Quotes about pencil (145 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee.
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?”

Spike Milligan (1918–2002) British-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, soldier and actor

Drawing

“In fact the only thing that I don't like about Whisky, is that if I take the merest sip of the stuff, it sends a sharp pain from the back of my left eyeball down to the tip of my right elbow, and I begin to walk in a very special way, bumping into people and snarling at the furniture. I have therefore learned to turn my attention to other tipples. Margaritas, I'm very fond of, but they make me buy very stupid things. When ever I've had a few margaritas I always wake up in the morning with a sense of dread as to what I will find downstairs. The worst was a 6ft long pencil and a 2ft wide India rubber that I had shipped over from New York, as a result of one injudicious binge.”

Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt

The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

Pain , People , Stupidity , Way

“A fool is someone whose pencil wears out before its eraser does.”

Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer

As quoted in The Truth in Words: Inspiring Quotes for the Reflective Mind (2002) by Paras, p. 92

Fools

“If they took away all my paints, I'd use pastels, if they took away my pastels, I'd use crayons, if they took away my crayons, I'd use a pencil. If they put me in a cell, and stripped me of everything, I'd spit on my finger and draw on the wall.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

The original quote attributed to Picasso in 1951 quotes him as saying that 'even if he were imprisoned, he would draw on the dust-covered prison walls and on the floor, with his fingers dripped in his own spit' (see above). This expansion appears to derive from an interview given by actor Dustin Hoffman to the L.A. Times in 2001.
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/mar/04/entertainment/ca-32985
Disputed

Drawing , Painting

“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then? p. 17e

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Ludwig Wittgenstein / Quotes / Culture and Value (1980)
1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
Source: Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951

Children

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

Time

“no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks, when the teacher rings the bell, drop your books and run like hell”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Books , Hell , Teachers

“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 (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

“The light works," he said, indicating the window, "the gravity works," he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. "Anything else we have to take our chances with.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Light , Chance

“With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Revolt of Islam

Canto V, st. 23
The Revolt of Islam (1817)

“I could not appreciate his [ Boudin ] paintings and when he offered to take me with him to paint outdoors in the open countryside, I always found a pretext and refused politely. But when summer came, I was more or less free to dispose of my time as I wished and I had no feasible excuse left to give him and gave in. Thus it was, that Boudin - with his inexhaustible kindness - took it upon himself to educate me. With time, my eyes began to open and I really started to understand nature. I also learned to love it. I would analyze its forms with my pencil. I would study its colorations.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

quote from an interview Claude Monet par lui-meme, by Thiébault-Sisson / translated by Louise McGlone Jacot-Descombes; published in 'Le Temps newspaper', 26 November 1900
about Eugène Boudin, who was landscape-painting in and around Le Havre c. 1856; Monet was 16 years old, then
1900 - 1920

Love , Education , Color , Understanding

“Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

[Jon Fripp, Michael Fripp, Deborah Fripp, Speaking of Science: Notable Quotes on Science, Engineering, and the Environment, https://books.google.com/books?id=44ihCUS1XQMC&pg=PA45, 2000, Newnes, 978-1-878707-51-2, 45]

Mathematics , Science

“As to the Court's invocation of the Lemon test: Like some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys of Center Moriches Union Free School District. Its most recent burial, only last Term, was, to be sure, not fully six feet under: Our decision in Lee v. Weisman conspicuously avoided using the supposed test but also declined the invitation to repudiate it. Over the years, however, no fewer than five of the currently sitting Justices have, in their own opinions, personally driven pencils through the creature's heart (the author of today's opinion repeatedly), and a sixth has joined an opinion doing so. The secret of the Lemon test's survival, I think, is that it is so easy to kill. It is there to scare us (and our audience) when we wish it to do so, but we can command it to return to the tomb at will. Such a docile and useful monster is worth keeping around, at least in a somnolent state; one never knows when one might need him.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384, 398-99 (1993) (concurring) (citations omitted).
1990s

Children , Secret , School , Justice

“One is never alone with a book nearby, don't you agree? Every page reminds us of a day that has passed and makes us relive the emotions that filled it. Happy hours underlined in red pencil, dark ones in black…”

Arturo Pérez-Reverte book The Club Dumas

Source: The Club Dumas

Books , Happiness

“When I erase a word with a pencil, where does it go?”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: William Blake

Madness

“He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Reality

“I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.”

Stephen King book The Green Mile

Source: The Green Mile

Memory

“My death will not be penciled on someone's calendar.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Death

“We lose weeks like buttons, like pencils.”

Dave Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Source: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

Life , Study

“She was a thin woman in a mustard-yellow suit, with a yellowish complexion, short-cropped rusty red hair, and a stiff posture. She reminded Reynie of a giant walking pencil.”

Trenton Lee Stewart (1970) Novelist

“[Jason] faltered when he looked at Leo, who was mimicking taking notes with an air pencil.
“Go on, Professor Grace!” he said, wide-eyed. “I wanna get an A on the test.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating… but there are other ways to understanding.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Way , Understanding , Drawing

“A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.”

Aphra Behn book Oroonoko

Source: Oroonoko

Life , World , Way , Soul

“Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop”

Gabrielle Zevin book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Love

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

“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?”

Alyson Nöel (1965) writer

Source: Fated

“The fracture of pencil still useful, but the fracture of soul,
we couldn't use it, Mister.”

Pramoedya Ananta Toer book Bumi Manusia

Source: Bumi Manusia

Soul

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Variant: I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
Source: A Moveable Feast

“My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night pencilled in”

Leonard Cohen book Book of Longing

Source: Book of Longing

Night

“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.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Love , School

“We all make mistakes. That's why my pencil has an eraser.”

Chris Grabenstein book Tilt-a-Whirl

Source: Tilt-a-Whirl

“What are you gonna do, angel face? Stab me with your eyebrow pencil?”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Kiss an Angel

Angels

“The pencil is mightier than the pen.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“How to Draw a Picture (XII)

Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Life , Drawing

“I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Beauty , Waiting

“If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.”

Barbara Kingsolver (1955) American author, poet and essayist

Life

“In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Letter #158 to Theo (24 September 1880) http://www.vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let158/letter.html 
Variant translation http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/8/136.htm: "I felt my energy revive and I said to myself, I shall get over it somehow, I shall set to work again with my pencil, which I had cast aside in my deep dejection, and I shall draw again, and from that moment I have had the feeling that everything has changed for me"
1880s, 1880
Context: I felt my energy revive, and said to myself, In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me.

Drawing

“Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child, in whom we trace
The features of the mother's face,
Her aspect and her attitude,
All her majestic loveliness
Chastened and softened and subdued
Into a more attractive grace,
And with a human sense imbued.
He is the greatest artist, then,
Whether of pencil or of pen,
Who follows Nature.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Kéramos http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/poetry/TheCompletePoeticalWorksofHenryWadsworthLongfellow/chap22.html, st. 29.

Art , Nature , Sense

“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.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Cats , Lovers , Past

“The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

“We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.”

David Levithan Boy Meets Boy

Source: Boy Meets Boy

Life

“I have owed you this letter for a very long time — but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Letter to his literary agent, found on his desk after his death in 1968
Writers at Work (1977)

Time

“In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There's only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model(too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rust bucket most of us got for our first ride, it's more complex. There's coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There's that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None of it means it's broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship to it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be dealt with. Which is how you come to know people, after all: not by things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 11

People , Cars , Way , Failure

“The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck; it cannot be erased. Everyone sees it.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Paper Reactors, Real Reactors (1953)

Change

“The paper is breathless
Under the hand
And the pencil is poised
Like a warlock's wand.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Poem in The Glassblowers (1950)

“They [his own fantasies he made in strange pencil drawings then] hover before me now in drifting color, more beautiful than I can possibly paint them.... I yearn for the day when I will have found my color harmonies, my harmonies.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

Quote of Nolde's letter, 1902, to Hans Fehr; as cited in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 35
During the next few years, Nolde virtually commuted between Copenhagen and Berlin; in the fishing village of Lildstand on Jutland's northern coast, he produced strange pencil drawings, as he wrote to Fehr
1900 - 1920

Beauty , Color , Drawing , Painting

“As I admired it [a red pencil and chalk drawing by Degas of a young mother, nursing her child] he showed me a whole series done from the same model and with the same sort of rhythm. He is a draughtsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting to the public, which generally imagines that the impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

note in Berthe's Journal, Jan. 1886; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, pp. 262-263
Berthe visited Degas in his studio
1881 - 1895

Way , Imagination , Thinking , Study

“I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. … That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country.”

Peter Weiss (1916–1982) Swedish-German playwright and author

Vanishing Point (1962)

Age , World , Spring , Idea

“Five more times in the succeeding pages of his penciled petition Gideon spoke of the right to counsel. To try a poor man for a felony without giving him a lawyer, he said, was to deprive him of the due process of law.”

Anthony Lewis movie Gideon's Trumpet

[8, Anthony, Lewis, w:Anthony Lewis, Vintage, 1989, 9780679723127, Gideon's Trumpet, http://books.google.com/books?id=IhDfidRb5wIC&pg=PA8&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false]

Law , Time

“The pencil moved prophetic: together now men read
In the fair book of nature, and find the hope they need.
The wreath woven by the river is by the seaside worn,
And one of fate's best arrows to its due mark is borne.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Prophecy and Fulfilment

Men , Fate , Books , Hope

“I've experienced all kinds of discrimination," Oshima says. "Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met." He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 19, Oshima

Love , Women , Men , Pain

“I have always been a pencil.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

Quoted in: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, ‎Riva Castleman, ‎Wolfgang Wittrock (1985) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: images of the 1890's . p. 44
undated quotes

“When my pencil starts moving, it must be allowed its head or - bang! - nothing more happens.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 61/62 - in a letter to his friend Etienne Devismes, Late Summer of 1881

“a couple of days afterwards I was sitting somewhere and painting - when one of these braggarts came up behind me. Well, hey, when you're young, you don't think that's very nice. And suddenly the guy throws his arms around me and roars: 'I sit here all day long plodding away with a pencil - scratching and scratching - and you get it right away!”

Willem Maris (1844–1910) Dutch landscape painter of the Hague School (1844-1910)

It was ...Mauve.
as cited on Wikipedia: Willem Maris

Guy , Thinking , Painting

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

On the numerical value of α, the fine-structure constant, p. 129
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

God , Understanding , Nature , Dance

“The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves — it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence — it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste — and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Life , Books , Nature , Reading

“Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual.”

Helen Garner (1942) Australian author

In the title story Postcards from Surfers.
Garner describing her mother.
Postcards from Surfers (1985)

“Mariam is never very far, she is here, in these walls they've repainted, in the trees they've planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children's laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westward. But, mostly, Miriam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), Chapter, 51.

Children , Books , Laughter , Tree

“The future is never written…only penciled in.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 50 (p. 497)

Future

“Many of my Hamptstead friends may remember this 'young lady' [an ash tree] at the entrance to the village. Her fate was distressing, for it is scarcely too much to say that she died of a broken heart. I made this drawing [Study of Trees, pencil on paper, circa 1821] when she was in full health and beauty; on passing some times afterwards, I saw, to my grief, that a wretched board had been nailed to her side, on which was written in large letters: 'All vagrants and beggars will be dealt with according to law.' The tree seemed to have felt the disgrace, for even then some of the top branches had withered. Two long spike nails had been driven far into her side. In another year one half became paralysed, and not long after the other shared the same fate, and this beautiful creature was cut down to a stump, just high enough to hold the board.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from Constable's Lecture, given at Hamptstead (July 1836), as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable, Tate Gallery Publications, London 1993, p. 391
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Fate , Health , Law , Beauty

“Just between you and me, have you ever been wrong? Are you divinely infallible? Are you different from the rest of us? Human nature is prone to error; the person who invented the pencil eraser knew that.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Error , Nature , Personality

“A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.”

Alan Turing Intelligent Machinery

"Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing," (Summer 1948), submitted to the National Physical Laboratory (1948) and published in Key Papers: Cybernetics, ed. C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robertson (1968) and, in variant form, in Machine Intelligence 5, ed. B. Meltzer and D. Michie (1969).

Universe

“If the people at large be not already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they never will be…. Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of considerable revolutions of time, the celebrated Cocker was born, and died; Walkinghame, of the Tutor's Assistant, and well versed in figures, was also born, and died; a multitude of accountants, book-keepers and actuaries, were born, and died. Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to be kept on certain splints of elm wood called "tallies." In the reign of George III an inquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected.
All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? I dare say there was a vast amount of minuting, memoranduming, and despatch-boxing on this mighty subject. The sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million of the cost thereof, the national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and the little old woman, Britannia, hasn't got home to-night…. The great, broad, and true cause that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the sun, moon, and stars.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

"Administrative Reform" (June 27, 1855) Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Speeches Literary and Social by Charles Dickens https://books.google.com/books?id=bT5WAAAAcAAJ (1870) pp. 133-134

Wisdom , People , Books , Age

“When first thy pencil did these beaties give
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live”

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) American poet

To A young African painter from Poems on Various Subjects kindle ebook ASIN B0083ZJ7SU

“My friend Bonner has just set off to Charlotte Street to pack your picture (an old painting) and forward it; it is a beautiful representation of a summer's evening; calm, warm and delicious; the colour on the man's face is perfect sunshine. The liquid pencil of this school is replete with a beauty peculiar to itself. Nevertheless, I don't believe they had any 'nostrums,' but plain linseed oil; 'honest linseed' as old Wilson called it. But it is always right to remember that the ordinary painters of that day used, as now, the same vehicle as their betters, and also that their works have all received the hardening and enamelling effects of time, so that we must not judge of originality by these signs always.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to Rev. John Fisher (20 December 1833), as quoted in Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock (Thames and Hudson, London, 1963), pp. 45-46
1830s

School , Beauty , Time , Summer

“[The waiters'] eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet – paté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes.”

S.J. Perelman (1904–1979) American humorist, author, and screenwriter

The Rising Gorge (1961) p. 13

“WOODSTOCK NATION is built on ELECTRICITY. It is our energy, music, politics, school, religion, play, battleground and our sensuality. I hesitate only in using the word Morality, for Morality means soul and ELECTRICITY lack soul but so too does the wood pen I scratch against the yellow pad. Morality rests in God's imagination and if we see ourselves as gods I guess we alone make those choices. Moral decisions never rest in our tools, be they electricity or pencils, flowers, or guns.”

Abbie Hoffman book Woodstock Nation

Woodstock Nation (1969)

God , School , Religion , Music

“I am not as these are, the poet saith
In youth's pride, and the painter, among men
At bay, where never pencil comes nor pem”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

from Not As These in The House of Life 1870 kindle ebook ASIN B0082R81E8

Men , Youth

“One of the loveliest daughters of that land,
Divinest Greece! that taught the painter's hand
To give eternity to loveliness;
One of those dark-eyed maids, to whom belong
The glory and the beauty of each Song
Thy poets breathed, for it was theirs to bless
With life the pencil and the lyre's dreams,
Giving reality to visioned gleams
Of bright divinities.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Leander and Hero from The London Literary Gazette (22nd February 1823)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life , Beauty , Dreams , Reality

“Inferior as a mechanical printing method for ordinary photographic purposes, the gum process may for a time at least be regarded as standing apart for pictorial purposes, because the large amount of personal control which must be exercised before it can be said to show distinct advantages over other methods implies that the controlling hand must be guided by an artist that is, a man of such large instinctive artistic taste that one can hardly conceive that he would be able to produce a better result by painting, and without the use of photography at all, were he to devote the same skill and endeavour to the employment of brush or pencil, instead of photographic appliances.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing methods and their bearing on pictorial photography, p. 73

Exercises , Time , Painting , Personality

“And the boy was right in back of her, his neck thin as a pencil. "My name is Thomas," he said. "Thomas Neary."
She didn't answer.
"The horse's name is Alfred, in case you want to know." He screwed up his face. "Or maybe Fernando."”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 1-10, p. 21-22

Boy , Horse

“Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

The Lottery (1948)

Summer , Night

“Sometimes I try to think and nothing comes out of it; but it happens that I doze off and suddenly feel as though someone is rousing me. I am startled, open my eyes, and what my mind was looking for stands before me like an apparition - at once I seize my pencil to draw; the main thing has been done.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote of Friedrich, recorded by Vasily Zhukovsky, c. 1821; cited by Sigrid Hinz, Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen; Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellchaft, Berlin ,1968 p. 239; as cited in 'The Phantasmatic in romantic subjective experience and aesthetics' - Master's Thesis http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1667795&fileOId=2224083 by Adrian Gerardo de Jong; Helsingborg Sweden, Sept. 2010, pp. 46-47
1794 - 1840

Feeling , Thinking , Drawing

““You know the answers, but just between ourselves, that sketch smells a bit. It’s sloppy.”
“I never did have any artistic talent,” Art said defensively. “I’d rather take a photograph any day.”
“You’ve taken too many photographs, maybe. As for artistic talent, I haven’t any either, but I learned to sketch. Look, Art—the rest of you guys get this, too—if you can’t sketch, you can’t see. If you really see what you’re looking at, you can put it down on paper, accurately. If you really remember what you have looked at, you can sketch it accurately from memory.”
“But the lines don’t go where I intend them to.”
“A pencil will go where you push it. It hasn’t any life of its own. The answer is practice and more practice and thinking about what you are looking at. All of you lugs want to be scientists. Well, the ability to sketch accurately is as necessary to a scientist as his slipstick. More necessary, you can get along without a slide rule.””

Robert A. Heinlein book Rocket Ship Galileo

Source: Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Chapter 10, “The Method of Science”, p. 108

Life , Art , Guy , Thinking

“She soon found the door the alethiometer had told her about. The sign on it said DARK MATTER RESEARCH UNIT, and under it someone had scribbled R. I. P. Another hand had added in pencil DIRECTOR: LAZARUS.
Lyra made nothing of that. She knocked, and a woman's voice said, "Come in."”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 4 : Trepanning

“A banal fever hallucination, soon obliterated and forgotten; it didn't reappear in M's memory until about thirty years later (on 10 August 1925), as he sat alone on a rainy day in a little inn by the seaside, staring at the wooden floor which had been scored by years of scrubbing, and noticed that the grain had started moving of its own accord (much like the lines on the [imitation] mahogany board of his childhood). As with the mahogany board back then, and as with visions seen between sleeping and waking, the lines formed shifting, changing images, blurred at first but then increasingly precise. Max {Ernst] decided to pursue the symbolism of this compulsory inspiration and, in order to sharpen his meditative and hallucinatory skills, he took a series of drawings from the floorboards. Letting pieces of paper drop at random on the floor, he rubbed over them with a black pencil. On careful inspection of the impressions made in this way, he was surprised by the sudden increase they produced in his visionary abilities. His curiosity was aroused. He was delighted, and began making the same type of inquiry into all sorts of materials, whatever caught his eye – leaves with their ribs, the frayed edges of sacking, the strokes of a palette knife in a 'modern' painting, thread rolling off a spool, and so forth. To quote 'Beyond Painting' These drawings, the first fruits of the frottage technique, were collected under the title 'Histoire Naturell.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, pp.283/284
1910 - 1935

Way , Quotes , Sleep , Memory

“Roll a ball under your hand on a table and roll a pencil in the same manner. What you feel are "point" and "line" bearings. But to understand what mechanics mean by a surface "bearing," grasp a pencil in your hand and use your other hand to make it turn as a piece of shafting. Now, the lower half of the shaft is supported everywhere by contact with your hand — the upper half is not supported, merely covered. The advantages of ball and roller bearings were obvious many years ago to mechanical people… Solid steel rollers, being inflexible, were not satisfactory at that stage, but a Hyatt flexible roller bearing was different. We had something. Our spirally wound tube roller had a springlike quality, yielded to irregularities caused by poor manufacture, thus making automatic adjustments between housing and bearing.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 13-14, as cited in: William Pelfrey (2006), Billy, Alfred, and General Motors: The Story of Two Unique Men, a Legendary Company, and a Remarkable Time in American History. p. 30-31; Sloan describing the Hyatt roller bearing product;

People , Feeling , Understanding , Support

“I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life , Books , Education , School

“Hugo [Claus], Now you should see my recent works. A drawing in ink, three pencil drawings and two sketches in oil-paint: a still-life and a landscape in the strongest colors you can imagine. I still have to work on the landscape, but I really think it will be the best of my paintings till now.... but the happiest thing is, I have acquired much more freedom.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Hugo [Claus], nu zoudt U eens moeten mijn laatste werk zien, een pentekening, drie potloodtekeningen en twee studies met olieverf: een stilleven en een landschap in de hevigste kleuren die Ge U kunt indenken. Aan dat landschap moet ik nog werken maar ik denk dat het mijn beste werk zal zijn, van mijn schilderwerk, en drie tekeningen vind ik mijn beste maar het gelukkigste is dat ik een veel grotere vrijheid heb verworven.
Quote of Raveel, in a letter to his friend Hugo Claus, from Machelen aan de Leie, 20-24 March 1948; as cited in Hugo Claus, Roger Raveel; Brieven 1947 – 1962, ed. Katrien Jacobs, Ludion; Gent Belgium, 2007 - ISBN 978-90-5544-665-0, p. 50 (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek)
1945 - 1960

Life , Color , Imagination , Thinking

“I had won notable victories on paper and the map with the aid of greaseproof pencils and a typewriter. In the course of this very campaign, if one may dignify the disaster thus, I had seen French generals create imaginary "masses of manoeuvre" with strokes of the crayon and dispose of hostile concentrations, that unahappily were on the ground as well as on the map, with sweeps of the eraser. Who was I to criticise them, hero as I was of a hundred "Chinagraph wars" of make-believe?”

Frederick E. Morgan (1894–1967) British Army general

Peace and War: A Soldier's Life (1961), p. 138

Hostility , War , Victory

“Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

As quoted in The Super 8 Book (1975) by Lenny Lipton (ed. Chet Roaman); also in Aesthetic Aspects of Recent Experimental Film (1980) by Barry Walter Moore, Garth S. Jowett, p. 6

Art

“At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water—right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.”

Paolo Bacigalupi (1972) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"The Tamarisk Hunter", High Country, 26 June 2006

People , Water

“We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several. illustrative problems in mathematics and physics.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1980s and later, "Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words," (1987), p. 65

Mathematics , Problem

“Tarzan sat in a brown study for a long time after he finished reading the letter. It was filled with so many new and wonderful things that his brain was in a whirl as he attempted to digest them all.
So they did not know that he was Tarzan of the Apes. He would tell them.
In his tree he had constructed a rude shelter of leaves and boughs, beneath which, protected from the rain, he had placed the few treasures brought from the cabin. Among these were some pencils.
He took one, and beneath Jane Porter's signature he wrote: I am Tarzan of the Apes”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 18 : The Jungle Toll

Tree , Study , Time , Reading

“The pencil-stroke is like cutting into the heart.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 8 (Gunter Brus Werkumkreisung,op.cit, p. 128.)

Heart

“I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Books , Thinking , Reading

“Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace
Thy strong enchantment, when the poet's lyre,
The painter's pencil cathch thy sacred fire,
And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace”

Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827) British writer

From 'Sonnet - to Expression', Poems 1786, kindle ebook ASIN B00849523Q

Beauty , Soul , Strong

“About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)

“And as for those who voted for me, I know there will be many whose pencils hovered for an instant before putting an X in my box and I will work flat out to repay and to justify your confidence.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Source: 2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

Confidence , Box

“To make the record, we now push a pencil or tap a typewriter. Then comes the process of digestion and correction, followed by an intricate process of typesetting, printing, and distribution. To consider the first stage of the procedure, will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record?”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Future

“Consider how The Dark Knight got away with a rating of PG-13 in the US by skilfully not showing any blood. Does that make it any more suitable for children? Or will there be a generation of youngsters haunted by visions of white-faced sadists brandishing pencils?”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

http://web.archive.org/web/20081015182445/http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24493980-5014239,00.html
Other Articles

Children

“He was a chiseler who wanted a cut of outside money his cast earned, demanded to be called ‘master,’ and prohibited poor Nimoy from using a company pencil.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

William Shatner, " Shatner: Roddenberry Was A Chiseler http://trekmovie.com/2008/06/02/shatner-roddenberry-was-a-chiseler/" TrekMovie.com, June 2, 2008
About

Money

“What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in ’59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2001), in an interview with Philip L. Frana. (OH 330; Communications of the ACM 53(8):41–47)
2000s

Way , Travel , Coffee , Drink

“No, absolutely not, I have never been what one calls a gifted child, never a dreamer. I didn't think of making fantasies with the pencil on the paper, although at school we learned to draw and play music of course. But in those days the piano was actually what I preferred most... But until my eighteenth year I have been hesitating long between both [painting and playing piano]..”

Suze Robertson (1855–1922) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Suze Robertson: Nee, ik ben volstrekt nooit wat men noemt een begaafd kind geweest, nooit een droomster. Aan fantasie met 't potlood op 't papier dacht ik niet, al leerden we op school natuurlijk ook teekenen en muziek. Maar in dien tijd was de piano eigenlijk meer mijn fort.. .Toch heb ik tot mijn achttiende jaar tussen die beide lang gewankeld.
Source: 1900 - 1922, Onder de Menschen: Suze Robertson' (1912), p. 30

School , Music , Thinking , Learning

“It is a great difficulty and great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe; ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil; will be able to hold without any technique. One favorable moment is enough. The little thing is easily and concisely set down. It's already done! It was a tiny but real affair, and someday, through the repetition of such small but original deeds, there will come one work upon which I can really build.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (June 1902), as cited in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 442
1895 - 1902

Motivation , Fashion

“Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Between Going and Staying

Love , Books , World , Light

“Accept a miracle instead of wit,—
See two dull lines with Stanhope's pencil writ.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

Lines written with the Diamond Pencil of Lord Chesterfield; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).