Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
Don’t misuse the pencil and don’t torment the paper.
Sep 10, 2025
Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her.
It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
What pen can describe this scene of marvellous horror; what pencil can portray it?
An honest man with an open Bible and a pad and pencil is sure to find out what is wrong with him very quickly.
I know you are reporters and I know this is your job, but, you know, take your note pads, take your pencils down, take your grunt-o-meters down, the fashion police, put everything away and just watch the match, you know, from just the fans' perspective. I seriously think that the quality of the match today was great.
I never thought I would make a living as a pencil-sharpener. The first goal was: I don't want to lose money. And then the goal was: I want to see if 100 people buy my pencils. I just kept upping the benchmarks.
Oh relax." I waved my hand dismissively. "If he wanted to kill me, he already would have. I brought him all these sharp pencils, ideal for stabbing, and he's been a perfect gentleman.
A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence.
I had placed my stick on the table, as I do every evening. It had been specially made to suit my height, to enable me to walk without too much difficulty. As I was standing up, a customer called to me: 'Monsieur, don't forget your pencil.' It was very unkind, but most funny.
If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.
All that Hubert needs over there is a gal to answer the phone and a pencil with an eraser on it.
I always tell people that my life is in pencil; I have to keep an eraser in my hand because I could always get a call that could change everything.
One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.
To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, you're overdoing it.
Why are pencils equipped with erasers if not to correct mistakes?
A fool is someone whose pencil wears out before its eraser does.
My heart is a colored pencil but my brain is an eraser
My teacher once told me – ”No one is perfect……..that is why pencils have erasers.”
Everybody makes mistakes, that's why they put erasers on pencils
College athletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil.
In order to create an image almost similar to that of a pencil case standing up and walking, I try to eliminate all excess by cutting. I have the feeling that this process (of "cutting off") is linked in some way to "elegance". Elegance and so-called "eliminating excess", or the beauty that remains after excess has beeen eliminated...
Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It's a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of them, I keep one in the pencil cup on my desk. Maybe I go with the wrong kind of people but i'm just not likely to have twelve guests all sitting around simultaneously eating fruit.
History written in pencil is easily erased, but crayon is forever.
I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there'd be no night!
When you come up with a theory, you fall in love with the beauty the simplicity and elegance of it. But then you have to get a sheet of paper and pencil and crack out all the details. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Because you have to prove it.
It's amazing how many people even today use a computer to do something you can do with a pencil and paper in less time.
When I went to Stan Lee - every time I was with Stan, I learned something every day. When I would do a pencil job, if I didn't have much faith in it I would hand it in and invariably Stan would make it look like it was a well-written and well-planned-out story. It made me tell people, 'If you want to become an artist, go to work at Marvel. Stan will turn you into a storyteller.'
Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.
The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.
Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. "Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul," he told them. "So we will start with these studies.
A pencil in my hand, its secret life / is charcoal, the wood already burnt, / a sacrifice.
In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.
Healthcare is growing now at about 10 per cent per annum in the U.S. top line, versus 3 per cent for the economy. As someone with a sharp pencil and an eye for this kind of thing, this can't last.
I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn't know what to do with myself.
Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.
Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganger roaming the halls, playing kind of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask?
I can draw pencil lines to show something is moving, but if I'm writing, I struggle with how to write it. The boy ran down the hallway? The boy ran quickly down the hallway? The boy ran down the marble hallway? I agonize over the words. So my editor works very hard. I'm lucky to have her.
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . .
Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust.
The authority of the civil defense ... issued a warning to the civilian population not to pick up any of those pencils because they are booby traps.
I am not talking about the American people and the British people, I am talking about those mercenaries. ... They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children.
How late is it? How long have we been sitting here? I look at my watch – three thirty and the day is almost ending. It’s October. All those kids recently returned to classrooms with new bags and pencil cases will be looking forward to half term already. How quickly it goes. Halloween soon, then firework night. Christmas. Spring. Easter. Then there’s my birthday in May. I’ll be seventeen. How long can I stave it off? I don’t know. All I know is that I have two choices – stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living.
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.
Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.
A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.
Whatever artistry may occur within the manuscript, the magic happens for me in the last draft. Whatever I have been resistant to say must finally be said. In the end, I see where my pencil has been leading me.
Procrastination is something you do yourself. You know: "I gotta sharpen these pencils before I start. I got 20 pencils, they're looking kinda dull." Well, the pencils aren't calling you and alluring you and inviting you and offering you anything. They're just sitting there. You're the one who's procrastinating.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.