Embroidery Quotes

• Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Time, Quilts, Children

  Oliver Wendell Holmes (2007). “Guardian Angel”, p.179, Reprint Services Corporation

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• Now the Earth with many flowers puts on her spring embroidery

  Sappho

  Spring, Flower, Earth

  Sappho (1965). “Lyrics in the Original Greek”, Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor books [1965]

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• Success is not fame or money or the power to bewitch. it is to have created something valuable from your own individuality and skill a garden, an embroidery, a painting, a cake, a life.

  Charlotte Gray

  Garden, Cake, Skills

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• Although the threads of my life have often seemed knotted, I know, by faith, that on the other side of the embroidery there is a crown.

  Corrie Ten Boom

  Inspirational, Life, Positive

  Corrie ten Boom (1974). “Tramp for the Lord: The Story that Begins Where The Hiding Place Ends”, p.12, CLC Publications

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• Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

  Voltaire

  Love, Romantic, Valentines Day

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

  Wendell Berry

  Love, Dark, Shining

  Wendell Berry (2005). “Hannah Coulter: A Novel”, p.51, Counterpoint Press

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• The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spiderweb of the micrometer.

  Maria Mitchell

  Stars, Eye, Mesh

  Maria Mitchell (1896). “Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals”

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• I'm good at embroidery. It's what I always wanted to do.... Yep, instead of whoring, I just wanted to do fancy embroidery.

  Lillian Hellman

  Fancy, Needlework, Wanted

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• Humility is the embroidery of chiefs.

  Bill Vaughan

  Humility, Chiefs

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• Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Clothes, Suits, Graves

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• When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.

  Lynn Abbey

  Book, Reading, Writing

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• A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

  Mao Zedong

  Party, Writing, Chinese Revolution

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.13, Lulu.com

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• The male is colored much more gorgeously than the female so that he can be shot and made into feather embroidery.

  Will Cuppy

  Males, Female, Made

  Will Cuppy (1944). “The Great Bustard and Other People: Containing: How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes and How to Become Extinct”

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• We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. To us Irish, memory is a canvas--stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the "story" part of the word "history," and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence.

  Frank Delaney

  Memories, Drama, Color

  Frank Delaney (2010). “Frank Delaney's The Ireland Novels 3-Book Bundle: Tipperary, Shannon, Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show”, p.17, Random House

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• Using my own hand as a base material, I considered it a canvas upon which I stitched into the top layer of skin using thread to create the appearance of an incredibly work worn hand. By using the technique of embroidery, which is traditionally employed to represent femininity and applying it to the expression of its opposite, I hope to challenge the pre-conceived notion that 'women's work' is light and easy. Aiming to represent the effects of hard work arising from employment in low paid 'ancillary' jobs, such as cleaning, caring and catering, all traditionally considered to be 'women's work'.

  Eliza Bennett

  Jobs, Hard Work, Caring

  "This Artist Painstakingly Sews Her Incredible Art Into The Palms Of Her Own Hands" by Gil Kaufman, www.mtv.com. July 22, 2014.

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• It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.

  Samuel Johnson

  Home, Men, Honor

  "The Rambler No. 68" by Samuel Johnson, November 10, 1750.

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• You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.

  Albert Camus

  Art, Mistake, Thinking

  "Happy Death".

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• With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears.

  John Milton

  Flower, Pansies, Pensive

  'Lycidas' (1638) l. 142

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• My go-to gifts are scarves from my friend Matin Maulawizada's nonprofit organization, Afghan Hands, which supports disenfranchised women in Afghanistan. In exchange for their beautiful embroidery, the women are given financial aid and classes in math and literacy. The scarves are all stunning and one of a kind.

  Claire Danes

  Beautiful, Math, Hands

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• The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Morning, Cities, Clothes

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• I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

  William Butler Yeats

  Song, Eye, Fool

  "A Coat" l. 8 (1914)

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• When we put the antlers on the model and then draped over it the lace embroidery that we had made, we had to poke them through a £2,000 piece of work. But then it worked because it looks like she's rammed the piece of lace with her antlers. There's always spontaneity. You've got to allow for that in my shows.

  Alexander McQueen

  Looks, Pieces, Lace

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• Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

  Florence King

  Reading, Cutting, Whales

  Florence King (1990). “Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye”, p.168, Macmillan

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• It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.

  Veronica Roth

  Thinking, Tugging, Habit

  Veronica Roth (2013). “The Divergent Series Complete Collection: Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant”, p.46, Harper Collins

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• Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.

  John Milton

  Lying, Flower, Glowing

  'Lycidas' (1638) l. 142

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