Scratch Paper Quotes & Sayings

And then another letter had come from Christopher, so devastating that Amelia wondered how mere scratches of ink on paper could rip someone's soul to shreds. She had wondered how she could feel so much pain and still survive. — Lisa Kleypas

All of a sudden, life became too much to bear. Just like that, for no particular reason. Because there was a child's corpse in the fridge on rue Parthenais. Because I had to start all over again from scratch, one more time. Because I had rolled my rock to the top of the hill and now it was rolling back down again. The times before, I'd always managed to put on a brave face. But there comes a time when you just don't feel strong enough to look for another place to live and go shopping again for clothes and dishes and cutlery and scouring pads and toilet paper. This was one of those times. When I got back to the hotel, I asked the Barbie at reception for the key to the minibar. It burned in the palm of my hand. I slapped it back down on the counter and ran out. I had to find a meeting. — Bernard Emond

Why the desire for death.
A clean paper or pure white wall.
One false line, a scratch, a mistake.
Unerasable. So obscureby
adding million other tracings,
blend it, cover over.
But the original scratch remains,
written in gold blood, shining.
Desire for a Perfect Life. — Jim Morrison

I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: "Hi!" I said. Someone or something hears. I don't know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears me and moves closer to me, and I don't feel so alone. I feel better. And I felt better that morning, starting over. No shame in that - Saint Augustine said that you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday's faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it. — Anne Lamott

(As to how the Gatekeeper came to life)

Once a bookworm, always a bookworm.

But inspiration starts once that lowly worm crawls up your brain; it would be too difficult to contain and all hell breaks loose, and that otherwise blank piece of paper becomes its battleground, teeming with chicken-scratch scribbles of what was going on in that nook that used to be your secret sanctuary. You have no choice but just to concede, and surrender to its call to breathe life into a name. — D.S. Quinio

Jeanne's sisters thought nothing of themselves ... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers ...
Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch. — Allegra Goodman

I'm out of tissues for toilet paper too. History notes just aren't ... up to scratch — Andrea K. Host

I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens - it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings, it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from. — Agatha Christie Mallowan

At the end of the day, if the guy is going to write the girl a letter, whether it's chicken scratch or scribble or looks like a doctor's note, if he takes the time to put pen to paper and not type something, there's something so incredibly romantic and beautiful about that. — Meghan Markle

We use paper documents to store knowledge so we can consult and reconsult it, giving us a type of recall impossible with our unaided minds; we use pencils to scratch down material so we can manipulate it in a fashion impossible in our unaided minds. — Clive Thompson

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 first thing she noticed when the light popped on was that the wallpaper had rows and rows of tiny lilacs on it, like scratch-and-sniff paper, and the room actually smelled a little like lilacs. There was a four-poster bed against the wall, the torn, gauzy remnants of what had once been a canopy now hanging off the posts like maypoles. — Sarah Addison Allen

Raining. Oh, brother, a scratch on the fender. Damn rabbi on his unicycle.
Wait a minute, where are my car keys? Could have sworn I left them in this pocket. No, just some loose change and ticket stubs from the all-black version of Elaine Stritch' s one-woman show.
Did I check my desk? Better go back inside. What's in the top drawer here? Hmm. Envelopes, my paper clips, a loaded revolver in case the tenant in 2A begins yodelling again. — Woody Allen

It was a dark day. A chill wind blew snowflakes against the window of Mr Norrell's library where Childermass sat writing business letters. Though it was only ten o'clock in the morning the candles were already lit. The only sounds were the coals being consumed in the grate and the scratch of Childermass's pen against the paper. — Susanna Clarke

Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page. — Timothy Schaffert

My standards are higher than they used to be, I think. They don't necessarily have to make sense, but I certainly work on them a lot harder now
partly because I do them on the computer, and I print them out and fix them, and print them and fix them over and over again, whereas in the early days I used to just scratch down a few things on a piece of paper. — Dean Wareham

When people hurt you over and over, think of them like sand paper. They may scratch and hurt you a bit, but in the end, you end up polished and they end up useless. — Chris Colfer

One day, while he was idly reciting his verses to a captive audience, a scrap of paper, borne by the wind, landed on his lap. On it were written two words: "Layla" and "Majnun." As the crowd watched, Majnun tore the paper in half. The half on which was written "Layla" he crumpled into a ball and threw over his shoulder; the half with his own name he kept for himself.
"What does this mean?" someone asked.
"Do you not realize that one name is better than two?" Majnun replied. "If only you knew the reality of love, you would see that when you scratch a lover, you find his beloved."
"But why throw away Layla's name and not your own?" asked another.
Majnun glowered at the man. "The name is a shell and nothing more. It is what the shell hides that counts. I am the shell and Layla is the pearl; I am the veil and she is the face beneath it."
The crowd, though they knew not the meaning of his words, were amazed by the sweetness of his tongue. — Reza Aslan