Sewing Quotes

1. "She was a Victorian girl; a girl of the days when men were hard and top-hatted and masculine and ruthless and girls were gentle and meek and did a great deal of sewing and looked after the poor and laid their tender napes beneath a husband's booted foot, and even if he brought home cabfuls of half-naked chorus girls and had them dance on the rich round mahogany dining-table (rosily reflecting great pearly hams and bums in its polished depths). Or, drunk to a frenzy, raped the kitchen-maid before the morning assembly of servants and children and her black silk-dressed self (gathered for prayers). Or forced her to stitch, on shirts, her fingers to rags to pay his gambling debts.Husbands were a force of nature or an act of God; like an earthquake or the dreaded consumption, to be borne with, to be meekly acquiesced to, to be impregnated by as frequently as Nature would allow. It took the mindless persistence, the dogged imbecility of the grey tides, to love a husband."
Author: Angela Carter

2. "All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing machine. (on Bach)"
Author: Arnold Bax

3. "When I moved out of my mom's house at 18 I was almost as sad to leave her sewing machine behind as anything else."
Author: Beth Ditto

4. "I remember an old Singer sewing machine at home that belonged to my grandmother. It had a pedal. My mom taught me how to use it when I was 12 years old. I used to find it so intriguing, how a flat piece of material could be made into an object that had so many uses."
Author: Bibhu Mohapatra

5. "Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now."
Author: Claire Vaye Watkins

6. "By now it was clear that Howl was in a mood to produce green slime any second. Sophie hurriedly put her sewing away. "I'll make some hot buttered toast," she said. "Is that all you can do in the face of tragedy??" Howl asked. "Make toast!"
Author: Diana Wynne Jones

7. "Following the pattern offered a kind of comfort, a quiet balance to working in the field during the day. The farmwork was coarse, exhausting, and largely a matter of faith - a farmer threw everything he had into the earth, but ultimately it wasn't up to him whether it rained or not. Sewing was different. Mabel knew if she was patient and meticulous, if she carefully followed the rules, that in the end when it was turned right-side out, it would be just how it was meant to be. A small miracle in itself, and one that life so rarely offered."
Author: Eowyn Ivey

8. "He taught me to read and write. I learned my lessons with my elder children. He has always kept school in our house, every night of his life. Our children supposed it was for them; I knew it was quite as much for me. While I sat at knitting or sewing, I spelled over the words he gave out. I know nothing of my ancestors, save that they came from the lowlands of Holland, down where there were cities, schools, and business. They were well educated, but they would not take the trouble to teach their children. As I have spoken to you, my husband taught me. All I know I learn from"
Author: Gene Stratton Porter

9. "In an age in which the classic words of the Surrealists - "As beatiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella" -can become reality and perfectly achievable with an atom bomb, so too has there been a surge of interest in biomechanoids."
Author: H.R. Giger

10. "All efforts of reason and analysis are, in a word, like trying to slice through a watermelon with sewing needles. They may leave marks on the outer rind, but the fruity pulp will remain perpetually out of reach."
Author: Haruki Murakami

11. "I have a great admiration and tenderness for Azzedine Alaia. I haven't seen him in a while, but I guess he must be still sewing some dresses at night."
Author: Hedi Slimane

12. "Here she was, being rescued by a socialist, feminist, lesbian, baby-killing, foreign terrorist. What would the ladies in the sewing circle say to that?"
Author: Hillary Jordan

13. "Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do - here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared."
Author: Ian McEwan

14. "Destiny was a machine built over time, each choice that you made in life adding another gear, another conveyor belt, another assemblyman. Where you ended up was the product that was spit out at the end—and there was no going back for a redo. You couldn?t take a peek at what you?d manufactured and decide, Oh, wait, I wanted to make sewing machines instead of machine guns; let me go back to the beginning and start again. One shot. That was all you got."
Author: J.R. Ward

15. "Ride?" Rhage snorted. "Please. That thing is a sewing machine with an air dam taped to it. My GTO could dust the fucker in fourth gear from a dead stop."When there was an odd sound from behind, John looked back. So did the three Brothers. "What." Xhex bristled and crossed her arms over her chest. "I can laugh, you know. And that's . . . pretty damn funny." Rhage beamed. "I knew I liked you."
Author: J.R. Ward

16. "Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines."
Author: Jack Horner

17. "My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her."
Author: James Weldon Johnson

18. "A lot happened in Vancouver. It was my first Western experience. I learned English, which is my second language. I became very acquainted with Western culture. I had my first sewing machine when I was 9. I trained in fashion illustration when I was in school."
Author: Jason Wu

19. "Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit."
Author: Jodi Picoult

20. "When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut."
Author: Jodi Picoult

21. "Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut."
Author: Jodi Picoult

22. "When he smiled, she saw that his mouth was full of little hooks, rows of them, each as small and delicate as a sewing needle."
Author: Joe Hill

23. "When a man's suit fits, when the construction is beautiful, when the sewing and fabrics are there... in the end, you'll look the best in it."
Author: John Varvatos

24. "Pam, my new therapist, who's like some blissed-out, grown-up, yoga-hippie version of Rain, says that the physical body, the idea of the self, is kind of a scar: a brief puckering of time, a fleeting sewing together of energy and heart, which go beyond the physical form, on and on and on, forever."
Author: Kate Ellison

25. "She'll need new shirts, please, Mr. Maxim. Women's shirts. And, my Lord, those trousers!"Sophie didn't see the problem. Trousers were just skirts with extra sewing. "I need them," she said. "Please let me keep them. You can't climb in a skirt. Or, you can, but then everyone would see your underpants, and surely that would be worse?"Miss Eliot frowned. She was not the sort of person who admitted to wearing underpants."
Author: Katherine Rundell

26. "She was fifteen years old, going on thirty-five, Doc, and she told me she was eighteen, she was very willing, I practically had to take to sewing my pants shut. Between you and me, uh, she might have been fifteen, but when you get that little red beaver right up there in front of you, I don't think it's crazy at all and I don't think you do either. No man alive could resist that, and that's why I got into jail to begin with. And now they're telling me I'm crazy over here because I don't sit there like a goddamn vegetable. Don't make a bit of sense to me. If that's what being crazy is, then I'm senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road, wacko. But no more, no less, that's it."
Author: Ken Kesey

27. "If you don't want me to be in love with you, you're going to have looking so lovely. First thing tomorrow, I'm having your maids sewing potato sacks to gether for you."
Author: Kiera Cass

28. "An Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape charges, a tape measure, a giant Swiss Army knife, tin snips, tongs, tweezers, three vises, a wire stripper, X-acto knives, a pick, a bunch of mallets, a nut driver set, hose clamps, a set of end mills, a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, a magnifying glass, all kinds of tape, a plumber's bob and ream, a sewing kit, scissors, sieves, a lathe, levels of all sizes, long-nosed pliers, vise-grip pliers, a tap-and-die set, three shovels, a compressor, a generator, a welding-and-cutting set, a wheelbarrow—"
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

29. "One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb."
Author: Marcel Pagnol

30. "I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more."
Author: Margaret Atwood

31. "In fact, he's never taken an interest in a woman before. I was beginning to to suspect he might prefer one of his male sneaks, but now..." She paused dramatically. "Now, we have the lovely, intelligent Yelena to get Valek's cold heart pumping.""You really should get out of your sewing room more. You need fresh air and a dose of reality," I said knowing better than to believe a word Dilana said, but unable to control the silly little grin on my face. Her sweet, melodious laughter followed me into the hallway."You know I'm right, " she called."
Author: Maria V. Snyder

32. "The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing."
Author: Mary Roach

33. "Hanging softly over the black Singer sewing machine, it looked like magic, and when people saw me wearing it they were going to run up to me and say, "Marguerite, forgive us, please, we didn't know who you were," and I would answer generously, "No, you couldn't have known. Of course I forgive you."
Author: Maya Angelou

34. "From about eight years old I was always making things on the sewing machine. Friends would see me making dresses and costumes, and I'd use difficult fabrics such as Lycra and elastic. But you know, my dad was creative and my brother is inventive too."
Author: Melissa George

35. "I'm always tinkering with something - suddenly I'll think I can work with wood, but then I'll realize I can't, so I go back to sewing."
Author: Melissa McCarthy

36. "My grandmother raised five children during the Depression by herself. At 50, she threw her sewing machine into the back of a pickup truck and drove from North Dakota to California. She was a real survivor, so that's my stock. That's how I want my kids to be too."
Author: Michelle Pfeiffer

37. "My regular life today is reading books, making dolls houses, sewing dolls with my daughter and barbequing."
Author: Milla Jovovich

38. "I preferred sewing to bossing little children."
Author: Mother Jones

39. "What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom."
Author: N.T. Wright

40. "It is safe to say that not all the cooking and sewing and farm management of an entire year signified as much hard work as the job of keeping those five children alive for a month. Their mother did it, though,...with never a murmur. It was not merely a part of her life's routine; it was her life itself."
Author: Nancy Byrd Turner

41. "My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It's actually one of the things that you live and die for."
Author: Neil Gaiman

42. "All the asylum clothing is made by the patients, but sewing does not employ one's mind. After several months' confinement the thoughts of the busy world grow faint, and all the poor prisoners can do is to sit and ponder over their hopeless fate."
Author: Nellie Bly

43. "God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts."
Author: Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

44. "No one expects a woman busy at her sewing to pay attention to what's being said around her. Nevermind if a man's mother and sister showerd them they heard everything while they stictched, he'll still think a woman who plies her needles saves all her brains for the work. You're a far better spy hemming sheets than if you clank with daggers."
Author: Tamora Pierce

45. "High in the hazy sky, the snowfkakes looked tiny and all alike, but as they drifted past the narrow window of the sewing room, all were unique - long or round or triangular - as if they'd borrowed their shapes from the clouds they'd come from."
Author: Ursula Hegi

46. "A doll is among the most pressing needs as well as the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for it, adorn it, dress and undress it, give it lessons, scold it a little, put it to bed and sing it to sleep, pretend that the object is a living person - all the future of the woman resides in this. Dreaming and murmuring, tending, cossetting, sewing small garments, the child grows into girlhood, from girlhood into womanhood, from womanhood into wifehood, and the first baby is the successor of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is nearly as deprived and quite as unnatural as a woman without a child."
Author: Victor Hugo

47. "Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.Then the curtain rose. They spoke."
Author: Virginia Woolf

48. "I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases."
Author: Virginia Woolf

49. "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,Those of mechanics, each one singing his as itshould be blithe and strong,The carpenter singing his as he measures his plankor beam,The mason singing his as he makes ready for work,or leaves off work,The boatman singing what belongs to him in hisboat, the deckhand singing on the steamboatdeck,The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, thehatter singing as he stands,The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on hisway in the morning, or at noon intermissionor at sundown,The delicious singing of the mother, or of theyoung wife at work, or of the girl sewing orwashing,Each singing what belongs to him or her and tonone else,The day what belongs to the day — at night theparty of young fellows, robust, friendly,Singing with open mouths their strong melodioussongs."
Author: Walt Whitman

50. "You sweat out the free agent thing in November then you make the trades in December. Then you struggle to sign the guys left in January and in February I get down to sewing all the new numbers on the uniforms."
Author: Whitey Herzog

Sewing Quotes Pictures