Origami Quotes

I tell myself that after four children my belly is already so stretched and flabby that I have to do origami to get my pants buttoned. One more pregnancy and I'd be doomed to elastic waists for the rest of my life. ~ Ayelet Waldman

After staring at origami directions long enough, you sort of become one with them and start understanding them from the inside. ~ Zooey Deschanel

Much of the Kama Sutra is like origami; I don't quite understand all the bending that needs to happen. ~ Erica Goros

I have more folds than an origami convention. ~ Roscoe Arbuckle

Prose vs. Poetry
To a writer of prose
a flower is a flower.

To a poet a flower can be
the origami of God's eye
enfolding the cosmos;
it is the luminous
well of imagination
bursting into pattern;
it is the coalescence
of infinite possibility
into palpable reality;
it is a confetti forest
for dancing bumble bees;
it is the flirtatious blush
ofradial symmetry;
it is the heartache of love
manifest in a rose.

For a true poet
A FLOWER IS NOT A FLOWER. ~ Beryl Dov

Nothing is set in stone. A bird can be refolded into a boat, a fish, a kimono, or any other extravagant vision. At other times it aches to return to its original folds. The paper begins to fray. It tires, rebels. ~ Tor Udall

Alone in cold sheets,
I imagine us folded like paper
In our origami bed.
And it keeps me warm. ~ Will Darbyshire

Instead of just looking back, whiplash-style, I can assume there's something else coming. Time just folds over itself, like origami. ~ Feist

When everything went wrong at once, it felt like folding origami in a hurricane. ~ Lola Dodge

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.And - I would argue as well - all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying ~ Donna Tartt

Jason: I'm all for hobbies, but you think this is the time for origami? Whatcha making, a crane? ~ Rachel Caine

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight. ~ Heather Demetrios

Marcia was incredibly organized, obsessively neat ... I mean she folded her underwear like origami. ~ Linda Barnes

I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world. ~ Sadako Sasaki

Alzheimer's disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami. ~ Gregory Petsko

Origami Striptease reads like William S. Burroughs and Djuna Barnes howling at a brutal paper moon. ~ Susan Stinson

Nix and Emma: 'Looks like you just found a new talent.'
'Great. Why couldn't I be good at underwater origami or something? ~ Kresley Cole

Don't bother her, don't try to talk to her, don't even look at her, or I'll fold you in half so many times you'll look like a tiny little origami werewolf. ~ Cassandra Clare

where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair
into my sister,
where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled
violin,
where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no
more dead lovers
than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions,
where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists,
where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be
torn down
swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle,

I understand only this:

It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast.


from "The Origami Fields ~ Sabrina Orah Mark

I knew where Rose was - the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything ~ Neil Gaiman

I know a man who used to be a millionaire before 2007. Now he's poor and mopping floors. But I'm not laughing, because at least he was able to get a job. Unlike me, who only has an English degree that's not even worth the paper it's printed on, the paper I folded into an origami dragon and lit on fire. ~ Jarod Kintz

I feel like I could dominate the origami field. I think I have enormous potential in that area. ~ Jon Cryer

She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams ~ Lauren Beukes

An arts degree is like a diploma in origami. And about as much use. ~ J.G. Ballard

You know, we spend so much of our lives not saying the things we want to say. The things we should say. We speak in code, we send little messages. Origami. So now, plainly, simply. I want to say that I love you both. ~ Michael Scofield

Marple closed her eyes and fell asleep. It felt good. She felt like a kid again. She'd waited a long time to feel like that. It felt like the universe was folding in on itself. It felt like origami birds being born. - from THE IMMORTALS ACT THEIR AGE ~ Eric Beeny

The feelings flattened and folded and turned into something else, like emotional origami. ~ Louise Penny

My throat tightened when I noticed a small tattoo of an origami rose on his upper arm. . .
"Hey, Lenzi," he whispered, barely louder than the surf.
"Rose," I said as our lips met. "My name is Rose. ~ Mary Lindsey

Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I'm waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She's probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer - equally sheer, skintight, and micro-short - and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There's a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami. ~ William Gibson

In one sense, burglars seem to understand architecture better than the rest of us. They misuse it, pass through it, and ignore any limitations a building tries to impose. Burglars don't need doors; they'll punch holes through walls or slice down through ceilings instead. Burglars unpeel a building from the inside out to hide inside the drywall (or underneath the floorboards, or up in the trusses of an unlit crawl space). They are masters of architectural origami, demonstrating skills the rest of us only wish we had, dark wizards of cities and buildings, unlimited by laws that hold the rest of us in. ~ Geoff Manaugh

the six of us are supposed to drive to the diner in Hastings for lunch. But the moment we enter the cavernous auditorium where the girls told us to meet them, my jaw drops and our plans change.

"Holy shit - is that a red velvet chaise lounge?"

The guys exchange a WTF look. "Um…sure?" Justin says. "Why - "

I'm already sprinting toward the stage. The girls aren't here yet, which means I have to act fast. "For fuck's sake, get over here," I call over my shoulder.

Their footsteps echo behind me, and by the time they climb on the stage, I've already whipped my shirt off and am reaching for my belt buckle. I stop to fish my phone from my back pocket and toss it at Garrett, who catches it without missing a beat.

"What is happening right now?" Justin bursts out.

I drop trou, kick my jeans away, and dive onto the plush chair wearing nothing but my black boxer-briefs. "Quick. Take a picture."

Justin doesn't stop shaking his head. Over and over again, and he's blinking like an owl, as if he can't fathom what he's seeing.

Garrett, on the other hand, knows better than to ask questions. Hell, he and Hannah spent two hours constructing origami hearts with me the other day. His lips twitch uncontrollably as he gets the phone in position.

"Wait." I pause in thought. "What do you think? Double guns, or double thumbs up?"

"What is happening?"

We both ignore Justin's baffled e ~ Elle Kennedy

Personality is a piece of paper that folds in to conceal different sides and display others, like an Origami ~ Alejandro Colliard

And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don't think it looks like a series of folded-over mistakes and do-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead, I think we'll conclude in the end that maybe we're all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better. ~ Bob Goff

I finally figured out how to read origami directions. ~ Zooey Deschanel

The second thing I thought was that I knew everything. Lettie Hempstock's ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was - where the universe began, to the sound of the uncreated voices singing in the void-and I knew where the Rose was -the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang, which would be, I knew now, nothing of the kind. ~ Neil Gaiman

I know men are delicate origami creatures who need women to unfold them, hold them when they cry. But I am tired of being your savior and I am tired of telling you why. ~ Ani DiFranco

Like a master of origami who can take a simple square of paper and turn it into an intricate network of folded angles to create a dragon, I can take a minuscule problem in my life and turn it into a massive complication. ~ Virginia M. Sanders

You are quarter ghost on your mother's side.
Your heart is a flayed peach in a bone box.
Your hair comes away in clumps like cheap fabric wet.
A reflecting pool gathers around your altar
of plywood sub flooring and split wooden slats.
You are rag doll prone. You are contort,
angle and arc. Here you rot. Here
you are a greening abdomen, slipping skin,
flesh fly, carrion beetles.
This is where bullets take shelter,
where scythes find their function, breath loses
its place on the page. This is where the page is torn
out of every book before chapter's close,
this is slippage, this is a shroud of neglect
pulled over the body, this
is your chance to escape.
Little wraith,
bend light around your skin until it colors you clear,
disappear like silica in a kiln, become
glass and glass beads, become
the staggered whir of an exhaust fan:
something only noticed
when gone. Become
an origami swan. Fold yourself smaller
than ever before. Become less. More
in some ways but less
in the way a famine is less. They will
forgive you for not being satisfied
with fitting in their hands.
They will forgive you
for dying to be
a bird diminutive enough
to fit in a mouth and not be crushed. ~ Jamaal May

One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with. ~ Stewart Brand

A master of origami said he tried to express with paper the joy of life, and the last thought before a man dies. ~ Tor Udall

Let fear defeat you not.

- Origami Yoda ~ Tom Angleberger

People keep talking about this unfolding. I can't trust the unfolding, okay? If there is some higher power making origami out of the universe, it hates my guts. I was a fat kid whose parents got divorced, whose father died, and then who got cancer herself. So no. I don't trust how things are going to unfold. ~ Wendy Wunder

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing. ~ Christopher Barzak

And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I'll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait might
fold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy's: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me - a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami. ~ Nicholaus Patnaude

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less. ~ David Nicholls