Nib Quotes & Sayings

The gift of phrase was instantaneous to him in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong. — Jocelyn Gibb

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. — Ali Shaw

Hold fast
To the law
Of the last
Cold tome,
Where the earth
Of the truth
Lies thick
On the page,
And the loam
Of faith
In the ink
Long fled
From the drone
Of the nib
Flows on
Through the breath
Of the bone
Reborn
In a dawn
Of doom
Where blooms
The rose
For the winds
The child
For the tomb
The thrush
For the hush
Of song,
The corn
For the scythe
And the thorn
In wait
For the heart
Till the last
Of the first
Depart,
And the least
Of the past
Is dust
And the dust
Is lost.
Hold fast! — Mervyn Peake

I write into an old book that smells of dust and whose pages are floppy with damp. Sometimes the ink splodges onto the paper, other times it will barely leave the nib of my pen. — Fennel Hudson

The quill swirled and lunged over the page, in a slow but relentless three steps forward, two steps back sort of process and finally came to a full stop in a tiny pool of its own ink. Then, Louis Phelypeaux, First Compte de Pontchartrain, raised the nib, let it hover for an instant, as if gathering his forces, and hurled it backwards along the sentence, tiptoeing over "i's" and slashing through "t's" and "x's" nearly tripping over an umlaut, building speed and confidence while veering through a slalom course of acute and grave accents, pirouetting through cedillas and carving vicious snap-turns through circumflexes. It was like watching the world's greatest fencing master dispatch twenty opponents with a single continuous series of maneuvers. — Neal Stephenson

I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper. — James Robertson

The ancient dream of man to fly among the stars and go through the could and look down on the lands and seas has degenerated in its realization to the socialized and apathetic behavior of passengers who hardly look out the windows. — Paul Goodman

Every day I work my guts out in training, every match I play my heart out. — Ruud Van Nistelrooy

These kids will make you cry, laugh ... They make you feel all kinds of emotions through their writings and they share a lot with me, as an instructor, that they might not normally share with other people because they are young artists and they need a platform for pulling that stuff out. — Clinton D. Powell

Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes."
"What causes the other ten percent?" asked Kizzy.
"Natural disasters," said Nib. — Becky Chambers

Belief creates the actual fact. — William James

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat. Oh! be swift my soul to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our God is marching on. — Julia Ward Howe

I want him to have everything, but all he has is me. — Ruthie Knox

your pen sticks upright by the nib in the carpet. If there were a cat to swing or a wife to murder now would be the time. So — Virginia Woolf

But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me - naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe's furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration) - but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description. — Samuel R. Delany

Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment. — Zia Haider Rahman

But if you are single the last thing you want is your best friend forming a functional relationship with somebody else. — Helen Fielding

There is nothing mysterious about the principles of the gospel. We have studied them in the scriptures, we have discussed them in Sunday School, and we have heard them from the pulpit many times. These divine principles and values are straightforward and clear; they are beautiful, profound, and powerful; and they can definitely help us to avoid future regrets. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

He was one of those men who can both get money and keep it. He must have been a millionaire. He kept accounts. He introduced a post-office atmosphere into his shady dealings. Not a stamp, not a pen-nib escaped him, and he would stay up half the night to figure out what had happened to a mislaid farthing. You cannot conceive the caution and the meanness of that man! He would have made a Syrian pawn-broker appear like Diamond Jim Brady. But he had brains, and also nerve. At the same time, he was as smooth as glycerine. He looked like an octopus - he had a dirtyish pallor, no shape, evil eyes, and a beak. In shaking hands with him, you felt that six or seven other hands were investigating your pockets while a dozen eyes watched you. He was feared. He made money out of everything. But he was still unknown to the police. — Gerald Kersh

Temptation was the color white. It was black ink, quivering at the point of a pen's nib. — Marie Rutkoski

Never interrupt an author when he or she is 'in the zone', else you'll understand the real meaning of 'writer's nib'. — Fennel Hudson

I cannot wait for her to stop being a teenager." "I can," Nib said. "Do you know how impossible it's going to be to boss her around when she's twenty? — Becky Chambers

... your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib. — Edgar Allan Poe

pencil the exact middle of the head's height. Place a horizontal line there; this should be located below the eyebrows' line. — Vladimir London

I'm not really a relationship expert but ... I'm an expert on manhood and what men think. — Steve Harvey

Happy the man ... with a natural gift
for practising the right one [art] from the start
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass
like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye. — Seamus Heaney

Writers, in essence, are professional word tamers; if the words walking down the lines were living creatures, they would surely fear and hate the pen's nib as tamed animals do the raised whip. — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

I give thanks for the fact that I can get this stick with a bit of steel nib on the end, dip it in some black carbon stuff, and draw on paper. Now, people did it the same way 2,000 years ago. And there's something lovely about that play, and making mud pies and a mess. That's a lovely privilege. — Michael Leunig

Doomed to practice it day after day, even to the extent of dipping his nib in orange juice to make the words invisible, he has fallen in love with secrecy. — Paul West

If a man prays to Thee with a yearning heart, he can reach Thee, through Thy grace, by any path. — Ramakrishna

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with — George Orwell

I got myself a really nice nib pen, with like 15 kinds of India Ink, and tons of different nibs; I think I was just procrastinating, like, once I have the right nib, the book is just going to jump right out of my fingertips ... but then it just ended up looking like the shitty drawings that I usually do. — Demetri Martin

Chronicler wiped the nib of his pen clean, "It's not really my place to comment on the story," he said placidly. "If you say you saw a dragon ... " He shrugged. Kvothe gave him a profoundly disappointed look. "This from the author of The Mating Habits of the Common Draccus? This from Devan Lochees, the great debunker?" "This from Devan Lochees who agreed not to interrupt or change a single word of the story he is recording." Chronicler lay his pen down and massaged his hand. "Because those were the only conditions under which he could get access to a story he very much desired. — Patrick Rothfuss

When he looked over, Emma had her head tipped back against the tree, and was humming as she watched the clouds move through the branches. Peter realized then how alone they each were. It was just that now they were alone together. — Jennifer E. Smith

I kissed her," he explained, aggrieved.
"Mmm, yes, I had the dubious pleasure of witnessing that, ah-hem, overly public occurrence." Lyall sharpened his pen nib, using a small copper blade that ejected from the end of his glassicals.
"Well! Why hasn't she done anything about it?" the Alpha wanted to know.
"You mean like whack you upside the noggin with that deadly parasol of hers? I would be cautious in that area if I were you. — Gail Carriger

I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts make sense only when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page. — Philippa Gregory

I maybe many things to many people; but for me I am a writer; always have been and always will be.
I may not contribute to great literatures, but my contribution to writing would be always there; etched in the minds of the people whose lives I have touched with words.
Only a writer can understand what it means to a writer to not be able to be one.
To have the nib of pen broken ... like a death sentence ..
Or a life imprisonment in one's own mind without an outlet to thoughts.
I would give up things I love the most if that's the choice I am given to be able to be what I really want to be - A writer.
(C) Arti Honrao — Arti Honrao

It is a glorious thing, to be able to write with pen on paper instead of nail or hook into oak, to feel one's words flowing so smoothly from instrument to surface, without the barriers of friction or poor leverage, and yet its own subtle tactile pleasures as the nib scratches tiny channels into the sheet. And here, unlike in his cabin, here he feels no division between his mind and his hand, no errors in translation or static in the transmission: the words appearing on the page are the ones he has intended to put there, the images match the scenes in his mind, the sensations the very ones that warm his chest, prickle his scalp, push against his eyes. — Doug Dorst