Sketch Quotes

“For the record, while it's very charming that you keep trying to protect me, I would like to remind you that I actually know how to defend myself."
He grimaced. "I know. It's just... instinct."
"Well, stop it."
He held his hands up. "Won't happen again." He hesitated. I mean, unless I'm pretty sure you're about to die, then I'm absolutely going to rescue you, whether you like it or not.”
― Marissa Meyer, Renegades

“But for some reason she had left off the metal mask, and though Adrian knew he shouldn't assign it any significance, he couldn't help it.
Without the mask, he still didn't see her as Nightmare. He could only see Nova.
Nova, who had betrayed him a hundred different ways. But still Nova.”
― Marissa Meyer, Supernova

“She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Selected Short Stories

“The ones who constantly make us laugh are the hardest of friends to know - for comedians are the caricatures among us.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The hours tick by as I lie in bed.
Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.”
― Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris

“He hadn't left any of the stretches that he'd done of me. But he did leave a sketch of my rocking chair. It was perfect. A rocking chair against the bare walls of my room. He'd captured the afternoon light streaming into the room, the way the shadows fell on the chair and gave it depth and made it appear as if it was something more than an inanimate object. There was something sad and solitary about the sketch and I wondered if that's the way he saw the world or if that's the way he saw my world.
I starred at the sketch for a long time. It scared me. Because there was something true about it.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“This sketch was more elaborate than the others, more complete. A river scene, with a tree in the foreground and a distant wood visible across a broad field. Behind a copse on the right-hand side, the twin-gabled roofline of a house could be seen, with eight chimneys and an ornate weather vane featuring the sun and moon and other celestial emblems.
It was an accomplished drawing, but that's not why Elodie stared. She felt a pang of déjà vu so strong it exerted a physical pressure around her chest.
She knew this place. The memory was as vivid as if she'd been there, and yet somehow Elodie knew that it was a location she'd visited only in her mind.
The words came to her then as clear as birdsong at dawn: "Down the winding lane and across the meadow broad, to the river they went with their secrets and their sword."
And she remembered. It was a story that her mother used to tell her. A child's bedtime story, romantic and tangled, replete with heroes, villains, and a Fairy Queen, set in a house within dark woods encircled by a long, snaking river.”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter

“The art is already in the picture.”
― Laura Chouette

“There are stars inside the universe nobody ever wrote about;
so what keeps us from hoping and loving the ones we see each day?”
― Laura Chouette

“My lines do not borrow your love -
they create art so I can admire it forever.”
― Laura Chouette

“They fall silently
the steps of her arrival -
crossing snow so pale 
even the morning sky would fall 
into nights amber
(if it knew of her ways & worth); 
for she has entered the palace of gold 
- her hair braided with hope
tainted with autumn leaves
that seem like a hanged man's rope -
for her name is war and 
her crown is crafted out of grief.”
― Laura Chouette

“She'd loved birds long before her physical limitations kept her grounded. She'd found a birding diary of her grandmother's in a trunk in the attic when she was Frankie's age, and when she asked her father about it, he dug through boxes on a shelf high above her head, handing down a small pair of binoculars and some field guides.
She'd seen her first prothonotary warbler when she was nine, sitting alone on a tupelo stump in the forest, swatting at mosquitoes targeting the pale skin behind her ears. She glanced up from the book she was reading only to be startled by an unexpected flash of yellow. Holding her breath, she fished for the journal she kept in her pocket, focusing on the spot in the willow where he might be. A breeze stirred the branches, and she saw the brilliant yellow head and underparts standing out like petals of a sunflower against the backdrop of leaves; the under tail, a stark white. His beak was long, pointed and black; his shoulders a mossy green, a blend of the citron yellow of his head and the flat slate of his feathers. He had a black dot of an eye, a bead of jet set in a field of sun. Never had there been anything so perfect. When she blinked he disappeared, the only evidence of his presence a gentle sway of the branch. It was a sort of magic, unveiled to her. He had been hers, even if only for a few seconds.
With a stub of pencil- 'always a pencil,' her grandmother had written. 'You can write with a pencil even in the rain'- she noted the date and time, the place and the weather. She made a rough sketch, using shorthand for her notes about the bird's coloring, then raced back to the house, raspberry canes and brambles speckling bloody trails across her legs. In the field guide in the top drawer of her desk, she found him again: prothonotary warbler, 'prothonotary' for the clerks in the Roman Catholic Church who wore robes of a bright yellow. It made absolute sense to her that something so beautiful would be associated with God.
After that she spent countless days tromping through the woods, toting the drab knapsack filled with packages of partially crushed saltines, the bottles of juice, the bruised apples and half-melted candy bars, her miniature binoculars slung across one shoulder. She taught herself how to be patient, how to master the boredom that often accompanied careful observation. She taught herself how to look for what didn't want to be seen.”
― Tracy Guzeman, The Gravity of Birds

“Once again she was struck by a sense of profound familiarity. She knew this place. In the story that her mother used to tell, the house had been a literal gateway to another world; for Elodie, though, curled up in her mother's arms, breathing in the exotic fragrance of narcissus that she wore, the story itself had been a gateway, an incantation that carried her away from the here and now and into the land of imagination. After her mother's death, the world of the story had become her secret place. Whether at lunchtime in her new school, or at home in the long, quiet afternoons, or at night when the darkness threatened suffocation, all she had to do was hide herself away and close her eyes and she could cross the river, brave the woods, and enter the enchanted house...”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter

“Maybe what we create outlives us - so art is nothing but a thought inside something that has passed and yet living inside everything one can ever dream of; a sketch of ideas inside of a world of colours.”
― Laura Chouette

“The right way is art.”
― Laura Chouette

“The art is already in the picture; we only have to set the colours free for hearts that have not seen love yet.”
― Laura Chouette

“A poet may create or reminds;
yet for both - the art is embraced by words.”
― Laura Chouette

“We place too much of ourselves inside art -
so we become part of it and never feel quiet again
for the people, we created it for, nor the meaning we gave it.”
― Laura Chouette

“We always hide our souls whenever we create something that praises the heart.”
― Laura Chouette

“Brambleweft starts to sketch- billowing skirts and cunning little capes, corsets stitched with fanciful creatures. Butterflies alighting along arms and in elaborate headpieces. I am charmed at the alien vision of myself- my corset will have two golden beetles stitched in what looks like a breastplate, with Madoc's moon crest and elaborate swirls of shining thread continuing down my front, and tiny sheer drop sleeves of more gold.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“If I close my weary eyes,
I can shut the dark out,
just for a single moment
and see the world I hope to see.

Unravel its detail does,
so slowly in the dim light.

It is a fragile dream,
half awake, half asleep.
Sketches of a world I yearn to reach.”
― Susan L. Marshall, All the Hope We Carry

“… Sprawls overhead would shower golden ‘snowflakes’ on vehicles parked below, on people waiting for buses, on gangs of laborers hurrying to their day’s toil, and on bike riders rushing underneath them …”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“… Pinky’s head would move, to and fro, with the wrist of Tingy without slackening the grip. A bulldog clip couldn’t have been fiercer…”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“… She gritted her teeth, caught hold of woman’s right upper arm and, despite her wriggle, dragged her, nearly lifting her off the ground, out of the gallery; the woman screaming obscenities at her.”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“… A jumble of green leaves showed innumerable egg-shaped, and egg-sized, flower buds huddling in their recesses, a few blossomed into flowers large enough to spill out a human palm. …”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“… This subliminal ‘Helena’ – an autopilot hidden deep within you – jostles you, despite you, in picturing things you never know why you do. …”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“Remember when I used to be dumb? Well I'm better now. [Stan Laurel - 'Pack Up Your Troubles."]”
― A.J. Marriot, Laurel & Hardy - The British Tours

“Why indeed does the hand experience such difficulty in rendering itself? ...It is a tragedy, or perhaps a boon, that the form should never know itself or approach anything resembling itself without warping the parameters of its being. Awareness is thusly obliteration and through reproduction of this intuitive knowing, the self is contaminated, and thereby annihilated.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“A poet may create or reminds.”
― Laura Chouette

“Kit smiled a little as he bent to retrieve the abandoned sketchbook; the irony of a spy being spied upon didn't escape him. He leafed through it idly.
Imagine that... she'd not only been spying... she'd been documenting her findings.
He bit back a laugh when he saw himself, arms stretched skyward, penis dangling modestly---he had been swimming, after all. But it was a beautiful drawing. She'd roughed in the pier beneath him and the trees behind it, too, and she'd caught him perfectly, the mindless contentment of the moment, the strength and confidence of his body, a hint of pleased-with-himself arrogance in the arch of his back. There was nothing tentative or missish about the drawing; it was, above all things, honest and surprisingly accomplished. He was flattered, but he felt oddly exposed, which had nothing to do with the fact that he was naked in the sketch. She'd captured something essential about him.”
― Julie Anne Long, Beauty and the Spy