Manuscript Of Quotes & Sayings

It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters. — Lady Gregory

This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read. — Jack Kerouac

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things ... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.
[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938] — Mikhail Bulgakov

The stock exchanges have converted from "open outcry" where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild - in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the "flash crash"); in August 2012, as this manuscript was heading to the printer, the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Every agent has a Sig Weiss - as a rosy dream. You sit there day after day paddling through oceans of slush, hoping one day to run across a manuscript that means something - sincerity, integrity, high word rates - things like that. You try to understand what editors want in spite of what they say they want, and then you try to tell it to writers who never listen unless they're talking. You lend them money and psychoanalyze them and agree with them when they lie to themselves. When they write stories that don't make it, it's your fault. When they write stories that do make it, they did it by themselves. And when they hit the big time, they get themselves another agent. In the meantime, nobody likes you. — Theodore Sturgeon

Good designers are no longer satisfied in taking the manuscript from someone and making it look nice. One of the things that I've tried to do is move from being a designer to a content provider. — Tibor Kalman

The manuscript may go forth from the writer to return with a faithfulness passing the faithfulness of the boomerang or the homing pigeon. — Rose Macaulay

Today there survives more than 25,0000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament. These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Bible we have in our possession today is the same Bible that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago. — Charlie Campbell

If we are at war, we're not fighting for a bewitched alchemical manuscript, or for my safety, or for our right to marry and have children. This is about the future of all of us." I saw that future for just a moment, its bright potential spooling away in a thousand different directions. "If our children don't take the next evolutionary steps, it will be someone else's children. And whiskey isn't going to make it possible for me to close my eyes and forget that. No one else will go through this kind of hell because they love someone they're not supposed to love. I won't allow it. — Deborah Harkness

A small brazier glowed near the monk's left hand. On a lecturn before him lay pots of paints, brushes, a quill, a pen, a knife, a sizeable handbell, the tooth of some animal
and a piece of parchment.
It was the parchment that commanded the room. Until he saw it Len didn't realize how starved he had been of colour. Villagers dressed in various shades of brown and beige, like their furniture and fields and now, here, was an irruption of the rainbow, as if a charm of goldfinches had landed on the manuscript and been transfixed. — Diana Norman

At the age of six, Mahler accepted paid commissions as a composer, something he was never to do in later life, his mother having promised him two kreuzers on condition that he did not make any ink blots on the expensive music manuscript paper. — Jens Malte Fischer

God suffers in the multitude of souls whom His word can not reach. Religious truth is imprisoned in a small number of manuscript books, which confine instead of spread the public treasure. Let us break the seal which seals up holy things and give wings to Truth in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine. — Johannes Gutenberg

She praised his book and he embraced her from gratitude rather than lust, but she didn't let go. Neither did he. She kissed his cheek, his earlobe. For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed. She sat on the desk, between the columns of read and unread manuscript, and pulled him toward her by his index fingers. — Anthony Marra

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal. — Chloe Thurlow

The embryological record, as it is usually presented to us, is both imperfect and misleading. It may be compared to an ancient manuscript, with many of the sheets lost, others displaced, and with spurious passages interpolated by a later hand ... Like the scholar with his manuscript, the embryologist has by a process of careful and critical examination to determine where the gaps are present, to detect the later insertions, and to place in order what has been misplaced. — Francis Maitland Balfour

The more time you can put between you and your manuscript, the more fresh your eyes become and the more mistakes you'll catch. Let a chapter rest for a day, you'll see ways to improve it. Let your completed book rest a month or more and you'll see stuff that's long or that you want to skip. Read it out loud to get rid of awkward phrases and listen to your critique partners if they are good. — Dan Alatorre

I started my career in journalism and researched outlaw motorcycle club culture extensively for my stories. This included talking to people in club life, many of whom answered questions for me throughout the writing process. The Reaper's Legacy manuscript was reviewed and corrected by a woman attached to an outlaw MC. — Joanna Wylde

On the Overture of the Rossini opera "Il SIgnor Bruschino" - The sound of the second violins striking the backs of their bows against the metal candle holders shortly after the start of the overture was judged 'incomprehensible' by the Giornale. Rossini feared as much. 'Dio ti salvi l'anima' (God save your soul), he wrote on the manuscript at the end of the overture). — Richard Osborne

The world's many mysteries fascinate me and inspire in me a hope so profound that I suppose, if I were to express it sincerely and at length in a manuscript more bluntly philosophical than this one, any normal person, those who walk freely in daylight, would find it the work of a Pollyanna and worthy only of ridicule. — Dean Koontz

I had actually finished the manuscript of 'The Wild Trees' and turned it in to Random House when all of a sudden word came. Michael Taylor and his colleague, Chris Atkins, another explorer, have just knocked one out of the park. They found the world's tallest tree. The tree is named Hyperion, 379.1 feet tall. — Richard Preston

The Blacks was a white foreigner's idea of a people he did not understand. Genet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man's burden of greed and guilt, and which at the same time toted its own insufficiency. I threw the manuscript into a closet, finished with Genet and his narrow little conclusions. Max — Maya Angelou

Book burning is a charming old custom, hallowed by antiquity. It has been practiced for centuries by fascists, communists, atheists, school children, rival authors, and tired librarians. Like everything of importance since the invention of the cloak and the shroud, its origins are cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy. Some scholars believe that the first instance of book burning occurred in the Middle Ages, when a monk was trying to illuminate a manuscript. All agree that book burning was almost non-existent during the period when books were made of stone. — Richard Armour

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what's to come, and it's enough; I have faith in what I can't see and it's substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it's an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters.
Simply put, I'm in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought.
The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky. — Chila Woychik

You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross. — Jacqueline Woodson

How do you end a story that's not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn't there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own? — Shaila M. Abdullah

You know, until I caught a reference in an ancient manuscript, I thought cows were about the size of a chicken." Chickens and fish being the only animal life aboard, I'd thought so too until this moment. "You mean they're not?" He shook his head, and his hands sketched improbable dimensions. Now Ennio was frowning. "So . . . The rhymes were altered. I wonder why? — Les Johnson

Let's find and remedy all our weaknesses before our enemies get a chance to say a word. That is what Charles Darwin did ... When Darwin completed the manuscript of his immortal book "The Origin Of Species" he realized that the publication of his revolutionary concept of creation would rock the intellectual and religious worlds. So he became his own critic and spent another 15 years checking his data, challenging his reasoning, and criticizing his conclusions. — Dale Carnegie

Grateful love and thanks. And last but not least to my elder son, David, for his careful preparation of the final manuscript. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

When the author is not traveling, he works at an L-shaped desk, which affords a view north through a large sunny window. He writes everything on an electric typewriter because "it has to be a book from the first day," he explains. He has no daily routine because of all the traveling he does, but follows a very disciplined writing process. He writes each page six times, then places it in a three-ring binder with a DePauw University cover ("a talisman," he calls this memento from his alma mater). When he feels that he has gotten a page just right, he takes out another 20 words. "After a year, I've come to the end. Then I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise." He always hands in a completed manuscript, and his editor is his first reader. — Jennifer M. Brown

Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind. It freed itself, link by link, from where it had rested, unobserved, waiting for him. My hands, which had been balled up and pressed against his chest, unfurled with it. The chain continued to drop, to an unfathomable depth where there was nothing but darkness and Matthew. At last it snapped to its full length, anchoring me to a vampire. Despite the manuscript, despite the fact that my hands contained enough voltage to run a microwave, and despite the photograph, as long as I was connected to him, I was safe. — Deborah Harkness

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist. — Isaac Asimov

Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something.
"The manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is more important than movement. That action is virtuous only if it reflects pure comprehension, and that virtue comes from the comprehension, not the action."
Olivier frowned. "So?"
"Dear boy, I must tell you a secret."
"What?"
"I do believe it is wrong. — Iain Pears

The point is, I can't tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript - or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here] - in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won't take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead. — Kathryn Stockett

If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare ... we should be able to show why ... his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we ... call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein ... without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare's mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and simple. — William James

There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a
rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2,
to tell him you have read all of his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the
manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2
admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart. — Mark Twain

If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them
you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea. — Mark Twain

To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with. — Christina Stead

I ran through the manuscript in the space of a day, much as one might pick compulsively at a box of chocolates. It was simply too provocative to put down. Has the potential of being highly influential inside the field and among an informed public. — Baruch Halpern

I do believe you would be perfectly happy shut up in your study with your rolls of manuscript all your life, without seeing another human being save a servant to bring you in bread and fruit and water twice a day. — G.A. Henty

Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are. — Bruce Jackson

I love all of my children equally, all of my printed books, and each one bears a special piece of me. But the one I'm most proud of is the one no one will ever see - the very first manuscript I ever wrote, back in 1990. It took me a year to do it. — Steve Berry

First, it is largely unknown just how the Holy Spirit interacted with the author of an original Biblical manuscript- 'passive' vs. 'active' (I contend that it was both/and). Secondly, it is also widely unknown just what the 'process' involved in 'canonization' was. Additionally, I see little evidence of the injection of personal bias if any by the Biblical authors. — R. Alan Woods

Frankly, if there ever was a time when I was really happy, it wasn't during those first intoxicating moments of my success, but long before that, when I hadn't yet read or shown my manuscript to anyone -- during those long nights of ecstatic hopes and dreams and passionate love of my work, when I had grown attached to my vision, to the characters I had created myself, as though they were my own offspring, as though they really existed -- and I loved, rejoiced and grieved over them, at times even shedding quite genuine tears over my guileless hero. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

On the above matters there is much to be orally transmitted, as these are our deepest secrets and are kept within our family. Even between a father and a son or brothers, it should never be passed down to anyone who is undeserving, or without due consideration. To people other than those in the family, never show or give away even a word, without exception... This manuscript has the deepest secrets and the core principles of the correct way, and it should be kept inside, deep in one's mind. — Yoshie Minami

I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago. — Laura Mullen

We had spent years battling for control of our marriage, of our love story, our life story. I had been thoroughly, finally outplayed. I created a manuscript, and she created a life. — Gillian Flynn

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph. — Patrick Modiano

I think the trick of writing a good picture book manuscript is to leave that space for illustration. An illustrated novel can do the same thing. — Mac Barnett

I wanted to write; I sought all possible paths of personal liberation, but I could never sacrifice a living instant of life for the sake of a line to be written, my balance for the sake of a manuscript, a storm within me for the sake of a poem. I loved life itself too much for this. — Nina Berberova

Self-pity needed her full attention, and only in solitude could she breathe life into the lacerating details, but at the instant of her assent - how the tilt of a skull could change a life! - Lola had picked up the bundle of Briony's manuscript from — Ian McEwan

The leaves on our little maple, all taken together, weigh thirty-five pounds. Every ounce therein must be pulled from the air or mined from the soil - and quickly - over the course of a few short months. From the atmosphere, a plant gains carbon dioxide, which it will make into sugar and pith. Thirty-five pounds of maple leaves may not taste sweet to you and me, but they actually contain enough sucrose to make three pecan pies, which is the sweetest thing that I can think of right now. The pithy skeleton within the leaves contains enough cellulose to make almost three hundred sheets of paper, which is about the number that I used to print out the manuscript for this book. Our — Hope Jahren

Rob left a note in the Manuscript, stating that once the formula was perceived and defined, it could be used in many ways, including winning millions of dollars from a bunch of billionaires. — J.M.K. Walkow

Transforms old print To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes Of gallery critics by a thousand arts. — William Cowper

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with - except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection - is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households ... writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. — Clifford Geertz

As I say, all all he wanted from the manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string. [ ... ] He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up. — Kurt Vonnegut

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce ... Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too. — Sarah Waters

Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book. — Terence McKenna

It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel. — Golo Mann

Far from resenting these lessons, the pupil, to please his tutor, once composed a sheaf of poems, and though the verses were very obscene, Perry, who thought them nevertheless hilarious, had had the manuscript leather-bound in a prison shop and its title, Dirty Jokes, stamped in gold. — Truman Capote

I wanted to write something visual that I could read to the children. This was when I created the idea of Redwall Abbey in my imagination. As I wrote, the idea grew, and the manuscript along with it. — Brian Jacques

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels ... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature. — Seth Grahame-Smith

I once had a dream, or a vision, and I imagined that dream to be of importance to other people, so I wrote the manuscript and made the film. But it is not until the moment when my dream meets with your emotions and your minds that my shadows come to life. It is your recognition that brings them to life. It is your indifference that kills them. I hope that you will understand; that you when you leave the cinema will take with you an experience or a sudden thought - or maybe a question. The efforts of my friends and myself have then not been in vain ... — Ingmar Bergman

My most important goal as a romance writer is to satisfy readers by creating memorable characters, offering insights on life, and, most of all, touching hearts.
I derive the greatest satisfaction when I hear from readers who have been genuinely moved by my books and/or who identify with the characters or situation. I also confess to reveling in the feeling I get when I type "The End" on a manuscript. — Laura Abbot

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust - dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight. — Gustave Flaubert

You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door. — Michael Koryta

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box. — James Herriot

Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many woman writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of reader, think of it? — Doris Grumbach

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration. — Tom Bissell

Since the tragedy of Marina's death, her parents have heard from strangers around the globe surprised to find themselves writing to share the impact of "meeting" Marina through her words: Jewish teenagers visiting a series of concentration camps while on "The March of the Living" and finding specific comfort and renewed purpose in her writings; college peers living more mindfully; musicians writing songs inspired by her; older readers making midlife recalibrations and career changes, whether they are returning to school or shifting to a nonprofit or finishing that manuscript; people simply rediscovering a sense of hope. These new life paths all build from Marina's own sense that it's never too late to change, that we must take action, that we are indeed "in this together. — Marina Keegan

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts - manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story. — Mark Twain

And a ton came down on a coloured road,
And a ton came down on a gaol,
And a ton came down on a freckled girl,
And a ton on the black canal,
And a ton came down on a hospital,
And a ton on a manuscript,
And a ton shot up through the dome of a church,
And a ton roared down to the crypt.
And a ton danced over the Thames and filled
A thousand panes with stars,
And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shore
To the tune of a thousand scars. — Mervyn Peake

Talking to Lee Child and discovering, from his chapter in The Chopin Manuscript, that he's even more of an audio geek than I am (as his chapter in Chopin proves). — David Hewson

Tolstoy's wife copied out the entire manuscript of War and Peace in longhand seven times. — David Markson

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - wholeheartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. — Steven Pinker

Each story, good and bad, short or long
from that trip to the mall when you saw Santa, to a long, bad illness
they are all a line or a paragraph in our own life manuscript. Two thirds of the way through, even, and it all won't necessarily make sense, but at the end there'll be a beautiful whole, where every sentence of every chapter fits. — Deb Caletti

The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings. — Anthony Powell

The discovery of a completely unknown manuscript at a period in which historical science is carried to such a high degree appeared almost miraculous. We hastened, therefore, to obtain permission to print it, with the view of presenting ourselves someday with the pack of others at the doors of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, if we should not succeed - a very probable thing, by the by - in gaining admission to the Academie Francaise with our own proper pack. This permission, we feel bound to say, was graciously granted; which compels us here to give a public contradiction to the slanderers who pretend that we live under a government but moderately indulgent to men of letters. — Alexandre Dumas

I am the discoverer of Quantum Editing, the process whereby the amateur editor keeps being changed by the editing he does, requiring him to further edit the manuscript, changing him yet further, etc. — Matt Chatelain

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys. — Mark Helprin

If you get into the habit of using the Heading 1 style for your manuscript Chapters, you won't have to manually correct all the — Suzanne Fyhrie Parrott

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is. — Samuel S. Vaughan

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript. — Kiran Desai

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other. — Thomas Browne

I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I've forgotten to back up the manuscript? — Rick Yancey

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls ... — Penelope Lively

Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read. — Dorothy Dunnett

It was a few minutes before Helena could stop panting. She dared not read any further, or she'd crash through the connecting door and ravish Hastings - and she was far from sure how she felt about him.
As she was reading the manuscript of The Bride of Larkspear — Sherry Thomas

Your first attempt will be terrible ... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft ... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while. — Pamela Druckerman

There are no coincidences", Silette wrote. "Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs.
To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries. — Sara Gran

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. — Anna Quindlen

I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside. — Umberto Eco

I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting. — William Manchester

Now the twelfth canto of Book II is an almost literal translation from Tasso description in the Jerusalem Delivered of the island of Armida. That poem was not printed till 1582. It is likely enough that Spenser may have seen part of it in manuscript, which would account for the general resemblance of the Adonis passages, though the likeness is not close enough to make any debt certain. — Janet Spens

A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing. — Oliver Harris

I was greeted by the Ulmers' eleven-year-old daughter, a girl of remarkable poise. Mrs. Ulmer was busily typing a manuscript that needed to make the evening mail and after welcoming me, in a very friendly manner, she returned to work. There were two other children and Mr. Ulmer, who was writing the manuscript just as his wife was typing it. The youngest child, who could have been no more than five or six, had the task of relaying the handwritten pages from his father to his eldest sister, who would quickly scan them for errors, and from her to his mother. The middle child, a little girl of seven or eight, lay on the floor with a large dictionary and would look up words when called upon by her parents or sister. — Robert Bruce Stewart

Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher! — Mary Doria Russell

I am so sorry to hear of Asher's passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humor and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher's always rejecting his manuscript when they were sent to him to referee. Asher said in effect, 'You should thank me. I am only trying to protect your reputation.' He often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol.

{Charles H. Bennett's letter written to the family of Israeli physicist, Asher Peres} — Charles H. Bennett

This book is intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature. It aims to give in a brief space the principal requirements of plain English style. It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention (in Chapters II and III) on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated. The numbers of the sections may be used as references in correcting manuscript. — William Strunk Jr.

So far, I've never missed a deadline for a term paper, a review, a manuscript. I perform the mumbo-jumbo of voting with belief in my heart, I've not yet won even a jaywalking ticket, and unlike my father, whom I fault in this respect, I refrain from opting out of jury duty; instead, they mostly kick me out. — William T. Vollmann

Do you like books, Lady Murray?' Lavinia asked.
'Just to read,' Violet said.
'A mistake. A very big mistake. A poorly bound book disintegrates. Where would our learning be then? We need something permanent, solid. We need to treat words with the respect they are due. Treasure them. Adorn the books that contain these words with leather bindings, illuminate their words with gold. We shouldn't treat learning lightly.'
'But I would treat a word scrawled on a scrap of paper with the same respect as one written on an illuminated manuscript. — Alice Thompson