Yarn Best Quotes & Sayings

The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. — Lorrie Moore

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. — Cheryl Strayed

In your arms I forget what the yarn knows of sweaters. I forget how to hold myself together. So if I unfold now like a love letter tell me you'll write back soon. Tell me you'll still come untethered. — Andrea Gibson

The world is a woven basket. Every stitch counts. — A.D. Posey

For a few years, skeins of yarn piled up in baskets around the house. There weren't enough humans in my mother's orbit to wear all the scarves and sweaters and hats she knitted. And then, as suddenly as she started, she lost interest, leaving needles still entwined in half-finished fragments. — Christina Baker Kline

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it. — Ashwin Sanghi

Did you hear about the cat that ate the ball of yarn?" Mason asked. "No." She was already smiling. Mason Riley was telling her a joke. "It had mittens. — Erin Nicholas

Nothing good about this but it's title. A priggish little yarn. And Hidden Riches is not a story
it's a machine. It creaks. It never made me forget for one instant that it was a story. Hence it isn't a story. — L.M. Montgomery

Thus it is that four strangers sit in the red chairs, strip off their socks, plunge their feet into the ink-baths, and hold hands under an amphibian stare. This is the first act of anyone entering Palimpsest: Orlande will take your coats, sit you down, and make you family. She will fold you four together like Quartos. She will draw you each a card - look, for you it is the Broken Ship reversed, which signifies Perversion, a Long Journey without Enlightenment, Gout - and tie your hands together with red yarn. Wherever you go in Palimpsest, you are bound to these strangers who happened onto Orlande's salon just when you did, and you will go nowhere, eat no capon or dormouse, drink no oversweet port that they do not also taste, and they will visit no whore that you do not also feel beneath you, and until that ink washes from your feet - which, given that Orlande is a creature of the marsh and no stranger to mud, will be some time - you cannot breathe but that they breathe also. — Catherynne M Valente

A sci-fi yarn that ponders the meaning of time and the importance of evolution while occasionally throwing in some shootouts. — James Berardinelli

Ox Cart Man

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar's portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart's floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hoped by hand at the forge's fire.

He walks by his ox's head, ten days
to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire's light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year's ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again. — Donald Hall

The bears bear hard hard yarn yarns you are unlikely to be confused. — Lemony Snicket

Fancy finding you here," he said jauntily.
Nothing about it was fanciful, and she suspected he might have followed her. Why else would he be there?
"You've taken up knitting, have you?" she countered as she walked to the yarn section of the shop.
"No,I've taken up finding you alone. Nice of you to accommodate me."
His answer pleased her more than she could say, but she warned him, "I'm not alone."
"For the moment you are. — Johanna Lindsey

It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the "Giulia" blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze. — Jeffrey Eugenides

One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn. — Lodro Rinzler

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea. — David Brin

Lovely, quite girl, no trouble, no trouble at all. You wouldn't even know she was in the house. That is often the yarn twisted around women's wrists. — Sue Monk Kidd

That all hair?'" "Did you see it? It was like a cross between a magpie nest and ball of yarn after it's been mauled by a cheetah." A beat. Then, "A cheetah? — Marissa Meyer

With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel-Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss-and you have urban fantasy at its best. — Hal Duncan

yarn, n.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.
Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eights-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true. — David Levithan

Because I'm a cat. A big one, the Panther of Rough Storms, in fact. But still a cat. If there's a saucer of milk to spill, I'd rather spill it than let it lie. If my mistress grows absent-minded and leaves a ball of yarn about, I'll bat it between my paws, and unravel it. Because it's fun. Because it's what cats do best. — Catherynne M Valente

When she's gone far and long enough that she no longer remembers her name, she stops, and presses her fingers deep into her sockets, scooping her eyes out and pinching off the long ropes of flesh that follow them out of her body like sticky yarn. What rushes from her mouth might be screaming or might be her soul, and it is smothered in the indifferent silence of the wild world. — Livia Llewellyn

Jack Campbell's dazzling new series is military science fiction at its best. Not only does he tell a yarn of great adventure and action, but he also develops the characters with satisfying depth. I thoroughly enjoyed this rip-roaring read, and I can hardly wait for the next book. — Catherine Asaro

It's perfect. Blurred lines; it's when fact and fiction become indiscernible. Fantasy and reality fade into a color of grey yarn and you become tangled up in it and can't escape into the world of black and white you desperately need as proof of the reality of life itself. — Scott Hildreth

The chances of running out of yarn on a project are directly related to the difficulty that you will have getting more. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

I still have a problem with nuns. I follow them around like a kitten with a ball of yarn. After a while, all my characters become very close friends. — Meg Tilly

I'm a yarnaholic. That means I have more yarn stashed away than any one person could possibly use in three or four lifetimes. There's something inspiring about yarn that makes me feel I could never have enough. — Debbie Macomber

I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can. — Ridley Scott

When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'etre. "Just privacy," I said ... She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back
undoing what she had just done
so that she could know I was OK. — Jonathan Safran Foer

By 7:28, all the guests had arrived, and there were three empty seats: one for Eve, who had yet to show up, another for John, who would have a seat after he gave his daughter away, and a third that would remain empty, save for the ball of soft white yarn with two silver knitting needles in it. — Debra Anastasia

Besides, if you ever did eat some bad food, I could still find a use for you. I've always wanted a cat-drawn carriage."
Cheshire opened one eye, his pupil slitted and unamused.
"I would dangle balls of yarn and fish bones out in front to keep you moving."
He stopped purring long enough to say, "You are not as cute as you think you are, Lady Pinkerton. — Marissa Meyer

The progress of science is tremendously disorderly, and the motivations that lead to this progress are tremendously varied, and the reasons why scientists go into science, the personal motivations, are tremendously varied. I have said ... that science is a haven for freaks, that people go into science because they are misfits, and that it is a sheltered place where they can spin their own yarn and have recognition, be tolerated and happy, and have approval for it. — Max Delbruck

If you could choose any mask to wear right now, what would it be?" Anne lay down her yarn. "I suppose if, as you say, I would grow into this mask, then I would make it of my own face . . . but a braver, better version of myself." "And what would this braver Anne do?" The answer came quickly, as if it had been there all along. I'd save them, she thought. — Lena Coakley

I Need a Good Book

I need a good story.
I need a good book.
The kind that explodes
Off the shelf.
I need some good writing,
Alive and exciting,
To contemplate all by myself.

I need a good novel,
I need a good read.
I probably need
Two or three.
I need a good tale
Of love and betrayal
Or perhaps an adventure at sea.

I need a good saga.
I need a good yarn.
A momentous and mightily
Or slight one.
But with thousands and thousands
And thousands of books,
I need someone to tell me
The right one.

-John Lithgow — John Lithgow

Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air. Should a clerk come out with the remark that All Young Mothers In This Day and Age (why can't they save their breath and say "now"?) insist on a yarn which can be machine-washed and machine-dried, come back at her with the reply that one day, you suppose, they will develop a baby that can be machine-washed and -dried. — Elizabeth Zimmermann

Yes, it is." Bennett blew out his breath. "You can't expect me to ... sit in the morning room and chat
about the weather with her mother, and hold her yarn while she knits, and ... wait five weeks before I
attempt to hold her hand. — Suzanne Enoch

This place might have been paradise, a treasure trove far greater than any to be found in a pirate yarn.
Everywhere he looked there were books.
They rose into the air in majestic columns, stacks and stacks of them forming a maze that seemed to stretch to forever; the stacks rose high into the air and disappeared towards the unseen ceiling. The air had the overwhelming smell of old books, of polished leather, and yellowing leaves, like the smell of a bookshop or a public library magnified a thousand-fold. — Lavie Tidhar

I will always buy extra yarn. I will not try to tempt fate. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I'd have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash ... in fact, they'd assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful. — Elizabeth Moon

SABLE- A common knitting acronym that stands for Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee