Sunshine. Have you seen the way he looks at you?" I've seen the way he looks at me but I don't know what it means. "Like you're a seventeenth-century, hand-carved table in mint condition. — Katja Millay

The outsiders stood always in awe in front of what they had surnamed the Celestial City with Mighty Walls. The great mystery that cloaked its very foundations kept impelling the youth of Crotona, as well as those of the adjacent cities, to seek admittance. In spite of the difficult rules of the Master, curiosity goaded many to venture inside its secrecy, with a passionate aspiration to discover the unknown. Yet, to enroll, young men and women should be introduced by their parents. Sometimes, it was one of the assigned Masters of the Pythagorean Society who assumed the introduction. At the massive wooden gated entrance, one could admire the marble statue of Hermes-Enoch, the father of the spiritual laws. A cubical stone formed its stall where a skillful hand had carved the words: No entry to the vulgar — Karim El Koussa

Simon had never noticed before, but she wore a silver ring on her right hand, with a partner of flames around the band of it, and a carved L in the center. It reminded him of the ring Clary wore around her neck, with its design of stars.
"It's the Lightwood family ring," she said, noticing where his gaze was fixed. "Every family has an emblem. Ours is fire. — Cassandra Clare

Will take you by the hand and keep you; I will give you p as a covenant for the people, q a light for the nations, 7 r to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, s from the prison those who sit in darkness. 8. I am the LORD; that is my name; t my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols. 9 Behold, the former things have come to pass, u and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them. — Anonymous

You are missing a key element to the story. Maybe the moral of the legend is that we are all carved, created, and formed by a master hand. Maybe we are all works of art. — Amy Harmon

A black pendant in the shape of a heart lay in her hand. It was carved with roses and strung onto a velvet cord. — Teresa Flavin

When the waiter brought the cheese-board, there was a large carrot carved in the shape of a mermaid sitting between the Dolcelatte and the Pecorino. Teo could have sworn that the carrot-mermaid flexed her tail and plunged her little hand inside a smelly Gorgonzola. 'Tyromancy, ye know,' remarked the mermaid. 'The Ancient Art of Divination by Cheese.' Then she pulled her tiny hand out and inspected the green cheese-mold on her tiny fingers. 'Lackaday!' she moaned. 'Stinking! It goes poorly for Venice and Teodora, it do! — Michelle Lovric

We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. — Jonathan Lethem

When you love someone, truly love them, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt-you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it's crippling-like having your heart carved out. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

While the burning fish is tracing his arc
near the cypress, beneath the highest blue of all,
and the blind boy flies away in the white stone,
and the ivory poem of the green cicada
beats and reverberates in the elm,
let us give honor to the Lord
the black mark of his good hand
who has arranged for silence in all this noise.
Honor to the god of distance and of absence,
ff the anchor in the sea - the open sea ...
He frees us from the world - it's everywhere
he opens roads for us to walk on.
With our cup of darkness filled to the brim,
with our heart that always knows some hunger,
let us give honor to the Lord who created the zero
and carved our thought out of the block of faith. — Antonio Machado

The staircase was a mass of rotting wood, carved with such cruel-looking mermaids that Mr. Jelliby was afraid to put his hand on the banister. — Stefan Bachmann

He who carved the edges of the cosmos curved Himself into a fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light splitting all white. He gave up the heavens that were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand. The mystery so large becomes the Baby so small, and infinite God becomes infant. — Ann Voskamp

For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time. — George Sutherland

The camp offices stood in the centre, adjoining the shrine to Jupiter that held the legion's Eagle. In the camps of the Vth Macedonica and the VIth Ferrata, these buildings were of grey stone, dressed by Gaulish masons to such smoothness that a man could run his hand down them and not feel the joins.
The legions' respective signs of the bull and the eagle had been carved thereon with such pride and perfection that men copied them on their shields and carved them on the bedheads in the barracks.
At Raphana, the camp office of the XIIth Fulminata and IVth Scythians before which we dismounted was built of the local baked mud, and some drunkard with a poor eye for detail had etched
the Scythians' sign of the goat and the Fulminata's crossed thunderbolts together, so that it seemed as if the goat were thunderstruck, or else that lightning grew from its anus. Both applied equally; each was unthinkable in a legion which had any pride in itself. — M.C. Scott

Turn back time to half-past innocence. But that clock's lying on its side, hour hand spinning wildly, in a dirty Dublin alley near a gold makeup pouch half concealed by trash, and an address carved in stone by a dying woman. Broken. — Karen Marie Moning

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. — Galway Kinnell

You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?"
"Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what."
"The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fucking market."
"A religious beef, you're saying?"
"It's not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world's populations
more cheap labor, more addicted consumers. — Thomas Pynchon

At the entrance to the original tower, there is a stone into which Jung carved some words with his own hand: 'Cold or not, God is present. — Haruki Murakami

That was what humans did: They left on another messages through time, pressed between pages or carved into rock. Like reaching out a hand through time, and trusting in a phantom hoped-for hand to catch yours. Humans did not last forever. They could only hope what they made would endure. — Cassandra Clare

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains. — Susan Vreeland

it says as God put his sperrit into the workman as built the tabernacle, to make him do all the carved work * and things as wanted a nice hand. And this is my way o' looking at it: there's the sperrit o' God in all things and all times - weekday as well as Sunday - and i' the great works and inventions, and i' the figuring and the mechanics. And — George Eliot

The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey. — Richard Preston

Consider the roots of a simple and mundane action, for instance, buying bread for your breakfast. A farmer has grown the grain in a field carved from wilderness by his ancestors; in the ancient city a miller has ground the flour and a baker prepared the loaf; the vendor has transported it to your house in a cart built by a cartwright and his apprentices. Even the donkey that draws the cart, what stories could she not tell if you could decipher her braying? And then you yourself hand over a coin of copper dug from the very heart of the earth, you who have risen from a bed of dreams and darkness to stand in the light of the vast and terrifying sun. Are there not a thousand strands woven together into this tapestry of a morning meal? How then can you expect that the omens of great events should be easy to unravel? The Pseudo-Iamblichus Scroll — Katharine Kerr

She was tall and built like the figurehead of a ship carved by a generous hand. — Leigh Bardugo

Was it her imagination, or did the townhouse loom? All the other mansions on this street looked polite and elegant, neatly confining themselves within rows of trimmed hedges. This house, on the other hand, sprawled. She spied a gargoyle lurking above one cornice, glowering at her. Of course the Duke of Marwick would have a gargoyle carved into his house! — Meredith Duran

When I closed the door Grandmother was already seated at her spinning wheel. Her foot was on the treadle but her eyes were thoughtfully on me. The spinner was beautifully carved of dark oak with leaves twining their way round and round the outer rim. It must have been very old, as the designs were too fanciful to have been made i the new England. She called to me and asked me if I could spin. I told her yes, well enough, but that I could sew better, which was a statement only half true. A camp surgeon would have a better hand with a cleaver to a limb than I with a needle on the cloth. She spun the wool through knotted fingers glistening with sheep's oil and wrapped the threads neatly around the bobbin. Gently probing, she teased out the story of our days in Billerica just as she teased out the fine thread from the mix and jumble of the coarse wool in her hands. — Kathleen Kent

Women can go mad with insomnia.
The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird
a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.
Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one. — Cathy Ostlere

He took something out of his jacket and handed it to her. It was a long thin dagger in a leather sheath. The hilt of the dagger was set with a single red stone carved in the shape of a rose.
She shook her head. "I wouldn't even know how to use that
"
He pressed it into her hand, curling her fingers around it. "You'd learn." He dropped his voice. "It's in your blood."
She drew her hand back slowly. "All right."
"I could give you a thigh sheath to put that in," Isabelle offered. "I've got tons."
"CERTAINLY NOT," said Simon. — Cassandra Clare

One day, I will be a child again. Carved toys will caper and dance from my mind, out across rock I will raise as mountains. Through grasses I will proclaim forests. For too long I have been trapped in this world of measures, proportions and scale. For too long I have known and understood the limits of what is possible, so cruel in rejecting all that can be imagined. In this way, friend, we are each of us not one but two lives, for ever locked in mortal combat, and from all things at hand, we make weapons.' - Hust Henarald — Steven Erikson

Her knees entered the ground. Her moment had arrived. Still in disbelief, she started to dig. He couldn't be dead. He couldn't be dead. He couldn't - Within seconds, snow was carved into her skin. Frozen blood was cracked across her hands. Somewhere in all the snow, she could see her broken heart, in two pieces. Each half was glowing, and beating under all that white. She realized her mother had come back for her only when she felt the boniness of a hand on her shoulder. She was being dragged away. A warm scream filled her throat. — Markus Zusak

I got out my jar of ointment. I knew animators who had special containers for the ointment. Crockery, hand-blown glass, mystical symbols carved into the sides. I used an old Mason jar that had once held Grandma Blake's green beans.
Larry fished out a peanut butter jar with the label still on it. Extra-crunchy. Yum-Yum. — Laurell K. Hamilton

I want you to have this." He extended his hand. On his palm sat the beautiful butterfly he had carved. Silver spots on the wings glinted in the sunlight, and a silver chain hung from a small hole drilled into its body.
Valek looped the necklace around my neck. "When I carved this statue, I was thinking about you. Delicate in appearance, but with a strength unnoticed at first glance." His eyes met mine. — Maria V. Snyder

Your voice at times a fist
Tight in your throat
Jabs ceaselessly at phantoms
In the room,
Your hand a carved and
Skimming boat
Goes down the Nile
To point out Pharaoh's tomb.
You're Africa to me
At brightest dawn.
The Congo's green and
Copper's brackish hue,
A continent to build
With Black Man's brawn.
I sit at home and see it all
Through you. — Maya Angelou

All this wandering that you do," he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. "How will anyone ever get close to you?"
"I don't know," she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves. — Lorrie Moore

My idea of a traditional holiday - the right way to do it - goes back to the days when gift-giving meant sharing homemade things: hand-knit sweaters, carved wooden toys, smoked meats and the like. — Mark Frauenfelder

She didn't understand that. "How can anyone be afraid of love?"
"How can they not?" His face was completely aghast. "When you love someone ... truly love them, friend or lover, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt - you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it's crippling - like having your heart carved out. It leaves you naked and exposed, wondering what you did to make them want to hurt you so badly when all you did was love them. What is so wrong with you that no one can keep faith with you? That no one can love you? To have it happen once is bad enough ... but to have it repeated? Who in their right mind would not be terrified of that? — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast. — Hunter Murphy

Arben was large. Strong. Armed. And these, his strengths, were his greatest weaknesses.
Brute force and the ability to control others through fear and intimidation made men lazy. Overconfident. Slow.
She would never be as fast as a bullet, but in close contact, would always be faster than the hand that drew the gun. Speed was life. Speed was survival. Speed born from the will to live, from the necessity of staying one move ahead, speed carved into her psyche one sadistic knife slice after another. That which hadn't killed her had made her faster. — Taylor Stevens

As they approached a puddle, he laid his hand against the small of her back to steer her around it, and her stomach flipped over.
Stupid, traitorous stomach, performing acrobatics for the likes of Dom Manton. Why couldn't it do that with Edwin? He, at least, wanted to marry her.
But sadly, Edwin didn't have smoldering eyes the exotic color of the finest jade. Or hair cropped unfashionably short, which only emphasized the carved masculine lines of his face. Or a body that looked so amazing in blue superfine it made a grown woman want to weep.
She would not weep over Dom's body, curse it! — Sabrina Jeffries

Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wipe the mucus that dripped from my nose.
She had been lying with her head faced away from me. She lifted it then, and turned, so that we looked at one another. If an anvil had fallen from the sky at that moment and landed upon me, I could not have felt more crushed.
(pg 39) — Geraldine Brooks

He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant. He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet. It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate. The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved. — Hilary Mantel

Do the people of this land ... desire to preserve those [liberties] protected by the First Amendment ... If so, let them withstand all beginnings of encroachment. For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanquished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch for a saving hand while yet there was time. — George Sutherland

You are being suffocated by tradition ... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art
it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants. — Kurt Vonnegut

[He] looked as thought he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque. — Robert Galbraith

For three thousand years it had been the concent's policy to accept any and all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw one away. On one and only one occasion, this had turned out to be a wise policy: the millennial Apert of 3000, when 27,500 pilgrims had swarmed in through the gates to enjoy a square meal and see the End of the World. We had folding chairs made of bamboo, machined aluminum, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, hand-carved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal, and plaited grass. Tabletops could be made of old-growth lumber, particle board, extruded titanium, recycled paper, plate glass, rattan, or substances on whose true nature I did not wish to speculate. Their lengths ranged from two to twenty-four feet and their weights from that of a dried flower to that of a buffalo. — Neal Stephenson

Patch reached for my hand and pushed my dad's ring off the tip of his finger and into my palm, curling my fingers around it. He kissed my knuckles. "I was going to give this back earlier, but it wasn't finished."
I opened my palm and held the ring up. The same heart was engraved on the underside, but now there were two names carved on either side of it: NORA and JEV.
I looked up. "Jev? That's your real name?"
"Nobody's called me that in a long time. — Becca Fitzpatrick

It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. — Joseph Conrad