Shavings Quotes & Sayings

This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter. — Henry Ward Beecher

This man was like a decadent triple-chocolate truffle cake with chocolate shavings sprinkled on top. — Katie Reus

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings. — Ray Bradbury

Not one of them [formulae] can be shown to have any existence, so that the formula of one of the simplest of organic bodies is confused by the introduction of unexplained symbols for imaginary differences in the mode of combination of its elements ... It would be just as reasonable to describe an oak tree as composed of blocks and chips and shavings to which it may be reduced by the hatchet, as by Dr Kolbe's formula to describe acetic acid as containing the products which may be obtained from it by destructive influences. A Kolbe botanist would say that half the chips are united with some of the blocks by the force parenthesis; the other half joined to this group in a different way, described by a buckle; shavings stuck on to these in a third manner, comma; and finally, a compound of shavings and blocks united together by a fourth force, juxtaposition, is joined to the main body by a fifth force, full stop. — Alexander William Williamson

Burn shavings and splinters of pitch pine, and when they turn to charcoal, put them out, and pound them into mortar with size. This will make a pretty black for fresco painting. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink. — Ernest Hemingway,

Minutes passed by. A little blue butterfly landed on my nose. I blinked at it and it fluttered to my ear. A big yellow butterfly gently floated over and landed on my paw. Soon a whole swarm of them floated up and down around me, like a swirl of multicolored petals. It happened in my backyard, too, if the magic was strong enough. Butterflies were small and light, and very magic sensitive. For some reason I made them feel safe and they gravitated to me like iron shavings to a magnet. They ruined my ferocious badass image, but you'd have to be a complete beast to swat butterflies.
If a baby deer frolicked out from between the buildings trying to cuddle up, I would roar. I wouldn't bite it, but I would roar. I had my limits. — Ilona Andrews

Kings of a bakery? The very suggestion was laughable. How easy it was to assume that elsewhere was infinitely better than where you stood. Sometimes at night, she dreamed of the TEXAS, U.S.A. magazine advertisement, envisioning a land with row upon row of fat loaves laden with jeweled fruits; bread cubes sodden with thick lamb stew; sugar-dusted sweet breads, ginger-spiced cookies, and fat wedges of chocolate cake soaked in Kirschwasser. She'd awake with cold drool down her chin. Regardless of the family's lack of resources, one of Papa's famous Black Forest cakes had miraculously prevailed. Dressed in a layer of bittersweet chocolate shavings — Sarah McCoy

[T]he parent-child relationship was one way, you gave them all your love and they were under no obligation to pay a penny back. Of course, if they did love you then that was the icing on the cake with cherries on top. And chocolate shavings and those little silver balls that cracked your fillings. — Kate Atkinson

Destiny is not one push, she thought as she waited to cross a quiet street on that cold Paris evening years later, but a thousand small moments that through insight and hard work you line up in the right direction, like the magnet does the metal shavings. — Robert M. Edsel

The windows are open, admitting the September breeze: a month that smells like notepaper and pencil shavings, autumn leaves and car oil. A month that smells like progress, like moving on. — Lauren Oliver

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you'd given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn't know the outcome for a long time. — Meg Wolitzer

Butterflies were small and light, and very magic sensitive. For some reason I made them feel safe and they gravitated to me like iron shavings to a magnet. They ruined my ferocious badass image, but you'd have to be a complete beast to swat butterflies. — Ilona Andrews

In my fancy, you perch in the Cooperage & I smell the Peel of the Wood, & the Staves are around you & the white Hogsheads newly bound & the Shavings curled and looped upon the Floor, silver and gold--& you are eating a fat Mushroom. — M T Anderson

The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings. — Michael Chabon

Has a girl ever faked an orgasm with you?" I blurt out. It's eight o'clock on Monday morning, and I nervously tap my fingers on the kitchen counter as I look at my roommate.

Dean, who was on his way to the fridge, stops in his tracks so abruptly that if he'd been on skates, I would be wiping ice shavings off my face right now.

"I'm sorry, didn't hear you. What was that? — Elle Kennedy

Her cackle resumed at full volume, and Delbert laughed with her. Life can be a hellish mess, he thought, but these shavings of joy are such an exquisite remedy. — Dan Hammond Jr.

Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn't count at school because it didn't get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of Design and Technology, a free A level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink on to a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls. — Mark Haddon

Someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings. — Sasa Stanisic

I finished grating a root and dropped the stub into a jar on the desk. Bloodroot is aptly named; the scientific name is Sanguinaria, and the juice is red, acrid, and sticky. The bowl in my lap was full of oozy, moist shavings, and my hands looked as though I had been disemboweling small animals. — Diana Gabaldon

But that's just the way it was surviving in America's public schools. Every day was a struggle. Every day was psychological warfare, and if you didn't stay sharp, the system would grind you into human pencil shavings. — Jonathan LaPoma

This love, this mortal love, is of their own making," Hermes muses, "the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us? ... It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral ... Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not. — John Banville

All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners! — Roald Dahl

I've been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I've formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door
Isn't that what friends are for? — Bruce Cockburn

So my doctor told me to watch what I'm eating - to read food labels. I'm in the store reading the Fig Newtons label: I've always liked Fig Newtons. I'm reading the label to make sure everything's fine: fat content. I looked at the serving size; two cookies. Who eats two cookies? I eat Fig Newtons by the sleeve: two sleeves is a serving size. I open them both and eat them like a tree chipper; Fig Newton shavings coming off the side. — Brian Regan

But the wood has endured. In splinters and shavings, gorgeously encased, it has traveled the world over and found a joyous welcome among every race. For it states a fact. Hounds are checked, hunting wild. A horn calls clear through the covert. Helena casts them back on the scent. Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope. — Evelyn Waugh

Scarlet started laughing again. She remembered what it was like seeing the princess for the first time. Her full lips, delicate shoulders, huge eyes flecked with shavings of gray, all paired with the unexpected scars on her right cheek that should have made her less stunning but didn't. It occurred to Scarlet that Wolf hadn't seemed to notice. She felt a little twinge of pride. — Marissa Meyer

She will toss the leaves in a wooden bowl with a micro spray of olive oil, a drop of balsamic vinegar, the insanely expensive balsamic vinegar that she bought at the gourmet store, so viscous it drips in a slow, thick stream. A tomato. A Persian cucumber. These will emerge, pristine, from her tiny refrigerator, chilled, perfect. She will slice them thinly and fan them into beautiful patterns, a vegetable mandala, courtesy of the mandoline, a feast for the eyes. She will hand-crumple Parmigiano Reggiano onto the top, and then, from on high, she will brandish the mill and grind coarse crystals of pink salt form the Himalayas into fine, sparkly shavings that will float, like snowflakes, onto the pale green surface of her salad. — Janice Y.K. Lee

I believe that you meet people who are vital to your transformation only when the conditions are right, when the tenacious concerns of the unconscious break into awareness. Then such kindred spirits are drawn to each other like iron shavings to a magnet. — Terri Jentz

We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world. — Sebastian Barry

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. — Henry David Thoreau

He imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile. — Lev Grossman