Whittle Quotes

1. "Part of seeing what is on an ordinary block is seeing that everything visible has a history. It arrived at the spot where you found it at some time, was crafted or whittled or forged at some time, filled a certain role or existed for a particular function. It was touched by someone (or no one), and touches someone (or no one) now."
Author: Alexandra Horowitz

2. "Lately I've been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and how I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be. And when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: before I die, I want to be somebody's favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe."
Author: Andrea Gibson

3. "Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one's weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value."
Author: Anna Funder

4. "But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?' 'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished..."
Author: Anthony Burgess

5. "A great deal of my battle, as an actor, is to whittle away the things that make me self-conscious and try to trick myself into not being self-conscious. So, it's always a challenge, whether I'm lying in a hospital bed or flying around with a rocket pack on my back, or what have you. On the best of days, it's a challenge for me."
Author: Billy Campbell

6. "If laws were real they wouldn't need to be enforced, because if they were real they couldn't be broken. Try breaking the law of gravity. Now that's a law. Laws made by man are rules reflecting the current status of his moral codes. As he alters and whittles away his morality, casting bits and pieces aside, his codes change to reflect it."
Author: Boyd Rice

7. "You shouldn't speak until you know what you're talking about. That's why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I'm a fucking actor! They hand me a script. I act. I'm here for entertainment. Basically, when you whittle everything away, I'm a grown man who puts on makeup."
Author: Brad Pitt

8. "I die with the dying light, yet shine brighter as the darkness approaches. Soon I'll be whittled to bone and stripped clean through, nothing left but a skeleton on which to hang a hat. But have no fear, I look good in hats."
Author: Chila Woychik

9. "Just ‘cause something's scary doesn't mean it's bad. Just means it's worth enough to take note." Wasn't it just like his dad, Dodge thought, to whittle everything down to its basic elements? Black and white. Right and wrong. Could it really be that simple?"
Author: Christy Hayes

10. "You like Nick a lot, don't you, Nora?" Dorothy asked."He's an old Greek fool, but I'm used to him.""Charles isn't a Greek name.""It's Charalambides," I explained. "When the old man came over, the mugg that put him through Ellis Island said Charalambides was too long...too much trouble to write... and whittled it down to Charles. It was all right with the old man; they could have called him X so they let him in."
Author: Dashiell Hammett

11. "I have like 250 letters that I have to whittle it down to 150. Only then do you have the whole overview of a book. When it was finally edited, at least my take was, everybody's lying. You know?"
Author: Don Novello

12. "Gentlemen, I give you the Whittle engine."
Author: Frank Whittle

13. "But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost."
Author: James Frey

14. "There was a chemical solution to all of America's food needs, which had been whittled away for years and years and honed down with precision to train the public that everything they needed to put on the table for their family came in a box, bottle or can."
Author: Kenneth Eade

15. "All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep."
Author: Kiran Desai

16. "From far across the sea I come,Through fire, frost,and blazing sun,That you might, with your own fair hand,Enjoy the bounties of my land- Emma Delagardie and Augustus WhittlesbyAmericanus, A masque in three parts"
Author: Lauren Willig

17. "That's part of being an endurance athlete. Who in their right mind wouldn't find excuses to escape an hour or more of suffering? Excuses always lead to a reckoning. We find reasons not to take that first step out the door, just as we find ways to be - or not to be - our best. Weakness, doubt and fear are parts of the human condition. Facing them instead of fabricating an elaborate ruse to sidestep them - hoping to avoid them but ultimately carrying them in our hearts and minds and psyche until they whittle away at our being - gives us a direct route to hope and dreams. Along the way, we reap all those other by-products that make the suffering a tonic for our souls."
Author: Martin Duggard

18. "He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away."
Author: Raymond Hull

19. "The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility."
Author: Susan Orlean

20. "I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn't have seen this space as sad-making and vacant - I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found."
Author: Susan Orlean

21. "No swamp dragon could ever terrorise a kingdom, except by accident. Vimes wondered how many had been killed by enterprising heroes. It was terribly cruel to do something like that to creatures whose only crime was to blow themselves absent-mindedly to pieces in mid-air, which was not something any individual dragon made a habit of. A race of, of whittles, that's what dragons were. Born to lose. Live fast, die wide."
Author: Terry Pratchett

22. "Now Lucy sighed on his behalf. Communication must be difficult when your ass whittled the opposite sex's vocabulary down to one word."
Author: Tessa Bailey

23. "There might have been prettier women in the room but, when she turned those babies on, fluttered her eyelashes, I was hers. It had taken me nearly fifteen years to extinguish their light. Now, when she looks at me, it's a vacuum. I had drained so much from her over the course of our marriage that every glance rips a little bit of my soul away to fill the void I had whittled within her."
Author: Thomm Quackenbush

24. "These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will."[Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 343 (1966) (dissenting)]"
Author: William O. Douglas

Whittle Quotes Pictures