Pencil Quotes & Sayings

[Jason] faltered when he looked at Leo, who was mimicking taking notes with an air pencil.
"Go on, Professor Grace!" he said, wide-eyed. "I wanna get an A on the test. — Rick Riordan

Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: "Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise." We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. — Eric Weiner

Being an artist is the same as being a wizard. Only instead of a wand you use a pencil for your magic. — Kristina Webb

Oh, for eloquence to plead the cause of China, for a pencil dipped in fire to paint the condition of this people. — Hudson Taylor

It is possible to draw a straight line with a crooked pencil. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Here's what you do," suggested Tansy Wagwheel, whom this job in just a few short weeks would drive screaming down Fifteenth Street and on into the embrace of the Denver County public-school system, "It's in this wonderful book I keep close to me all the time, A Modern Christian's Guide to Moral Perplexities. Right here, on page eighty-six, is your answer. Do you have your pencil? Good, write this down - 'Dynamite Them All, and Let Jesus Sort Them Out.'" "Uh . . ." "Yes, I know. . . ." The dreamy look on her face could not possibly be for Lew. "Does it do horse races?" Lew asked after a while. "Mr. Basnight, you card. — Thomas Pynchon

She blew out a sigh and focused her attention on the students in her class taking a test. There was nothing like a teenage boy cleaning his ears with the eraser of his pencil to squelch sexual desire. — Robin Alexander

You remember how you were taught to write. Your mother put a pencil in your hand, took your hand in hers, and began to move it. Since you did not know at all what she meant to do, you left your hand completely free in hers. This is like the power of God in our lives. — Anthony Of Sourozh

Whenever she came across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory as if they were Holy Writ. — Haruki Murakami

Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said. — Shirley Jackson

Corporate documents, like football game plans, are not easily drafted in a stadium, with thousands of very interested fans participating, each with their own red pencil, trying to reach a consensus on every word. — Jon Postel

You know nothing. You're nothing but a skank-ass, pencil-dick hemorrhoid. And you smell like anal leakage." "Say what? — Janet Evanovich

I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle - for travel and for procuring a book in seconds. — Drew Gilpin Faust

As long as I could hold a pencil, I was drawing and telling stories and making jokes. I've just been lucky that no one ever stopped me, and now I can do that for a living. — Alex Hirsch

I work pretty quickly. I'd probably draw somebody once or twice in pencil, then just go to ink. Not really care too much about it, and it just kind of worked out. — Box Brown

My father would sit and design furniture and cabinets - he was a carpenter and cabinet maker - and I would ask for my own piece of paper and pencil. And when I would say, 'What should I draw?' he would push a cartoon under my nose and say, 'Here, draw this.' So the cartoon became a kind of focus of attention. — Burne Hogarth

We still have your watch.You can have it back tonight.All you need to do is sneak up after dinner, set the tower, and flee the country. Agreed?
Azalea burned with embarrassment as Bramble folded the napkin around the pencil and passed it to Lord Bradford with the rolls. Lord Bradford took it and unfolded it in his lap.His dark eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. Then he folded the napkin and placed it under his plate. Bramble's yellow-green eyes narrowed. — Heather Dixon

the process of learning a theory depends upon the study of applications, including practice problem-solving both with a pencil and paper and with instruments in the laboratory. If, for example, the student of Newtonian dynamics ever discovers the meaning of terms like 'force,' 'mass,' 'space,' and 'time,' he does so less from the incomplete though sometimes helpful definitions in his text than by observing and participating in the application of these concepts to problem-solution. That — Thomas S. Kuhn

Then eventually Westwood arrived. He looked nothing like Reacher expected, but the reality fit the bill just as well as the preconceptions had. He was an outdoors type, not a lab rat, and sturdy rather than pencil-necked. He looked like a naturalist or an explorer. He had short but unruly hair, fair going gray, and a beard of the same length and color. He was red in the face from sunburn and had squint lines around his eyes. He was forty-five, maybe. He was wearing clothing put together from high-tech fabrics and many zippers, but it was all old and creased. He had hiking boots on his feet, with speckled laces like miniature mountain-climbing ropes. He was toting a canvas bag about as big as a mail carrier's. — Lee Child

A child her wayward pencil drew
On margins of her book;
Garlands of flower, dancing elves,
Bud, butterfly, and brook,
Lessons undone, and plum forgot,
Seeking with hand and heart
The teacher whom she learned to love
Before she knew t'was Art. — Louisa May Alcott

What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing. My major sense organ is apparently a pencil. — Kay Ryan

The world is a pencil
not a pen. — Todd Boss

Sticklers never read a book without a pencil at hand, to correct the typographical errors. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families. — Lynne Truss

If you're wearing smoky eye makeup, a little beige or gold pencil on the inner eye corners will open up the area, but you only want to do it if the shadow is really dark. Otherwise, light pencil makes your eyes look too far apart, like a fish. — Gisele Bundchen

After a half hour, Antonio lured her away by throwing around words like technique and shading. I planned on joining her in the kitchen when the game ended, but decided against it when she grabbed a pencil and spoke rapidly as she sketched. I'd wanted her to be comfortable and I'd wanted to hang with my friends. Somehow, I got both my wishes. — Katie McGarry

I recall the rasp of charcoal on newsprint, the chewing-gum stretch of a kneaded eraser, the precarious bite of a razor blade in a new pencil. The vibrancy of fresh watercolors squeezed from a tube. A new sketchbook, cracked open to flawless white. The way the smell of turpentine made me feel simultaneously sick and excited. — Kirsten Hubbard

One is never alone with a book nearby, don't you agree? Every page reminds us of a day that has passed and makes us relive the emotions that filled it. Happy hours underlined in red pencil, dark ones in black ... — Arturo Perez-Reverte

Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it. — John Constable

In middle school, I had this one teacher who would kick me out all the time. He just didn't like me. I could ask a person next to me to borrow a pencil, and he'd kick me out of class. Besides that, I've never been in trouble. — Arnaz Battle

Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of his unrivall'd pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odors, and imparts their hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the seaside sands,
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth
Happy who walks with him! — William Cowper

I was raised by my grandparents, and they always made sure that I had a pencil and some paper, whether we were in the car or at a restaurant. While they were enjoying a nice meal, I would be sitting there drawing funny pictures of the waitress. — Jarrett J. Krosoczka

Color is gradually applied, or layered, dark to light (on a white or light-colored surface), building increasingly complex values, hues and textures. Although every colored pencil type works well with layering, harder pencils have a slight edge over the softer varieties because the points maintain their sharpness longer. — Gary Greene

Next time I ran into a terrorist I was going to put a death squeeze on his balls, stab him in the eye with a pencil, and then kill him. — Laurel Ulen Curtis

Owen had been using the track for months, but he didn't recall Sterling doing anything more athletic than tapping his pencil against his desk until Owen's fingers had itched with the need to spank the brat out of him. — Jane Davitt

As for helping me in the outside world, the Convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser, it will erase ink. — Dorothy Parker

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. — Theodor Adorno

There's something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times - one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of. — Julie Burchill

A Book of Glass
On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to
elisions.

The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and
thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things

To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials.

And I see a book in glass - the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be
incomplete, after all.
But I will make the book of glass. — David Shapiro

How is your handwriting?" I ask. "Do you write in pencil or pen?" They stare back at me with squinting eyes and a look that needs no words. "Get with it granddad. — Fennel Hudson

There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one. — Paul Valery

You don't need to wear Spanx if you buy my clothes. The dress, the trousers, the pencil skirt - they should do the work. — L'Wren Scott

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing. — Eric San

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray Everything is fine - the first bits of sun are on the yellow flowers behind the low wall, people in cars are on their way to work, and I will never have to write again. Just looking around will suffice from here on in. Who said I had to always play the secretary of the interior? And I am getting good at being blank, staring at all the zeroes in the air. It must have been all the time spent in the kayak this summer that brought this out, the yellow one which went nicely with the pale blue life jacket - the sudden, tippy buoyancy of the launch, then the exertion, striking into the wind against the short waves, but the best was drifting back, the paddle resting athwart the craft, and me mindless in the middle of time. Not even that dark cormorant perched on the No Wake sign, his narrow head raised as if he were looking over something, not even that inquisitive little fellow could bring me to write another word. — Billy Collins

All that Hubert needs over there is a gal to answer the phone and a pencil with an eraser on it. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Ms. Whitlock stands in front of her desk in her patented white button-down shirt, gray pencil skirt and dark-rimmed glasses. — Katie McGarry

I really do love being outdoors - I mean, you'd never think it in my high heels and pencil skirt! But I really do miss the smell of hay and farms, and I like milking a cow. — Christina Hendricks

I walked over to the paper and bent as the pencil began scribbling across it.
You look OK. Are you OK?
"Liz?" A stupid question. Liz was the only poltergeist I knew. But if she was here, that meant. "Chloe?" My heart started thudding again. "Where's Chloe. Did they - ?"
She's outside.
I took a deep breath. "Good. Okay. My dad's there, too?"
I watched the paper. Nothing happened.
"Liz? My dad is with her, right? She called him, didn't she?"
Couldn't.
"What do you mean she couldn't. She has her cell - " No, she didn't. We hadn't taken them into the forest. If Chloe had managed to follow me straight from there ...
I swore. "Tell her to get to a pay phone. Call collect. Get my dad and - "
No time. They're packing the van.
"Then you ride with me. You can find out where we go, and return and Chloe - "
We're getting you out.
"What? No. Absolutely not. Tell Chloe - "
Girls rule :D — Kelley Armstrong

Something in my mind, like an eye behind my eye, sees angel shapes in shadows of our lamp-lit street. As I feel for the pencil in my pocket, I know it's the Dad part of me at last seeing glints of the divine, even in the grungy pavement. — Laurel Garver

The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine — Brooks Landon

Healthcare is growing now at about 10 per cent per annum in the U.S. top line, versus 3 per cent for the economy. As someone with a sharp pencil and an eye for this kind of thing, this can't last. — James Chanos

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I've never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He's too busy writing something. If he isn't first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn't got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. — William Faulkner

The pencil sharpener is about as far as I have ever got in operating a complicated piece of machinery with any success. — Robert Benchley

Dear Benjamin,
"You should know that I'm not sorry either. I'm not sorry that I want to do these things with you. I'm not sorry that I want you so much I can't think of anything but you. But most of all, I'm not sorry that I love you. I love you. I love you."
I pause and listen to the low scratch of a pencil on paper as it carries all of my feelings to him, my one.
Before I finish, to the heavenly sound of him sighing with pleasure.
"Yours always, Eleanor. — Charlotte Stein

The Difference between Writers and Editors.
Writers are creative using one end of a pencil.
Editors are more adept using the opposite end. — Roy A. Higgins

I'm doing philosophy like an old woman, first I'm looking for my pencil, then I'm looking for my glasses, then I'm looking for my pencil again. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me. — Richard Brautigan

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them? — Ray Bradbury

I've sold shoes, hawked newspapers, jerked sodas, gazed rapturously at the tinsel dream at the end of a runway from my usher's aisle in a burley-cue, drove a truck - then because I didn't like being pushed around, started pushing a pencil around. — Burne Hogarth

God ... has a pencil with an eraser on it and he has promised us that he will use it if we will repent and change our ways ... He has said that if we would forsake our evil and thoroughly make up our minds against it, then he would wash it out of his mind and just forget the whole thing. Of course, he expects that we will wash it out of our minds also. — Sterling W. Sill

I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase.
It seemed like a lot of copper. — Raymond Chandler

They always pencil in my boobs. I was only angry when they were really droopy ... For King Arthur, for a poster, they gave me these really strange droopy tits. I thought, well if you're going to make me fantasy breasts, at least make perky breasts. — Keira Knightley

He carried a pencil and paper with him in case inspiration struck. — Anonymous

The computer is really like a pencil, you know. It used to be. The pencil can do anything you want to, but you have to do it, and the same is with the computer. — Massimo Vignelli

You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing. — Paul Strisik

So many people spend years (and money) studying to be doctors, lawyers, actors, dancers, business executives and scientists - when you're an author, you can be any of these things, and you don't need a degree or certificate; all you need is an imagination, a dream and an open mind. — Rebecca McNutt

I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night! — Ray Bradbury

College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil. — Ruby Wax

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools. — Michael LeBoeuf

I didn't want to be a sideman. My own style was coming out and I was into my own writing. I wrote a whole album, I arranged it all with pencil and paper. I did eventually do a lot of work with my father, but that was different. I was living at home; I wasn't a starving musician. I wasn't spoiled, but I wasn't going to have some producer come in and tell me what to play. — Shuggie Otis

In order to hold off the Forces of Darkness, you will need a number two pencil and a calendar, preferably one without pictures of kitties on it. — Christopher Moore

My technique, starting with a quick outline in pencil, is designed to record first impressions, with no time for second thoughts. — John Newbery

Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought. — John Greenleaf Whittier

Great ideas are fish in a stream. Your pen/pencil is a spear. If you don't spear them, they'll swim on by. Be ready. — James Scott

I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous. — Stephen King

At night if I'm in a hurry, I'll just put on a lot of mascara and black pencil all the way around the inner rim. It's a totally sexy eye in a minute and a half. — Brooke Burns

Homework, I have discovered, involves a sharp pencil and thick books and long sighs. — Katherine Applegate

Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare's life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a series of ingenious chemical tests that several of Collier's "discoveries" had been written in pencil and then traced over and that the ink in the forged passages was demonstrably not ancient. It was essentially the birth of forensic science. This was in 1859. — Bill Bryson

The small figures that appear in my paintings are there only because they were there when I was working from nature on my preliminary sketches with pencil. — E. J. Hughes

I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil. — Richard Bach

Bramble had taken another pencil from Delphinium, and Azalea's napkin, and wrote something new.
You're afraid of the King. Admit it.
Azalea grimaced at her untouched food, burning in humiliation as Lord Bradford took the napkin and read it. This time, he looked to be discreetly writing something back beneath the table.
Fairweller blinked at the King for a moment, in which Lord Bradford handed Bramble her napkin. She opened it and turned a rosy pink.
My lady, it read,who isn't?
Bramble pursed her lips and kicked Lord Bradford beneath the table-hard. His face twitched befre regaining its solemn expression.Azalea buried her face in her hands.
"All we ask is for you to consider it. That is all," said Fairweller.
"Oh." Lord Bradford's voice was slightly strangled. "Yes. Thank you."
Bramble threw the pencil-smudged napkin onto her plate. "I'm done," she said. "May we go to our room now? — Heather Dixon

I'm born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching. — Karl Lagerfeld

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it. — Larry Page

Unfortunately when I start to talk or when someone watches over my shoulders my pencil either stops or I draw meaningless lines. — E. J. Hughes

I always write in pencil, so I can erase. — Elsa Peretti

After a while he played with the pencil and the paper again and was delighted when he discovered how to make a mark with the one on the other. Various noises continued outside, but he didn't know whether they were real or not. He then talked to his table for a week to see how it would react. — Douglas Adams

The discovery in 1846 of the planet Neptune was a dramatic and spectacular achievement of mathematical astronomy. The very existence of this new member of the solar system, and its exact location, were demonstrated with pencil and paper; there was left to observers only the routine task of pointing their telescopes at the spot the mathematicians had marked. — James R Newman

[My advice to a beginning photographer is] sit down with a pencil and paper and think about what your life is about. What you are about. Don't even take a camera into your hands before you figure that out. — Tina Barney

When NASA started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ballpoint pens don't work in zero gravity. So they spent twelve million dollars and more than a decade developing a pen that writes under any condition, on almost every surface. The Russians used a pencil. — Garrison Keillor

How to Draw a Picture (XII)
Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life. — Stephen King

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A fair realization of the incredible degree of the diversity of linguistic system that ranges over the globe leaves one with an inescapable feeling that the human spirit is inconceivably old; that the few thousand years of history covered by our written records are no more than the thickness of a pencil mark on the scale that measures our past experience on this planet; that the events of these recent millenniums spell nothing in any evolutionary wise, that the race has taken no sudden spurt, achieved no commanding synthesis during recent millenniums, but has only played a little with a few of the linguistic formulations and views of nature bequeathed from an inexpressibly longer past. — Benjamin Lee Whorf

Someone else shoved a pencil in your hand and aimed you in the direction of a burning building somewhere and told you not to come back without a quote from the fire marshall, kid, and that was it: you were a reporter. — Garth Risk Hallberg

He put down the receiver and looked vaguely at the paper in his hand. It was a rough piece of white wrapping paper. Scrawled in pencil in ragged block letters were the words:
HE DISAGREED WITH SOMETHING THAT ATE HIM
And underneath in brackets:
(P.S. WE HAVE PLENTY MORE JOKES AS GOOD AS THIS) — Ian Fleming

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph. — Walt Disney

When the boy begins to understand that the visible point is preceded by an invisible point, that the shortest distance between two points is conceived as a straight line before it is ever drawn with pencil and paper ... the fountain of all thought has been opened to him ... the philosopher can reveal him nothing new, as a geometrician he has discovered the basis of all thought. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A desk, some pads, a pencil, and a large basket
to hold all of mu mistakes. — Albert Einstein

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms. — Haruki Murakami

A fool is someone whose pencil wears out before its eraser does. — Marilyn Vos Savant

In this room I have picked which gun was unloaded out of ten options. And then they pulled the trigger on me. I have picked stocks that went on to skyrocket. I have picked which pencil I would shove into Ms. Robertson's ear until she kicked me out for thinking about it. — Kiersten White

Something about this made Reynie uneasy. Had he done so badly? Was this meant to test his courage? He did as he was told, closing his eyes and bracing himself as best he could.
"Why are you flinching?" the pencil woman asked.
"I don't know. I thought maybe you were going to slap me."
"Don't be ridiculous. I could slap you perfectly well with your eyes open. I'm only going to blindfold you. — Trenton Lee Stewart