Quotes & Sayings About Scribbles

I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours. — Joyce Carol Oates

Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that. — Steven Hall

Finch scribbles something and slaps it to the wall. Welcome. He scribbles something else. Freak. He shows it to me before destroying it. He writes Belong, which goes on the wall, and Label, which doesn't. Warmth, Saturday, Wander, You, Best friend go up, while Cold, Sunday, Stand still, Everyone else go into the heap. — Jennifer Niven

We all scribble poetry. — Homer

Next to me she seems like a clean blackboard, whereas I am full of crossed-out scribbles that I can no longer decipher. — Deborah Moggach

I know I draw without taking my pen off the page. I just keep going, and that my drawings I think of them as scribbles. I don't think they mean anything to anybody except to me, and then at the end of the day, the end of the project, they wheel out these little drawings and they're damn close to what the finished building is and it's the drawing ... — Frank Gehry

If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics. — Eric Temple Bell

Not that Beulah didn't present her own set of problems. She did. Not least of which was fighting the temptation to fake some scribbles on her and let the ghost have fun. — Stacia Kane

I try to keep my gaze from drifting to her, but I find myself watching her as she taps away at the keyboard, completely oblivious. I twist my pen between my finger and thumb, staring at her. She tilts her head and looks down at her notebook, adjusting her glasses as her pen scribbles over the page. Her light blue eyes flick along as she writes. She bites the edge of her lip and suddenly looks up at me. — Dannielle Wicks

The turtle whose head
Is within his shell
Thinks the world outside
Is going well. — Carol Kendall

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan. — Peter Watts

When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better. — Werner Herzog

I always knew I was going to be an artist. It was a done deal right from when I was very little. It sounds like the dumbest thing ever, but my mom used to doodle when she was on the telephone and she made these - they weren't just little scribbles - these little shapes and forms. I don't know why she did it. I've never seen her do it again. — Jeff Vespa

Theories look great on paper until reality scribbles all over the page. — Richelle E. Goodrich

She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed. — Helen Oyeyemi

As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.
Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon's curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder.He felt so vibrant. As if his life was fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn't care. Nothing felt like this. — Marie Rutkoski

Twiddle-twiddle away at my softly clicky keyboard for a while, making twiddly adjustments all along- and then print what I have twiddled. Glare at the printout and snarl and curse and scribble almost illegibly all over it with a ballpoint pen. Go back to the machine and enter the scribbles. Repeat this procedure until I hate the very meaning of every word I know. — Roy Blount Jr.

From out of the Then
And into the Now,
From the There to the Here
Come the Why and the How. — Carol Kendall

As when on some secluded branch in forest far and wide sits perched an owl, who, full of self-conceit and self-created wisdom, explains, comments, condemns, ordains and order things not understood, yet full of importance still holds forth to stocks and stones around - so sits and scribbles Mike. — Michael Faraday

Stella scribbled
in thick black texta
across half the pages
of my best storybook,
filled with people who ventured
where their hearts took them.
Beautiful worlds beyond mine. — Emma Cameron

It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs. — Stanislaw Ulam

(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

You never can tell
From a Minnipin's hide
What color he is
Down deep inside. — Carol Kendall

We have to make a mark, even if it's only a scribble. — John Steinbeck

The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity. — G.K. Chesterton

we are all like poems.
some of us rhyme. some don't.
some are Pulitzer prizes
some are just scribbles

and yet, we all possess
a special kind of beauty

that can either heal
or cut to the bone

one that can never quite
be fathomed, nor forgotten. — Sanober Khan

But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man. — Alexander Pope

Parents of young children are always acting. You act excited to read a story for the five-hundredth time. You act impressed someone went to the bathroom on the toilet. The excitement I show to some of the children's scribbles should get me a Golden Globe nomination. — Jim Gaffigan

Her eyes pleaded with him to understand, to try. Under that gaze, Eanrin had no option but to sit and stare at the scribbles in the dust, stare with all the intensity a cat can muster. His pupils dilated until the golden irises were like rings of eclipsed sunfire. Imraldera watched him, chewing her bottom lip and waiting.
At last the cat lashed his tail and raised his whiskered face to her. I'm sorry, my girl. It looks to me like the Greater Stick Bug pursues the Lesser Stick Bug over the back of a giant alligator. Can't make a thing of it otherwise. — Anne Elisabeth Stengl

Addison spoke in calligraphy while everyone else talked in scribbles. — Shawn Martin

When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works. — Paulo Coelho

My notepad resting on my lap takes the scribbles of unspoken truth: effeminate men are very witty, whereas macho men are duller than death. — Morrissey

One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world's wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death. The — Yoon Ha Lee

Writing is how I process the cacophony of each day. Prayer is how God makes sense out of my scribbles. — Donna Pyle

When in doubt, scribble. — Jean Wilson

These rapid scribbles, the pixels arranged by fingers henceforth forever still, acquired the macabre aspect of husks. — J.K. Rowling

For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable "memory fragment" - often called a "trace" or an "engram" - or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new "trace" to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be "scribbles," "holograms," or "imprints"; they could live in "spirals," "rooms," or "storage units." Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars. — Maggie Nelson

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

She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away. "Nothing like life, in other words," he said. "There, it's questions with either no answers or messy ones. — Khaled Hosseini

I have a tremendous respect for writers who scribble away their torments, and their passions into plays. — Rob Urbinati

All intervening steps, scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed work models, studies thoughts, conversations, are of interest. Those that show the thought process of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product — Sol LeWitt