Trowel Quotes & Sayings

I bet the sleazeball buttered you up with loads of compliments too?'
Cleo gave a grim nod. 'Yes, he did. He said my trowel was awesome. — Helen Moss

No one likes an ugly crier. It's uncomfortable for all parties involved. — Tara Sivec

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence. — Jayne Anne Phillips

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel. — Alan Bradley

I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly. — Elliot Perlman

It was never meant to be this way. All other dreams were meant to be subservient to God's dream. Yet in the pursuit of my "essential" dream, I have been slowly building my own personal tower to my own personal heaven. It has me. It defines me. It motivates me. It guides and directs me. It gives me a reason to get up in the morning and a reason to press on. Every day I get out my mortar and trowel and put another few courses of bricks on my personal tower to the sky. I'm still going to church, and I haven't forsaken the faith, but in a profound and practical way, God is out of the picture. I am not in a place of overt rebellion to him, yet I am not serving him. I don't have time for the Lord because all of my daily time and energy is invested in my dream. I was given the capacity to imagine so that everyday my "eyes" would be filled with him, yet now another dream — Paul David Tripp

My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family. — Albrecht Durer

Endure and persist; this pain will turn to good by and by. — Ovid

I am intrigued by writers who garden and gardeners who write. The pen and the trowel are not interchangeable, but seem often linked. — Marta McDowell

When I thought of the ferocity and strength of the fairy race, and the fact that it took all I had to open the damn blister pack and extricate the water pistols, my chosen method of defense seemed ludicrous. I'd be armed with a plastic water pistol and a trowel. — Charlaine Harris

The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops. — Simon McBurney

She was a woman with a broom or a dust-
pan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw
her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or you
saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in,
cool, at dusk. She rang porcelain cups like a Swiss bell ringer
to their place. She glided through the halls as steadily as a
vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She
made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled
but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers
raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake.
She slept quietly and turned no more than three times in a
night, as relaxed as a White glove to which, at dawn, a brisk
hand will return. Waking, she touched people like pictures,
to set their frames straight. — Ray Bradbury

I wish to walk and keep the ways of God — Lailah Gifty Akita

No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out of heaven from God. — John Robert Seeley

Quite possibly, in those days, when his temper was more liable to explode into a spot of boots and fists, he might have helped them, just to get it out of his system. But as it happened the wheel turned the other way, toward the thought that two geezers kicking an old cove who was lying on the ground groaning were pox-ridden mucksnipes. So he had waded in and laid it on with a trowel ... — Terry Pratchett

You had to see him [Marco Rubio] backstage. He was putting on make up with a trowel. — Donald Trump

Just look at the architecture, Dr Hartmann explained. Blueprint your feet, and you'll find a marvel that engineers have been trying to match for centuries. Your foot's centerpiece is the arch, the greastest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress. The harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. No stonemason worth his trowel would ever stick a support under an arch; push up from underneath, and you weaken the whole structure. Buttressing the foot's arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eighteen muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake resistant suspension bridge. — Christopher McDougall

That wind! ... it called to mind the small, scarce, stemmy flowers that she and Edmund would walk half a day to pick, though in another day they would all be wilted. Sometimes Edmund would carry buckets and a trowel, and lift them earth and all, and bring them home to plant, and they would die. They were rare things, and grew out of ants' nests and bear dung and the flesh of perished animals. — Marilynne Robinson

The truth of God's Word cuts through the good and bad of our lives like a trowel digging up hard-to-remove weeds without damaging the plant. — Jo Ann Fore

Old gardeners never die. They just spade away and then throw in the trowel. — Herbert V. Prochnow

Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider. — Nathaniel Branden

I see the green earth covered with the works of man or with the ruins of men's work. The pyramids weigh down the earth, the tower of Babel has pierced the sky, the lovely temples and the gray castles have fallen into ruins. But of all those things which hands have built, what hasn't fallen nor ever will fall? Dear friends, throw away the trowel and mortarboard! Throw your masons' aprons over your heads and lie down to build dreams! What are temples of stone and clay to the soul? Learn to build eternal mansions of dreams and visions! — Selma Lagerlof

Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks. — P.G. Wodehouse

My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have never heard anyone try to trowel such a thick layer of flattery on the wrinkles and fat deposits of advanced middle age, Major," she said. "I am fifty-eight years old and I think I have slipped beyond flowering. I can only hope now to dry out into one of those everlasting bouquets. — Helen Simonson

Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel. — Benjamin Disraeli

May I a small house and large garden have;
And a few friends,
And many books, both true. — Abraham Cowley

What had set the fae world off? I'd never seen one. Now you couldn't throw a trowel without hitting a fairy. — Charlaine Harris

He started toward the entrance. Seriously, how could he not? He stopped when he noticed the girl. She was kneeling in her vegetable garden, her back to Leo. She muttered to herself as she dug furiously with a trowel. — Rick Riordan

Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed ... — James Joyce

The American Congress votes through the Declaration of Independence, with John Adams proclaiming the date to stand in history as the founding of America in freedom. Nobody actually signs anything on 4 July, which was instead the date the printers finished the broadsheet versions for publication and so dated their work. — Graeme Donald

I left the house at around midnight and crept up the driveway to the road. I wore canvas sneakers, athletic socks, safari shorts, a tee-shirt, and had the bright purple knapsack containing Jim's cold, hard foot, a garden trowel, a box of candles and matches to light them, a library copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and some fig bars for a snack. — Donald Antrim