Paper Clips Quotes

I look in the jewelry box where Joanie found the drugs. She showed me a miniature Ziploc bag filled with a clear, hard rock.

"What is this?" I said. I never did drugs, so I had no idea. Heroin? Cocaine? Crack? Ice? "What is this?" I screamed at Alex, who screamed back, "It's not like I shoot it!"

A plastic ballerina pops up and slowly twirls to a tinkling song whose sound is discordant and deformed. The pink satin liner is dirty, and other than a black pearl necklace, the box holds only rusty paper clips and rubber bands noosed with Alex's dark hair. I see a note stuck to the mirror and pick up the jewelry box and move the ballerina aside. She twirls against my finger. The note says, I wouldn't hide them in the same place twice.

I let out a short breath through my nose. Good one, Alex. I close the jewelry box and shake my head, missing her tremendously. I wish she never went back to boarding school, and I don't understand her sudden change of plans. What did they fight about? What could have been so bad? ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with. ~ Catherine Lacey

Raining. Oh, brother, a scratch on the fender. Damn rabbi on his unicycle.
Wait a minute, where are my car keys? Could have sworn I left them in this pocket. No, just some loose change and ticket stubs from the all-black version of Elaine Stritch' s one-woman show.
Did I check my desk? Better go back inside. What's in the top drawer here? Hmm. Envelopes, my paper clips, a loaded revolver in case the tenant in 2A begins yodelling again. ~ Woody Allen

Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn't changed ~ Bill Veeck

I can bend paper clips into the shapes of small animals. ~ Al Yankovic

I've no use for talking, would just as soon store paper clips in my mouth. ~ Jandy Nelson

Alex hopped onto the four-poster bed. He bounced up and down, grinning as the springs squeaked.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Making noise." He leaned over and rifled through Randolph's nightstand drawer. "Let's see. Cough drops. Paper clips. Some wadded-up Kleenex that I am not going to touch. And ..." He whistled. "Medication for bowel discomfort! Magnus, all this bounty belongs to you!"
"You're a strange person."
"I prefer the term fabulously weird. ~ Rick Riordan

This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office. ~ Don DeLillo

It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'Its a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business ofice, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. ~ J.D. Salinger

It was about everything. About life and death, and white and black and gray. It was about having to be tough when you weren't used to it. About having to grow when you'd thought you were done growing. In the back of my head, I knew what I'd said didn't make any damn sense. But how could I explain? How could I begin to tell him that I had lost a part of myself with my brother's death, and I was trying so hard to keep what I had left together with duct tape and paper clips? ~ Mariana Zapata

You amaze me, Cameron."

That got a slight smile out of her. "High praise, coming from someone who knows how to kill people with paper clips and everything."

Jack looked over in surprise. "You know about the paper clips?" He stroked his chin. "Hmm. Now that was good. Even for me."

Cameron stared at him, stupefied.

He laughed. "I'm just kidding." Mostly. Staples maybe, but never paper clips. ~ Julie James

He maybe, possibly, said that if he got word of anyone getting in your way, they'd find out whether there was any truth to the rumor about him knowing how to kill a man with paper clips. ~ Julie James

President Truman had a little sign on his desk. I've always admired its philosophy. It read: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. I've envied certain people, too, the great majority of my colleagues whose sole mission in life is to attain the goal of mediocrity. They sail into a safe harbor, button up and conveniently and quietly sort their paper clips, avoiding responsibility and decisions. I can't explain, Nicole, why I was singled out and am unable to avoid conflict, but I can't run or plug my ears or close my eyes or turn my back. I often envy those who can. ~ Leon Uris

She stuffed the goodies into her hidden running belt, jogged out of the park, and went shopping for duct tape, a razor blade, paper clips, and another disposable phone. ~ Janet Evanovich

She had done her residency at LA County Hospital, where the CT machines were so old she had to mark off the body parts for scanning with paper clips. She thought Baghdad hospitals might be like that. ~ Leslie Cockburn

Like most people with no grasp whatsoever of real economics, Mustrum Ridcully equated "proper financial control" with the counting of paper clips. Even senior wizards had to produce a pencil stub to him before they were allowed a new one out of the locked cupboard below his desk. ~ Terry Pratchett

Amanda herself couldn't understand why her writing was so different from her own personality. Her pen seemed to take on a life of its own when she sat before a sheaf of blank parchment paper. She wrote about characters unlike any people she had ever known... sometimes violent, brutal, always passionate; some who came to ruin and some who even triumphed in spite of their own lack of morality. Since she had no actual pattern on which to base these fictional characters, Amanda realized that their feelings, their passions, could only have come from inside herself. ~ Lisa Kleypas

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal. ~ Steven Pinker

A librarian remembers the particular scent of glue and dust, and if we're so lucky - and I was - the smell of parchment, a quiet tanginess, softer than wood pulp or cotton rag. We would bury ourselves in books until flesh and paper became one and ink and blood at last ran together. ~ Erika Swyler

I am in no mood to fulminate on paper
I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth. ~ Carlene Bauer

When you pour out words from your heart to your lover, make sure they aren't on a paper vessel and lost to the wind. ~ Dixie Waters

I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer's field - some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely - a mood of darkness and inevitability and facination - a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out. ~ Douglas Coupland

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Every now and then we'd meet up and reminisce about the characters. At the beginning, shortly after we started shooting, someone sent me some clips put together on youtube. It was the first time I'd seen something like that. "The intimate moments of Mulder and Scully." ~ Gillian Anderson

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Let me tell you, people go on and on about what a great idea electricity was, but I'm going to put toilet paper right next to the wheel and say those are the best ideas anyone's ever had. Scoff at it if you will, but try living for two millennia without it and then we'll talk. ~ Kevin Hearne

Ty slapped Owen on the arm. "Close your eyes, man."
"Why?"
"You got a tell."
"I have a tell at Rock, Paper, Scissors?" Ty and Nick both nodded. "And you tell me ten years later? You're both assholes! ~ Abigail Roux

Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the "Native American Embassy," hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the "20-Point Position Paper,"14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book - that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you. ~ Paul Beatty

This is a crucial time in the fight for corporate civil rights. Just look at the hateful signs at Occupy Wallstreet: 'Corporations Are Not People!' Wow, I thought we were past the point in this country where some people aren't people just because they have different color skin or different religion or were born in a lawyer's office, only exist on paper, have no soul and can never die. ~ Stephen Colbert

I yearn to tell you finally everything that is written only on paper, so dead, so empty and so boring. ~ Sarah Wildman

Women read men more truly than men read women. I'll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I have time; only it will never be inserted. It will be 'declined with thanks,' and left for me at the publisher's. ~ Charlotte Bronte

There is weather and there is climate.
If it rains outside, or if you stab a classmate's shoulder with a compass needle, over and over, until his white cotton school shirt looks like blotting paper; that is weather.
But if you live in a place where is is often likely to rain, or your perception falters and dislocates so that you retreat, suspicious and afraid of those closest to you, that is climate. ~ Nathan Filer

The first is simple: I only accept and pay attention to feedback from people who are also in the arena. If you're occasionally getting your butt kicked as you respond, and if you're also figuring out how to stay open to feedback without getting pummeled by insults, I'm more likely to pay attention to your thoughts about my work. If, on the other hand, you're not helping, contributing, or wrestling with your own gremlins, I'm not at all interested in your commentary.
The second strategy is also simple. I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles... To be on my list, you have to be what I call a "stretch-mark friend" - our connection has been stretched and pulled so much that it's become part of who we are, a second skin, and there are a few scars to prove it. ~ Brene Brown

And you remember how warm bourbon tasted, in a paper cup with water dipped out of the lake at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that you wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn't matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark, and the moon was only something that waxed and waned and heralded a changing in the weather. And rain just washed out graveled roads. The glitter was gone. And the worst part was that you didn't know exactly at what point it disappeared. There was nothing you could point to and say: now, there. One day you saw that it was missing and had been missing for a long time. It wasn't even anything to grieve over, it had been such a long time passing. The glitter and hush-breath quality just slipped away...there isn't even a scene--not for me, nothing so definite--just the seepage, the worms of time...I look at my children now and I think: how long before they slip away, before I am disappointed in them. ~ Shirley Ann Grau

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told. ~ Frank McCourt

Wyatt was, in fact, finding the Christian system suspect. Memory of his fourth birthday party still weighted in his mind. It had been planned cautiously by Aunt May, to the exact number of hats and favors and portions of cake. One guest, no friend to Wyatt (from a family "less fortunate than we are"), showed up with a staunchly party-bent brother. (Not only no friend: a week before he had challenged Wyatt through the fence behind the carriage barn with - Nyaa nyaa, suckinyerma's ti-it-ty ... ) Wyatt was taken to a dark corner, where he later reckoned all Good works were conceived, and told that it was the Christian thing to surrender his portion. So he entered his fifth year hatless among crepe-paper festoons, silent amid snapping crackers, empty of Christian love for the uninvited who asked him why he wasn't having any cake. ~ William Gaddis

The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.
See how the roof glitters, like ice!
Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night. ~ Amy Lowell

Every time she meets him, she feels like he was a new paper ready to be drawn. And she could clearly remember how the first time she met him, he was like a sketch paper filled with grey and blue and black, all mixed up together forming a confusing storm, ~ Basma Salem

General Electric CEO Jack Welch said in Winning: No vision is worth the paper it's printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards. ~ Eric Schmidt

I believe that if one person is watching a huge calamity, let's say a conflagration, a fire, there are always three principle options.

1. Run away, as far away and as fast as you can and let those who cannot run burn.

2. Write a very angry letter to the editor of your paper demanding that the responsible people be removed from office with disgrace. Or, for that matter, launch a demonstration.

3. Bring a bucket of water and throw it on the fire, and if you don't have a bucket, bring a glass, and if you don't have a glass, use a teaspoon, everyone has a teaspoon. And yes, I know a teaspoon is little and the fire is huge but there are millions of us and each one of us has a teaspoon. Now I would like to establish the Order of the Teaspoon. People who share my attitude, not the run away attitude, or the letter attitude, but the teaspoon attitude – I would like them to walk around wearing a little teaspoon on the lapel of their jackets, so that we know that we are in the same movement, in the same brotherhood, in the same order, The Order of the Teaspoon. ~ Amos Oz

Sydney: Can I ask you a question? Me: As long as you promise never again to start a question off with whether or not you can propose a question. Sydney: Okay, asshole. I know I shouldn't be thinking about him at all, but I'm curious. What did he wrote on that paper when we went to get my purse? And what did you write back that made hit you? Me: I agree that you shouldn't be thinking about him at all, but I'm honestly shocked it's taken you this long to ask me about it. Sydney: Well? Ugh. I hate writing it verbatim, but she wants to know, so ... Me: He wrote "Are you fucking her?" Sydney: OMG! What a prick! Me: Yep. Sydney: So what did you say back to him that made him punch you? Me: I write, "Why do you think I'm here for her purse? I gave her a hundred for tonight, and now she owes me change." I reread the text, and I'm not so sure it sounds as funny as I thought it did. ~ Colleen Hoover

Eating a huge home cooked Christmas dinner was his personal favorite. Evan would look around after each Christmas Day was done. There were empty dishes, and torn up wrapping paper on the ground. Monty was passed out on the couch stuffed with food. Evan would close his eyes and hear the day. He could feel the memories that were just made. ~ David Rangel

Humans will market anything to make a fucking profit. Religion, war, love, hate, sex, violence, pain, humor, emotion... all for fucking paper. We are pathetic beings. ~ James Wheeler

Equality is paper-deep, peel it away with a fingernail. ~ Tana French

on this paper will be twenty cents per year, payable quarterly in advance, at the place ~ Various

With the news that he would soon be a daddy again, Steve seemed inspired to work even harder. Our zoo continued to get busier, and we had trouble coping with the large numbers. The biggest draw was the crocodiles. Crowds poured in for the croc shows, filling up all the grandstands. The place was packed.
Steve came up with a monumental plan. He was a big fan of the Colosseum-type arenas of the Roman gladiator days. He sketched out his idea for me on a piece of paper.
"Have a go at this, it's a coliseum," he declared, his eyes wide with excitement. He drew an oval, then a series of smaller ovals in back of it. "Then we have crocodile ponds where the crocs could live. Every day a different croc could come out for the show and swim through a canal system"--he sketched rapidly--"then come out in the main area."
"Canals," I said. "Could you get them to come in on cue?"
"Piece of cake!" he said. "And get this! We call it…the Crocoseum!"
His enthusiasm was contagious. Never mind that nothing like this had ever been done before. Steve was determined to take the excitement and hype of the ancient Roman gladiators and combine it with the need to show people just how awesome crocs really were.
But it was a huge project. There was nothing to compare it to, because nothing even remotely similar had ever been attempted anywhere in the world. I priced it out: The budget to build the arena would have to be somewhere north of eight million dollars, a huge expense. ~ Terri Irwin

We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine. ~ Neal Stephenson

Still blows my mind that toilet paper isn't free. ~ Kristen Schaal

The Nazis knew they were doing wrong, so they hid everything; the Bolsheviks were convinced they were doing right, so they kept everything. Like it or not, you're a Russian historian, a searcher for lost souls, and in Russia the truth is always written not in ink, like in other places, but in innocent blood. These archives are as sacred as Golgotha. In the dry rustle of the files you can hear the crying of children, the shunting of trains, the echo of footsteps down to the cellars, the single shot of the Nagant pistol delivering the seven grams. The very paper smells of blood" (401). ~ Simon Montefiore

Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. 'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.' So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

If you want to avoid heated arguments, never discuss religion, politics, or whether the toilet paper roll should go over or under. ~ Al Yankovic

In those days [1935] I would read what the opposition papers got out, and I'd say to myself, 'What I'm doing just isn't good enough.' ~ Sylvia Porter

Her eyes had to adjust to the darkness and the rhythm of the exhibition - twisted bodies, beauty in ugliness, heads and hands, Mother Mary, the infant Jesus, attending angels. Whole worlds from nothing: eternal beauty from a piece of paper and a chunk of charcoal, a canvas and color, a slab of stone. ~ Tullan Holmqvist

There is something very sensual about a letter. The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox - are all acts of tenderness. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

If loyalty was toilet paper ... we'd be hard-pressed to wipe our asses, old buddy. ~ Stephen King

Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick or whatever. In sculpture you can get a rock. Writing you just need a pencil and paper. ~ Forest Whitaker

I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change. ~ Colson Whitehead

True luxury is being able to own your time - to be able to take a walk, sit on your porch, read the paper, not take the call, not be compelled by obligation. ~ Ashton Kutcher

Guys hate anticipation. That's why we all write about satisfaction. Why we never wrap presents. I notice you wrapped mine."
"I thought it was because you're all too cheap to buy wrapping paper. Or too clueless to find it in the store."
"There's that. But honestly, you go to the trouble of getting someone a present, something you think they'd like - why hide it and make them work for it? It's coy. ~ Huntley Fitzpatrick

If you're going to be a man that reads the papers and takes everything as gospel truth, that's a sign of who you are, that isn't a sign of the reality. ~ Frank Lampard

I used to cut out paper dolls. ~ Andy Warhol

By 1975 - and continuing to today - all Americans came to believe that they had a "right" to a safe, clean, healthy environment. When I grew up, no one seriously criticized the steel mills and paper mills for the deadly stench they produced - that was the smell of prosperity. In the modern society, no one would tolerate such conditions in an American city. ~ Denis Hayes