Pencil Line Quotes & Sayings

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

The bartender put a notepad and a pencil before me. Breathing hard, the pencil trembling, I wrote:
Dear Sinclair Lewis:
You were once a god, but now you are a swine. I once reverenced you, admired you, and now you are nothing. I came to shake your hand in adoration, you, Lewis, a giant among American writers, and you rejected it. I swear I shall never read another line of yours again. You are an ill-mannered boor. You have betrayed me. I shall tell H. L. Muller about you, and how you have shamed me. I shall tell the world.
Arturo Bandini
P.S. I hope you choke on your steak. — John Fante

Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line. — Antonio Damasio

Free from ivory-tower
the pencil twirls
across the footpath — Santosh Kalwar

And so instead, when you write, I hope you fall in love. — R. YS Perez

Blue liner at the lash line is a great way to brighten the eyes. I also love using a flesh-toned eye pencil on the water line to neutralize any redness. Tipping the lashes with navy mascara is another great way to make the whites appear whiter. — Tim Quinn

A ring was the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If her own life was that carefully described pencil line, she knew it all at once that the two ends were drawing close together. I have come full circle, she told herself, and wondered what had happened to all the years. It was a question, which from time to time, caused her some anxiety and left her fretting with a dreadful sense of waste. But now, it seemed, the question had become irrelevant, and so the answer, whatever it was, was no longer of any importance. — Rosamunde Pilcher

About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page.
"Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired.
He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff."
"It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write.
"Books are boring," James said as he wrote.
"They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.
He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books. — Laura Whitcomb

The Silver Samarsanda stood above the Jardeen, behind a line of tall pencil cypress: an irregular bulk of masonry, plastered and whitewashed, with a wide, many-slanted roof of mossy tiles. Beside the entrance five colored lanterns hung in a vertical line: deep green, a dark, smoky scarlet, a gay light green, violet, and once more dark scarlet; and at the bottom, slightly to the side, a small, steady yellow lamp, the purport of all being: Never neglect the wonder of conscious existence, which too soon comes to an end! — Jack Vance

I'm so glad you're here, Abby. I feel like I just walked into a Molly Ringwald movie. — Jamie McGuire

Whether it's digital or physical, a pencil or a pen: line work. Humans are making things. And out of that comes the entire designed world we live within. — Jake Barton

Being with my kids is the best, most fun thing; it's a privilege. — Chris Rock

You are what you are, until you decide to be different. — Paula Wall

With pencil there is a tendency to be timid, either using very faint lines or erasing bad lines ... Line sketching tends to emphasize the structure of a drawing rather than the nuances of media.. — Paul Laseau

Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing.

The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat. — Shaun Tan

Generally, I don't pencil, especially with the autobiographical comics, although I've usually planed out composition in my head during the scripting stage. I like to work directly in ink, to keep the spontaneity and expression conveyed by a less worked over line. — Jeffrey Brown

Do you have hands? Excellent. That's a good start. Can you hold a pencil? Great. If you have a sketchbook, open it and start by making a line, a mark, wherever. Doodle. — Chris Riddell

It came as a gift. A large gray bird flew up with a loud alarm call as he approached. As it gained height and wheeled away over the valley, it gave out a piping sound on three notes, which he recognized as the inversion of a line he had already scored for a piccolo. How elegant, how simple. Turning the sequence round opened up the idea of a plain and beautiful song in common time, which he could almost hear. But not quite. An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending-from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, and then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalizing afterimage and the fading call of a sad little tune ... These notes were perfectly interdependent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc. He could almost hear it again as he reached the top of the angled rock slab and paused to reach into his pocket for notebook and pencil. — Steven Pinker

One foot in Austria, the other in Italy, it's funny how man defines borders. An imaginary line is all that is needed to split continents apart, to separate men and cultures, to spark wars and injustices - a line in pencil, drawn on some agreement or a peace treaty ages ago. Insanity, it's nothing but insanity. Free movement of man, something that is and has been ingrained in our essence of being, is nothing more than an illusion. We are not free to walk where we please; we are not capable of overcoming the resistance of these imaginary lines, etching deep chasms into the face of the world. — Henry Martin

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

History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward. — Han Suyin

The autopilot is a hands-free piece of electronic wizardry. It's not some brutal application of electricity like one of the Pubyok's car batteries ... Think of its probing as a conversation with the mind, imagine it in a dance with identity. Yes, picture a pencil and eraser engaged in a beautiful dance across the page. The pencil's tip bursts with expression - squiggles, figures, words - filling the page, as the eraser measures, takes note, follows in the pencil's footsteps, leaving only blankness in its wake. The pencil's next seizure of scribbles is perhaps more intense and desperate, but shorter lived, and the eraser follows again. They continue in lockstep this way, the self and the state, coming closer to one another until finally the pencil and the eraser are almost one, moving in sympathy, the line disappearing even as it's laid down, the words unwritten before the letters are formed, and finally there is only white. — Adam Johnson

He was asked to draw a rabbit that wouldn't keep still as he drew it - as soon as it had paws it scratched itself luxuriously and then went hopping off around the page, nibbling at the other questions, so that he had to chase it with the pencil to finish filling in the fur. He wound up pacifying it with some hastily sketched radishes and then drawing a fence around it to keep it in line. — Lev Grossman

Alice: "I'll play you for it. Rock, paper, scissors."
Edward: "Why don't you just tell me who wins?"
Alice: "I do. Excellent. — Stephenie Meyer

He moved naturally. Only the tension in his shoulders suggested otherwise. Her hand closed involuntarily, feeling for an absent pencil, feeling the stroke of the line that would capture that tiny sense of unease, the jarring note that would draw the observer closer, closer still, wondering what it was about this scene of pastoral grace. — Diana Gabaldon

Everyone needs a place to let go and unwind from life, mine happens to be where pencil meets paper. — Brandy Nacole

The ink line drawing flowed the cursive journey,
created on paper canvas that brought the story to life. — Jazz Feylynn

How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper. — W.G. Sebald

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves. — Patricia Highsmith

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 music from my youth has aged poorly and is now like a joke out of context. You had to be there. — Jonathan Tropper

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