Quotes & Sayings About Stitching

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy? — Mary Roach

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding
which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together
blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author ... — Lemony Snicket

A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught ... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones ... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set ... — William Butler Yeats

I love him so much it's like a thread piercing me. Punching holes. Dragging through. Stitching love into me. I'll neve robe able to untangle myself from this feeling. The color of love is surely this robin's-egg blue. — Sally Thorne

Life is less a quest than a quilt. We find meaning, love, and prosperity through the process of stitching together our bold attempts to help others find their own way in their lives. The relationships we weave become an exquisite and endless pattern. — Keith Ferrazzi

I don't know how a woman can have such a poor view of herself as to show off poor stitching. — Sandra Dallas

Movies either work or they don't work and they're either funny or they're not and we work very hard. To achieve that kind of work is really kind of delicate stitching. — Ivan Reitman

It was a warm night for the end of March. Walt had left the front door to the ice-cream parlor open when he went out after supper to gossip with the old men down at Darly Stidger's Store. And yet it was not spring, although winter was dead and the moon was sickly with the neitherness of the time between those seasons: those last few weeks before the cries of the green frogs would rise in stitching clamor from the river shores and meadow bogs. — Davis Grubb

Poppy was busy with needlework, stitching a pair of men's slippers with bright wool threads, while Beatrix played solitaire on the floor near the hearth. Noticing the way her youngest sister was riffling through the cards, Amelia laughed. "Beatrix," she said after Win had finished a chapter, "why in heaven's name would you cheat at solitaire? You're playing against yourself."
"Then there's no one to object when I cheat."
"It's not whether you win but how you win that's important," Amelia said.
"I've heard that before, and I don't agree at all. It's much nicer to win."
Poppy shook her head over her embroidery. "Beatrix, you are positively shameless."
"And a winner," Beatrix said with satisfaction, laying down the exact card she wanted. — Lisa Kleypas

Why couldn't I be more like other girls my age? Take Mrs. Brown's niece. She spent every waking hour sizing up this beau or that, stitching tea towels and petticoats and putting aside a little each month for a set of Spode Buttercup dishes. — Kirby Larson

Clamboring over building detritus was not the lifestyle Karl Lagerfeld had in mind for this sweet little powder-blue suit. As he oversaw the hand stitching in his atelier he had probably imagined the suit living a life of tea parties and lunches with the girls at the Ivy — Tyne O'Connell

You brought the needle & I brought the thread. We meant to mend our two broken hearts, but we ended up stitching them together. — Amanda Lovelace

The fine stitching and well-carded wool of his supposedly unobtrusive cloak making him stand out like blood on a wedding dress. — George R R Martin

I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

If you view your life as a piece of fabric or a tapestry, the photography is the stitching. It keeps everything together. — Joe McNally

My greatest fear in working is always the end. Lately I have taken to tricking myself into finishing by leaving a hole in the middle somewhere, then stitching the two pieces together - the Union Pacific approach. — Twyla Tharp

Zafar always put huge emphasis on his role as a protector of the Hindus and the moderator of Muslim demands. He never forgot the central importance of preserving the bond between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, which he always recognised was the central stitching that held his capital city together. — William Dalrymple

My woman has a wandering eye;
Yarrow, thyme and thorn.
She eyes the ocean and the sky
While stitching sails, forlorn.
I got a kiss, and then a tear
As she bade me go;
But on the waves, my heart's in fear:
My woman's in the know. — F.T. McKinstry

I realized early on, maybe better than some of my competitors did, that a textile business can run only if you have scale. I decided to horizontally and vertically integrate, adding everything from spinning, dyeing, weaving, and stitching to processing and packing. — Mian Muhammad Mansha

Then took the quilt out of its linen wrapper for the pleasure of the brilliant colors and the feel of the velvet. The needlework was very fine and regular. Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow's-foot seams.
Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.
— Paulette Jiles

I think one of the beauties so far of the so-called Spirit of Seattle is there aren't any leaders, pop stars, or guru figures that everyone else is falling in line with and following. No [Nelson] Mandela, Havel, or Subcomandante Ski Mask riding in on a white horse and everybody else just wanting to follow them to the promised land. We're stitching it together and doing it ourselves. — Jello Biafra

You'd never look at a Rembrandt and say, 'That's just wood and canvas and paint - how much?!' It's all about how many people want it. It works on a pair of jeans as well - they're just material and stitching, and as soon as you walk out of the shop, they're worth nothing. — Damien Hirst

Thank you for stitching me up" I say.
"I seem to have a talent for it. — Bethany Griffin

With an animated show you can make a banana purple. You can put three hats on a cowboy. That would require several days of stitching, in live-action, that you wouldn't be able to afford. I mean, you can just do tons and tons and tons. — Dan Harmon

Are you in pain?"
"Nothing a whiskey and some tender female soothing will not alleviate."
She snorted. "I should spank you rather than succor you!"
He grinned roguishly, "As you deem just, my love. However, we should wait until the physician completes stitching me up."
She laughed, "Impossible! — Sharon Lathan

I didn't finish my dress until about three days before my wedding - I had the flu and was stitching it from my bed. And the tulle came back from India all brown. We had to wash it for hours, but that didn't dissuade me from wearing it. — Georgina Chapman

I'm having surgery today to have my face cleaned up. But it will take some fancy stitching to make me all beautiful again! — Patsy Cline

They filled her with the most astonishing sensation of synthesis-as though all the most disparate elements of her biography were at last knitting together. All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming one thing. Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again
of being most spectacularly alive. Not merely alive but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity
a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge. — Elizabeth Gilbert

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. — Anne Lamott

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us. — Rachel Kushner

There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform ... — A.S. Byatt

"So, you're basically playing the part of Wendy."
Jeb pauses and glances at me. "Windy?"
"Wendy, from Peter Pan. You're stitching Dad's shadow into place." Peter Pan was his favorite fairy tale as a child. His mom read it to him every night.
There's the hint of a shy, boyish grin on his face - the one he used to give me when I'd catch him off guard. — A.G. Howard

He felt he was about to experience again some ancient, delicious childhood moment that the steam calliope's sour hollowness, the stitching hurdy-gurdy accompaniment, and the drum-and-cymbal crash brought almost to the margin of his grasp. — Patricia Highsmith

Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and stray cats into a Perfect New Human? Did you ever stand naked surrounded by people who want your gleaming sperm, squirting frankincense, soma and testosterone from every pore? If so, then you're the bastard who stole my drugs Friday night. And I'll find you. Oh, yes. — Warren Ellis

Acknowledgements!
My thanks to Hollywood
When you showed me John Rambo
Stitching up his arm with no anaesthetic
And giving them "a war they won't believe"
I knew then my calling, the job for me

Thanks also to the recruitment adverts
For showing me soldiers whizzing around on skis
And for sending sergeants to our school
To tell us of the laughs, the great food, the pay
The camaraderie

I am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debt
You paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimage
One year basking in the Garden of Eden
(I haven't quite left yet)

Thanks to Mum and thanks to Dad
Fuck it,
Thanks to every parent
Flushing with pride for their brave young lads
Buying young siblings toy guns and toy tanks
Waiting at the airport
Waving their flags — Danny Martin

It's up to you. Everyone should get to choose their own way, and that's all I mean by yelling. But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both ways. That's how it generally goes in my country. But does it? September thought. If a body is hurt, they try to forget the person who hurt them and never think about the pain again. Remembering aches, like when I remember my father. It'd be so much easier to never wonder about him. I'm sure he remembers my face, but it's hard to remember his, when he's been gone so long! Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you. — Catherynne M Valente

For a long time we dreamed of a real leather ball, and at last my brother had one for his birthday. The feel of the leather, the stitching round it, the faint gold letters stamped upon it, the touch of the seam, the smell of it, all affected me so deeply that I still have that ache of beauty when I hold a cricket ball. — Alison Uttley

Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she. — Jonathan Franzen

Realization: We render time by stitching together moments--flipping pages in the book of consciousness presents a continuous stream. Our senses too slow to realize the separation of moments, like a strand of pearls through eternity.

Time is terrifying, time is unspeakable. Clock-time lies down between moments ... but distance warps with velocity, time bends with velocity. Frames of reference. Are not absolute. Are selfish. A private reality. Clocks have a life of their own. Framed by references. — David David Katzman

I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. — W.B.Yeats

The Dandy is the highest form of existence attainable by the human form. His life is exclusively dedicated to dressing exquisitely, parading about the fashionable boroughs of splendid cities and and holding forth at his club, where he dispenses witticism as readily as the vulgaroisie utters its banal platitudes. The only species of 'work' this singular Chap might engage in would consist of discussing buttonhole stitching with his tailor and performing his ablutions until the morning has been well aired enough for him to step into it. — Gustav Temple And Vic Darkwood

Every few years, in the world of sport, someone ascends to the most rarefied of all levels - the one at which it becomes news not when they win, but when they lose. It must have been like that in the early Fifties, when a tubby Italian called Alberto Ascari was stitching together nine Grand Prix wins in a row, a record not even Fangio, Clark or Senna could match. Or when the great Real Madrid side of Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas won the first five European Cup finals, between 1956 and 1960. Or when Martina Navratilova dominated Wimbledon's Centre Court, winning nine ladies' singles titles in thirteen years. The current Australian cricket team is in just such a run at present, having just completed nine consecutive victories, putting them four wins away from establishing an all-time record. And then there is Tiger Woods. — Richard Williams

It's like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I'm stitching the scraps back together. — Julia Alvarez

All you have to do is pick up a baseball. It begs to you: throw me. If you took a year to design an object to hurl, you'd end up with that little spheroid small enough to nestle in your fingers but big enough to have some heft, lighter than a rock but heavier than a hunk of wood. Its even, neat stitching, laced into the leather's slippery white surface, gives your fingers a purchase. A baseball was made to throw. It's almost irresistible. — Dave Dravecky

Not even in the right ballpark"? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball. — Sam Harris

Dear Lord...patch this work. Quilt us together, feather-stitching piece by piece our tag-ends of living, our individual scraps of love — Jane Wilson Joyce

In the morning we shed our blue sheep's clothing. Our border shirts came out of satchels and onto our backs. We preferred this means of dress for it was more flatout and honest. The shirts were large with pistol pockets, and usually colored red or dun. Many had been embroidered with ornate stitching by loving women some were blessed enough to have. Mine was plain, but well broken in. I can think of no more chilling a sight than that of myself all astride my big bay horse with six or eight pistols dangling from my saddle, my rebel locks aloft on the breeze and a whoopish yell on my lips. When my awful costume was multiplied by that of my comrades, we stopped feint hearts just by our mode of dread stylishness. — Daniel Woodrell

A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones, darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air. — Sue Monk Kidd

When you knit, if you get something wrong and keep knitting, then when you discover it, you have to rip out all those rows of stitching to go back and fix it, Life is like that. Sometimes, it has to rip out all the stitches to go back and fix what's wrong. — Lani Diane Rich

Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her own laundering. Nor will she let the steward touch her father's fine linen. In the main cabin she has installed a sewing-machine. All hand-stitching, and embroidering, and fancy work she does in the deck-chair beside me. She avers that she loves the sea and the atmosphere of sea-life, yet, verily, she has brought her home-things and land-things along with her
even to her pretty china for afternoon tea. — Jack London

He couldn't read any more of Velvette's stories. This was too intimate. She spills her soul by stitching words so splendidly, even ragged threads are imperceptible. — Anonymous

I just pray I don't have to work on you some day. Stitching together flesh that has no soul is bitter work. — Raymond E. Feist

He set off right away, glad of his boots, an old army pair. The leather had outlasted three complete sets of stitching. They were the most comfortable footwear he had ever known. There's no happiness like a good pair of boots, he thought as he walked. Boots, if they were just exactly right for you, changed the way you felt. In fact, there was no happiness like marching alone up a track towards evening in the desert. His limbs tingled. For a while he didn't care if he ever found what he was looking for, if he had to give it all up tomorrow. Nothing mattered but this march through the wide open air of the desert hillside. — Henry Shukman

You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There's no mystery. But you put a thousand times more effort into raising your child and the result is the opposite of what you hope and dream for. This seemed so unfair. — Jeffery Deaver

Our love isn't the sick and sticky splendor of teenage ardor, I've realized. It's sharp, slicing - a knife to the heart, followed by the quick stitching of its two halves back together again. — Logan Keys

The place where I think social media fails is in showing the knowledge, the tradition of stitching the clothing, of cutting the fabric, of the tannery, of the skinning of the jewels - this knowledge needs respect. Online and social media is the future, but we need to learn from the past, too. — Giuseppe Zanotti

As Liljana sat stitching a sampler or darning a sock, she dreamed her way into life as a grown woman with her own household to run, her own home to tidy, her own children to mind, and her own husband to cheer after a long day's work as they sat together by the fire. The life that future generations would dismiss as dull and degrading offered Liljana the liberating prospect of being mistress in her own home rather than living to serve others. — Fiorella De Maria

Dawn comes after the darkness, and with it the promise that what has been torn by the sea is not lost. All of life is breaking and mending, clipping and stitching, gathering tatters and sewing seams. All of life is quilted from the scraps of what once was and is no more- the places we have been, the memories we have made, the people we have known, that which has been long loved but has grown threadbare over time and can be worn no longer. We keep only pieces. All colors, all shapes, all sizes.
"All waiting to be stitched into the pattern only you can see.
"In the quiet after the storm, I hear you whisper, 'Daughter, do not linger where you are. Take up your needle and your thread, and go see to the mending ... — Lisa Wingate

....The important thing is not where we die but how we live. Being native to a place is a labor of love and a life's work. It means stitching your life to that of a place with a thread spun from mindfulness, attentiveness, husbandry, pilgrimage, and witness. Stories knit these components of practice together. Flung outward, they clothe our relationships; flung inward, they map the soul. Stories enable us to enter and dwell attentively in a place; they enable us to travel and return, then eventually to leave for good. We need stories to stay alive spiritually: without them we would all turn into hungry ghosts. Stories are the only things we can take with us out of this world. They are the wings that bear us up or the chains that drag us down. In the end, it is stories that enable us to die. — John Tallmadge

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love? — Jonathan Safran Foer

in bright pink hand-done stitching were the words 'property of Alex'. — Katie Reus

The details that are my life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. — Lauren Oliver

We don't do things we aren't good at by nature. I wouldn't play basketball because I'm only 5' 1. Find what you enjoy - whether it's racing, flying a helicopter, being a doctor, or stitching clothes together. Once you've done that, you have the passion you need. — Danica Patrick

Sea-foam white lace bloomed from the sweeping neckline, washing upon her breast from the powder-green ocean of silk that made up the dress. A red sash covered the waist, forming an inverted peak that separated the bodice from the explosion of skirts beneath. Patterns of clear green beads were embroidered in whorls and vines across the whole of it, and bone-colored stitching stretched along the ribs. — Sarah J. Maas

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That's how people change. — Tony Kushner

This is the fiction that I'm referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative. — Hal Duncan

A big iron needle stitching the country together. — Jessamyn West

Jeremy Popkin's collection of first-person narratives of the Haitian Revolution is an extremely valuable work, accessible, sound and intelligent. I only wish such a book had been available fifteen years ago when I was in the early stages of researching my series of novels. Popkin has been deft and tactful in stitching together these excerpts, and as a result, he manages to tell a complete version of the Revolution almost entirely in the words of the people who experienced it-this book engaged me deeply. — Madison Smartt Bell

Winning cannot become your habit unless defeats have torn you apart
and you sit in the battle field
stitching back yourself
one piece at a time
laughing in the faces of all defeats. — Chetan M. Kumbhar