Sharpening Quotes

1. "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

2. "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Author: Abraham Lincoln

3. "..the Zimmers sharpening their sarcasm. Over an early dinner, they chipped away at each other like little Michelangelos, placing every stroke of the mallet with care and devotion."
Author: Amor Towles

4. "My sisters and I stand, arms around each other, laughind and wiping the tears from each others eyes. The flash of the Polaroid goes off and my family hands me the snapshot. My sisters and I watch quietly together, eager to see what develops. Ghe grey-greensurface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don't speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in suprise to see, her long-cherished wish."
Author: Amy Tan

5. "Connor smiled sadly at me. "Go on, that's where you belong."My fangs were already sharpening when I returned his smile. "Just don't try to pet me."
Author: Andrea Cremer

6. "I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses."
Author: Annie Dillard

7. "Try it on.""It's probably a little snug. Marcie tends to buy down when it comes to sizing."He merely smiled."It has a slit up the thigh."His smile depened."Zip it up?"Patch's eyes made a slow assessment of me, sharpening to vivid black. "I'm going to have a hard time sending you off with Scott in that dress. Just a heads-up: If you come home and the dress looks even slightly tampered with, i will track Scott down, and when i find him, it won't be pretty."
Author: Becca Fitzpatrick

8. "He regarded us with dark, evaluating eyes. "This can't be good.""I'll go first," Dabria began, sucking in a rattling breath."Not even close," I shot back. I faced Patch directly, cutting Dabria out of the conversation. "She kissed you! And Dante, who's been tailing you,by the way, caught it on camera. Imagine my surprise when that's what I got an eyeful of earlier tonight. Did you even think to tell me?""I told her I kissed you, and that you pushed me away," Dabria protested shrilly."What are you still doing here?" I exploded at Dabria. "This is between me and Patch. Leave already!""What are you doing here?" Patch echoed to Dabria, his tone sharpening."I—broke in," she sputtered. "I was scared. I couldn't sleep. I can't stop thinking about Hanoth and the other Nephilim.""You have got to be kidding me," I said."
Author: Becca Fitzpatrick

9. "Patch's eyes made a slow assessment of me, sharpening to vivid black. "I'm going to have a hard time sending you off with Scott in that dress. Just a heads-up: If you come home and the dress looks even slightly tampered with, I will track Scott down, and when I find him, it won't be pretty.""I'll relay the message.""If you tell me where he's hiding, I'll relay it myself."I had to work not to smile. "Something tells me your message would be a lot more direct.""Let's just say he'd get the point."
Author: Becca Fitzpatrick

10. "I'm a good neurosugeon. That's not a boast but a way of acknowledging the innate ability God has given to me. Beginning with determination and using my gifted hands, I went on for training and sharpening for my skills."
Author: Ben Carson

11. "Of course, when we got home, we found that Dagda had peed on my down comforter. He had also eaten part of Mom's maidenhair fern and barfed it up on the carpet. Then he had apparently worked himself into a frenzy sharpening his ting by amazingly effective claws on the armrest of my dad's favorite chair. Now he was asleep on a pillow, curled up like a fuzzy little snail. "God, he's so cute," I said, shaking my head."
Author: Cate Tiernan

12. "I tell students that even if they don't like math right now, they can use math as a brain-sharpening tool - a tool that not only builds the foundation for a great career, but that also builds self-confidence, no matter what they choose to do with their lives."
Author: Danica McKellar

13. "A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme."
Author: Diane Johnson

14. "Now she sat in their dining hall, a book in her lap but unread while she stared blankly across the room.Bercelak's kin kept themselves busy by sharpening weapons, reading, talking, or setting things on fire with small bursts of flame."
Author: G.A. Aiken

15. "Men are tested and tried amongst deceptions radically and they are winning for themselves abilities to give, to deliberate, to stand fast, to choose well, to discriminate." "They are far from the 'automata' of the Universe some think them to be. They dance the starry path and are sharpening their knowledge with every orbit of each positive thought travelled."
Author: Gabriel Brunsdon

16. "Mailer famously labeled writing the spooky art. He was right. There's a lot of frontal lobe blather, a lot of pencil-sharpening and knuckle-cracking and drafting and chat, but the big decisions are made in the locked subconscious, decisions not just on the writing but on the conditions for writing: I resolve on the one story I've never told and lo! Here I sit, holed up in a house that means nothing to me, bone-certain no other places will do. Art, even the humble autobiographer's, invokes occult necessities."
Author: Glen Duncan

17. "Training is such a vital part of preparation for a game, you really do train to play. It tops up your ability, like sharpening a carving knife. You can get away with not doing it for a while, as long as you have reached a certain standard of fitness."
Author: Graeme Le Saux

18. "Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!"
Author: Hilary Mantel

19. "He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?"A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, "At this moment, master, I would have to say..."
Author: Hilary Mantel

20. "Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that if he had eight hours to cut down a tree, he'd spend several of these hours sharpening his ax."
Author: Irvin D. Yalom

21. "People who have fully prepared always save time. Albert Einstein was right to teach that if he is given six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first four sharpening the axes. When you are done with your action plans, work will be easier!"
Author: Israelmore Ayivor

22. "2.3.06.02.087: Unnecessary sharpening of pencils constitutes a waste of public resources, and will be punished as appropriate."
Author: Jasper Fforde

23. "Night wasn't so much falling as sharpening its claws."
Author: Jim Butcher

24. "All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this negative trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him to do it. The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, however, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important."
Author: John R. Perry

25. "They were young; time hadn't yet rubbed at them, polishing their differences and sharpening their opinions..."
Author: Kate Morton

26. "I thought of Al in his dream, looking nothing like this, more like an elegant bat. Broken? Perhaps, but I had put his butterfly back together with my blood. "I never liked the movie Titanic," I said, and he grunted, his gaze sharpening on me. "They both could have gotten on that damn door."
Author: Kim Harrison

27. "It always struck Fire, the physical affection between these siblings, who as often as not were at each other's throats over one thing or another. She liked the way the four of them shifted and changed shape, bumping and clanging against one another, sharpening each other's edges and then smoothing them down again, and somehow always finding the way to fit together."
Author: Kristin Cashore

28. "Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt."
Author: Lao Tzu

29. "?The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave."
Author: Leon Trotsky

30. "That's how I am! eyes peeled, scientific! first things first! the big ones! the small ones!...if they're going to behead you...for example!...you don't take your eyes of the guillotine!...look, the blade's dull!-Executioner! you shout, hey, you lazy fucker! don't you have anyone sharpening that thing?And the executioner scurries off, shit-assed and sheepish!"
Author: Louis Ferdinand Céline

31. "This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. Its helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique."
Author: Michael Pollan

32. "Up steps, three, six, nine, twelve! Slap! Their palms hit the library door. * * * They opened the door and stepped in.They stopped.The library deeps lay waiting for them.Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes."
Author: Ray Bradbury

33. "For everybody in their busy lives, you need to invest in sharpening your tools, and you need to invest in longevity."
Author: Ryan Holmes

34. "Fear's useless. Either something bad happens or it doesn't: If it doesn't, you've wasted time being afraid, and if it does, you've wasted time that you could have spent sharpening your weapons."
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan

35. "Leaving us with Eric is like hiring a babysitter who spends his time sharpening knives."
Author: Veronica Roth

36. "I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Sharpening Quotes Pictures