Pens Quotes - Page 11

• In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

  Jean Cocteau

  Pain, Memories, Believe

  Jean Cocteau (1990). “Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure”, Peter Owen Publishers

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• She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.

  Millard Kaufman

  Writing, Night, Hands

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• By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper - my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.

  Jay-Z

  Song, Memories, Thinking

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• The gate is perfectly simple," Temeraire said. "There is only a bar across the fence, which one can lift very easily, and then it swings open; Nitidus could do it best, for his forehands are the smallest. Though it is difficult to keep the animals inside the pen, and the first time I learned how to open it, they all ran away," he added. "Maximus and I had to chase after them for hours and hours--it was not funny at all," he said, ruffled, sitting back on his haunches and contemplating Laurence with great indignation.

  Naomi Novik

  Animal, Simple, Swings

  Naomi Novik (2009). “In His Majesty's Service: Three Novels of Temeraire (His Majesty's Service, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War)”, p.390, Del Rey

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• I usually dream of melodies. When I wake up I have them in my head. I usually come up with things in the middle of the night because that's when my mind is the quietest. I always have my tape recorder, pen and pad by my bed just in case.

  Leona Lewis

  Dream, Night, Mind

  "Leona Lewis Has a Health Condition That Makes Her Scared of Balconies" by Lexi Petronis, www.glamour.com. October 16, 2012.

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• With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Hands, Has Beens, Excommunication

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook E 76, 1799.

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• A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.

  Nelson Mandela

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Education

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• Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.

  Marlo Thomas

  Doors, Paper, Fame

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• I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation - with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Struggle, Heart, Games

  "This Side of Paradise". Book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920.

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• The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

  Barack Obama

  Children, School, Cities

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”, p.258, Broadway Books

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• If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

  Victor Hugo

  Break, Ifs

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• My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

  Abigail Adams

  Women, Losing A Loved One, Heart

  Abigail Adams, John Adams, L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Mary-Jo Kline (1975). “The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784”, p.90, UPNE

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• I can always live by my pen.

  Jane Austen

  Live By, I Can

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• When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

  David McCullough

  Husband, Grief, Writing

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• Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Music, Dance, Education

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2007). “Twilight of the Idols with the Antichrist and Ecce Homo”, p.47, Wordsworth Editions

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• Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

  Anne Fadiman

  Bereavement, Matter, Serious

  Anne Fadiman (2011). “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader”, p.89, Macmillan

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• A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Ends, Should, Sentences

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.996, Delphi Classics

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• She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

  Kate Morton

  People, Waiting, Stories

  Kate Morton (2011). “The Distant Hours: A Novel”, p.387, Simon and Schuster

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• A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

  Orson Welles

  Army, Artist, Needs

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• I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.

  Daniil Kharms

  Taken, Anxiety, Paper

  Daniil Kharms (2007). “Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writing of Daniil Kharms”, Overlook Press

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• The Arab World is writing a new future; the pen is in our own hands.

  Abdallah II

  Writing, Hands, World

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• The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.

  Virginia Woolf

  Block, Fall, Names

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “The Waves”, p.109, Booklassic

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• She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.

  Janet Fitch

  Notebook, Writing, Night

  Janet Fitch (2002). “White Oleander”, Large Print Press

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• You gave me Christopher Robin, and then You breathed new life in Pooh. Whatever of each has left my pen Goes homing back to you. My book is ready, and comes to greet The mother it longs to see -- It would be my present to you, my sweet, If it weren't your gift to me.

  A. A. Milne

  Mother, Sweet, Book

  A. A. Milne (2011). “The House at Pooh Corner”, p.3, Egmont UK

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• History belongs to she who holds the pen...If we don't tell our stories, they won't be told.

  Julianne Malveaux

  Stories, Ifs

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