Notebook Quotes - Page 4

• The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units.

  Lee Smolin

  Real, Numbers, Saws

  Lee Smolin (2008). “Three Roads To Quantum Gravity”, p.106, Hachette UK

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• It never failed—I'd buy a new journal, write like a madwoman for ten pages, then lose total interest in the process. Three months later, I'd start the whole process all over again. I think I just liked buying new notebooks.

  MaryJanice Davidson

  Writing, Thinking, Three

  MaryJanice Davidson (2006). “Undead and Unpopular: A Queen Betsy Novel”, p.70, Penguin

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• This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Writing, Forgiving, Evening

  Jonathan Franzen (2012). “Farther Away: Essays”, p.19, Macmillan

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• I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

  Colm Toibin

  Writing, Long, Rooms

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• I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Moveable Feast, Pencils

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl 'Write me! Write me now!' But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying 'Wait for me! Wait for me!' and waving my notebook in the air.

  Robin McKinley

  Running, Horse, Writing

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• ... when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography which marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one's notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one's dearest readers.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Beautiful, Lying, Ideas

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• The Nexus 7 is about the same size as a Moleskine notebook, and it just 'feels' like the right form factor for doing all those things you want to do on a smart phone, but can't quite do in the right way. It's not too big, and not too small - just right.

  John Battelle

  Smart, Phones, Way

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• I've been poked fun of throughout my career by fellow actors for my notes that I take. I have spiral notebooks that I carry with me on every project I do, and I take notes just so that if I have to relive a scene, if I have to go back, I know what I did.

  Anna Chlumsky

  Fun, Careers, Actors

  "EMMYS Q&A: Anna Chlumsky Of ‘Veep’ On Playing It Straight". Interview with Christy Grosz, deadline.com. June 6, 2014.

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• I try to remember dreams, and occasionally I'll make a note or two in a notebook if it's something extra interesting. They do mean quite a lot to me, and they don't happen all that often. In other words, I don't have some kind of loud, Technicolor dream every night. But a few times a month, I'll have a rather interesting dream. They're mostly visual - oddly enough, I don't have much dialogue in my dreams. They just don't speak.

  Kenneth Anger

  Dream, Mean, Night

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

  John Gregory Dunne

  Mind, Jumpstart

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• Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!

  Lionel Trilling

  Life, Hate, Mean

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• I love you. I am who I am because of you. You are every reason, every hope, and every dream I've ever had, and no matter what happens to us in the future, everyday we are together is the greatest day of my life. I will always be yours.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Love, Valentines Day, Dream

  FaceBook post by Nicholas Sparks from Mar 24, 2013

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• So it's not gonna be easy. It's going to be really hard; we're gonna have to work at this everyday, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, everyday. You and me... everyday.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Love, Relationship, Romantic

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• People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

  Alice Munro

  Reading, Knowing, People

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• A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had.

  Virginia Woolf

  Morning, Exercise, Snakes

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.583, Wordsworth Editions

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• The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.

  Willa Cather

  Attitude, Heart, Thinking

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.83, U of Nebraska Press

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• It is often we come the closest to the essence of an artist... in his or her pocket notebooks and travel sketchbooks... where written comments and personal notes provide an intimate insight into the magical mind of a working artist.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Artist, Essence, Mind

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• Da Vinci was as great a mechanic and inventor as were Newton and his friends. Yet a glance at his notebooks shows us that what fascinated him about nature was its variety, its infinite adaptability, the fitness and the individuality of all its parts. By contrast what made astronomy a pleasure to Newton was its unity, its singleness, its model of a nature in which the diversified parts were mere disguises for the same blank atoms.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Nature, Science, Unity

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.16, Faber & Faber

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• There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader ... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.

  David Simon

  Writing, Average, Detectives

  "Arrogant? Moi?". Interview with Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. March 27, 2009.

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• I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

  Nicole Krauss

  Illustration, Littles, Firsts

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• I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

  Nicole Krauss

  Dad, Writing, Green

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• I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Thinking, Two, Poetry

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• Co-operating critics comb the studios like big-league scouts, prepared to spot the art of the future and to take lead in establishing reputations. Art historians stand by ready with cameras and notebooks to make sure every novel detail is safe for the record. The tradition of the new has reduced all other traditions to triviality.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Future, League

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• When I'm taking the subway to my improv shows I will be writing in my notebook different actions that I see people doing on the train whether it's eating yogurt or looking at where their stop is, or tripping or holding a baby. It's not preparing scenes and ideas as much as it is stoking your brain to think observantly. Just to place observations in your head, so that they are available somewhere.

  Mike Birbiglia

  Baby, Writing, Thinking

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