Inkstand Quotes & Sayings

Take care of the waste on the farm and turn it into useful channels' should be the slogan of every farmer. — George Washington

All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased. — Anna Brownell Jameson

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. — Herman Melville

To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction - and a cat. The last ingredient is usually hardest to come by. — Stephen Baker

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand! — Herman Melville

Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with him was multiplication or subtraction. — Alexandre Dumas

Halfpast twelve o'clock came; Turkey began to glow in the face, overturn
his inkstand, and become generally obstreperous; Nippers abated down
into quietude and courtesy; Ginger Nut munched his noon apple; and
Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of his profoundest
dead-wall reveries. — Herman Melville

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

I'm my favorite rapper. — Kanye West

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. — Virginia Woolf

I assure you, an educated fool is more foolish than an uneducated one. — Moliere

Am I allowed to say I really wanted this? This is fantastic. — Steven Spielberg

The Necrotelecomnicon," said the dwarf. "Wizards use it. It's how to contact the dead, I think. — Terry Pratchett

Real life is often sloppy, tragic, ugly, embarrassing, unglamorous, and not made for TV. — Jane Velez-Mitchell

We're going to be focusing our science on things that will take us farther and longer into space. For many of those experiments, the crew members are human guinea pigs, which is fine; that's part of my job. I don't mind being a human guinea pig. — John L. Phillips

A young mark twain on the make: I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp. — H.W. Brands

I want love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything. It can't do anything on it's own.
It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf. — David Levithan

Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse? Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more. — James Kenneth Stephen

The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.
See how the roof glitters, like ice!
Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night. — Amy Lowell

Little Dorrit's old friend held the inkstand as she signed her name, and the clerk paused in taking off the good clergyman's surplice, and all the witnesses looked on with special interest. 'For, you see,' said Little Dorrit's old friend, 'this young lady is one of our curiosities, and has come now to the third volume of our Registers. Her birth is in what I call the first volume; she lay asleep, on this very floor, with her pretty head on what I call the second volume; and she's now a-writing her little name as a bride in what I call the third volume. — Charles Dickens