Fountain Pen Quotes

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.

You’ll drown in my love story, if I ever write it using a fountain pen.

She could spend an entire afternoon just looking at fountain pens and ink bottles or flipping through books that spoke of poetry and love and loss.

First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.

What I didn't realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad's old fountain pen wasn't really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key.

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.

Perhaps there are people in this world who love their fountain pens with every fiber of their being—and that's very sad. If you're not in love with him, you can understand him.

All the friends in the world are in the fountain of a pen.

I’m left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be some day.

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day.

If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.

Vintage fountain pens have provenance that makes a traditionalist go weak at the knuckles.

I hang up and don’t even need to look at Joshua. I know he’s shaking his head. After a few minutes I glance at him, and he is staring at me. Imagine it’s two minutes before the biggest interview of your life, and you look down at your white shirt. Your peacock-blue fountain pen has leaked through your pocket. Your head explodes with an obscenity and your stomach is a spike of panic over the simmering nerves. You’re an idiot and everything’s ruined. That’s the exact color of Joshua’s eyes when he looks at me.

As long as I live I'll never forget the time he had a bank president pinched, or rather I did, on no evidence whatever except that the fountain pen on his desk was dry. I was never so relieved in my life as when the guy shot himself an hour later.

When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for comber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.)

The solicitor he selected, a Mr Makepeace, had demanded five thousand pounds up front, even before he took the top off his fountain pen, and then another five once he'd briefed Alex Redmayne, the barrister who would represent him in Court. Danny couldn't understand why he needed two lawyers to do the same job.

The owner of the Agut d'Avignon had the air of a 1920s dandy who had ruined himself with one mad night of gambling at baccarat and had only been saved by this restaurant, which he seemed to cherish as if it were his wife or a good fountain pen.

One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")

Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.

What I didn’t realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad’s old fountain pen wasn’t really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key.

After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.

Pen: Today, the most reusable pen is a fountain model fitted with a piston or converter and refilled with bottled ink. The most sustainable pen is the one that already exists. Search eBay for secondhand pieces.

Rolfe’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Why?” “You’ll have to clarify that.” He took a breath. “Why go to so much trouble for slaves?” “Because if we don’t fight for them, who will?” She pulled a fountain pen from her pocket. “Sign the papers.” Rolfe raised an eyebrow. “And how will you know that I’m holding true to my word?” She removed the dagger from his throat, using the blade to brush back a strand of his dark hair. “I have my sources. And if I hear that you’re trading slaves, no matter where you go, no matter how far you run, I will hunt you down. That’s twice now I’ve disabled you. The third time, you won’t be so lucky. I swear that on my name. I’m almost seventeen, and I can already wallop you; imagine how good I’ll be in a few years.” She shook her head. “I don’t think you’ll want to try me now—and certainly not then.” Rolfe stared at her for a few heartbeats. “If you ever set foot in my territory again, your life is forfeit.” He paused, then muttered, “May the gods help Arobynn.” He took the pen. “Any other requests?” She eased off him, but kept the dagger in her hand. “Why, yes,” she said. “A ship would be nice.” Rolfe only glared at her before he grabbed the documents.

I take pride in using fountain pens. They represent craftsmanship and a love of writing. Biros, on the other hand, represent the throwaway culture of modern society, which exists on microwave ready-meals and instant coffee.

Your basic-type jailhouse tatt is homemade with sewing needles from the jailhouse canteen and some blue ink from the cartridge of a fountain pen promoted from the breast pocket of an unaltert public defender, is why the jailhouse genre is always the same night-sky blue. The needle is dipped in the ink and jabbed as deep into the tattooee as it can be jabbed without making him recoil and fucking up your aim. Just a plain ultraminimal blue square like Gately's got on his right wrist takes half a day and hundreds of individual jabs. How come the lines are never quite straight and the color's never quite all the way solid is it's impossible to get all the individualized punctures down to the same uniform deepness in the, like, twitching flesh. This is why jailhouse tatts always look like they were done by sadistic children on rainy afternoons.

At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they were (absurdly) meant to share.

A pen transmits the voice of the soul.

Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen.

Ode to My Fountain Pen In Memoriam My

She’d seen the fountain pen in his pocket; she knew his handwriting would be precise, elegant. It wasn’t, of course; it was scrambled and raw, a handy metaphor for his soul.

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

started writing Stardust in 1994, but mentally timeslipped about seventy years to do it. The mid-1920s seemed like a time when people enjoyed writing those sorts of things, before there were fantasy shelves in the bookshops, before trilogies and books ‘in the great tradition of The Lord of the Rings’. This, on the other hand, would be in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. All I was certain of was that nobody had written books on computers back in the 1920s, so I bought a large book of unlined pages, and the first fountain pen I had owned since my schooldays and a copy of Katharine Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies. I filled the pen and began.

I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens - it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings, it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from.

Gaiman wrote the first draft in fountain pen, in several five-hundred-page, leather-bound sketchbooks that he purchased in a close-out sale. "I really wanted a second draft," says the author. "It's my experience with computers that they do not give you a second draft. Computers give you an ongoing, ever-improving first draft.

Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.

He ran his finger over the wood. His nails would not do. A knife would have been ideal, but he’d never carried one. At last, he pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and pressed the tip into the knob. The wood gave purchase. He scratched hard several times to make the cross visible – his fingers ached, and the nib was irreversibly ruined – but at last he left his mark.

One understands then why woman has no sexual parts, properly speaking. It is because she is herself a sexual part - a sexual part of man, to cumbersome for him to carry around permanently and therefore deposited outside himself for most of the time and taken up when needed. Moreover the quality that distinguishes man from animals is this very power of equipping himself at any moment with an instrument, tool or arm that he needs, but that he can get rid of straight away, whereas the lobster has to drag his two pincers about with him everywhere. And just as mans hand is a sort of grappling hook that enables him to grasp a hammer, sword or fountain pen according to his needs, so his sex is the sort of grappling hook of the sexual parts rather than the sexual part itslef.

The old debate between mind and matter is fast becoming as antiquated as a debate about the relative merits of various sorts of fountain pens. “Matter” is going out of style. The electron is turning out to be the Cartesian “pineal gland” which mediates in the obsolete opposition of mind and matter as the lines between these two antagonists in the ancient dualism are blurred by the electronic revolution.

Their room, board, and tuition were paid directly by Babel, so they never even saw the bill – on top of that, they received their stipend of twenty shillings a month, and were also given access to a discretionary fund they could use to purchase whatever course materials they liked. If they could make even the flimsiest case that a gold-capped fountain pen would aid their studies, then Babel paid for it.

... a fountain pen with a curious label: For finding dreams that don't exist yet. Evangeline had been unable to resist trying the pen, and as soon as she did, a fledgling dream had taken form. She didn't know how long she'd spent drawing, only that when her piece was done, it felt like a picture of a promise. Evangeline and her love were at the end of a dock covered in candles, which made the ocean glow so that it looked like a sea of fallen stars. Only night and her moon watched. No one else was there, just Evangeline and her groom. Their foreheads were pressed together- and she might not have known exactly what they were doing if not for the words her pen had etched in to the sky. And then they will write their vows on their hands and place them over each other's chests, so they may sink in to their hearts, where they will be kept safe forever and always.

Ink was black, in inkwells and bottles, in the past. It would get all over your fingers because it would run and flow relentlessly. This inevitable messiness was the flip side of writing. I always felt caught between two kinds of black: that of the dirty and dirtying substance and that of the signs that miraculously emerged from it through the magic of wayward fountain pens, which, when dipped too deep in the inkwell, had a strong tendency to cover the paper with what used to be called “inkblots.” Oh, the miracle of a clear and possibly elegant sentence emerging from the sticky ink and wending its way between the blots! It is the black of meaning wrung from the black of matter. (…) Isn’t the most profound education the one that was afforded me at my childhood elementary school, the one that divides the ink sharply between thought become Letter and drive turned into splotches and blots? How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won’t they think that thought is just another variation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect? Everything in the world is the result of a creative and careful dosing of black as it is projected onto the formidable invariability of white. Anyone who hasn’t experienced this, and sooner rather than later, will never learn anything.

For this boy destined to be the world’s greatest heir, money was so omnipresent as to be invisible—something “there, like air or food or any other element,” he later said—yet it was never easily attainable.11 As if he were a poor, rural boy, he earned pocket change by mending vases and broken fountain pens or by sharpening pencils. Aware of the rich children spoiled by their parents, Senior seized every opportunity to teach his son the value of money. Once, while Rockefeller was being shaved at Forest Hill, Junior entered with a plan to give away his Sunday-school money in one lump sum, for a fixed period, and be done with it. “Let’s figure it out first,” Rockefeller advised and made Junior run through calculations that showed he would lose eleven cents interest while the Sunday school gained nothing in return. Afterward, Rockefeller told his barber, “I don’t care about the boy giving his money in that way. I want him to give it. But I also want him to learn the lesson of being careful of the little things.

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor’s famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico’s. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s.

There was an inner redoubt of dark blue glass--it was a color Jake associated with the bottles fountain-pen ink came in--and a rust-hued wall-walk between the redoubt and the outer wall. That color made Susannah think of the bottles Hires root-beer had come in when she was a little girl.

There was a little sketch pad with a pink paper cover, a packet of handwritten notes in what looked like my grandmother's handwriting, a silk scarf of water lilies on a blue background, a black fountain pen with an ornate silver hand on it, a book of poems by American poets with a number of pages dog-eared (I made a mental note to see if "Mending Wall" was in there), a magnifying glass with a carved wooden handle, a book called 'Native Flowers of New England' with a ragged cloth binding, another clothbound book called the 'Berry Farmer's Companion', and a stack of twenty faded black-and-white photographs.

Hopeful?” Bondi continued; “well, not really. I don’t see the world getting any better; like you I see it getting worse. I see liberty being strangled like a dog everywhere I look, I see my own country overwhelmed by ugliness and mediocrity and overcrowding, the land smothered under airstrips and superhighways, the natural wealth of a million years squandered on atomic bombs and tin automobiles and television sets and ball-point fountain pens. It’s a sorry sight indeed; I can’t blame you for wanting no part of it. But I’m not yet ready to withdraw, despite the horror of it. Even if withdrawal is possible, which I doubt.

In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes.

It was my mother who bought me green ink for the first time, along with the fountain pen she gave me as a gift to mark my graduation from high school. When I asked ‘Why green?’ she laughed and shrugged. ‘I don’t know, maybe just because it’s different from black and blue.’ My father smirked. ’It’s different from black and blue!’ Madam insists that all of her things be different from those of other people.’ My mother looked at him for a few moments and then turned to me. Nowadays she had to look up at me to meet my eyes, and I had to lean down to kiss her. She said, ‘Write something, see if you like it.’ On the corner of the Alik newspaper that was delivered to our house in the afternoon for my father, I wrote, ‘Green ink is different from all other inks. I like people and things that are different.

The commissar looked around, saw the knapsacks, looked at the books, saw German, French, English and Romanian books. At his request, I explained that I had been a student of languages and literature. After looking around everywhere, he asked Father to come to the chief police station, at five o'clock. I told him that I would come along, since Father didn't know Romanian. He gave us a summons to appear that day. We were greatly alarmed as it was during the deportations. Although we were terribly scared, yet my optimistic side thought that nothing could happen, since we really had no radio. My optimism was a kind of defense, a negation of the evil that loomed all around. On the way to the Siguran ta, it was a very long walk, Father was saying his prayer. I took again the Waterman fountain pen, in case of need, as a small bribe.

Perhaps, if I had a new fountain pen instead of this wreck, or a fresh bouquet of, say, twenty beautifully sharpened pencils in a slim vase, and a ream of ivory smooth paper instead of these, let me see, thirteen, fourteen more or less frumpled sheets . . . I might start writing the unknown thing I want to write; unknown, except for a vague shoe-shaped outline, the infusorial quiver of which I feel in my restless bones, a feeling of shchekotiki . . . half-tingle, half-tickles, when you are trying to remember something or understand something or find something, and probably your bladder is full, and your nerves are on edge, but the combination is on the whole not unpleasant ( if not protracted) and produces a minor orgasm or 'petit éternuement intérieur' when at last you find the picture-puzzle piece which exactly fits the gap.

The bottom drawer. Last chance. Camping equipment. Vuarnet sunglasses, three pairs without cases. She had three, six, ten of everything. Except! Except! And there it was. There it was. The gold. His gold. At the bottom of the bottom drawer, where he should have begun in the first place, in among a jumble of old schoolbooks and more teddy bears, a simple Scotties box, design of white, liliac, and pale green flowers on a lemony-white background "Each box of Scotties offers the softness and strength you want for your family..." You're no fool, D. Handwritten label on the box read, "Recipes." You cunning girl. I love you. Recipes. I'll give you teddy bears up the gazoo! Inside the Scotties box were her recipes - "Deborah's Sponge Cake," "Deborah's Brownies", "Deborah's Chocolate Chip Cookies," "Deborah's Divine Lemon Cake" - neatly written in blue ink in her hand. A fountain pen. The last kid in America to write with a fountain pen. You won't last five minutes in Bahia. A short, very stout woman was standing in the doorway of Deborah's bedroom screaming.

To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature.” In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot? Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape. Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed.

morning to pour out the sugar and substitute salt, thinking it so hilarious until our father lost his temper and spanked us both. The two of us dancing on the Eden patio in my mother’s cast-off nightgowns. Playing mermaid on the beach or fairies on the bluffs. Later, all three of us moving like a school of fish, Josie and Dylan and me, swimming in the cove or making a bonfire or practicing calligraphy with fountain pens my mother brought back from some trip she took with my father during one of their happy stints, an interest bolstered by Dylan’s passion for all things Chinese. Like so many boys of the era, he’d fallen hard for Kwai Chang Caine in the Kung Fu television series. I adored them both, but my sister was first. Worshipped the very air she breathed. I would have done anything she told me—chased down bandits, built a ladder to the moon. In turn, she brought me sand dollars to examine and Pop-Tarts she stole from the pantry in the house kitchen, and she kept her arms around me all night. It was Dylan who introduced surfing. He taught us when I was seven and Josie nine. It gave us both a sense of power and relief, a way to escape our crumbling family life and explore the sea—and, of course, it was our bond with Dylan himself. Josie. Thinking of her in the times before she turned into the later version of herself, the aloof, promiscuous addict, makes me ache with longing. I miss my sister with every molecule

In the Christmas term a conjurer used to give a performance in the school Concert Hall. I remember how once he was disconcerted, during a card trick, by young Smart-Allick. The conjurer, stepping down amongst the audience, produced a card from Smart-Allick's pocket. My chum retaliated by producing a card from behind the conjurer's collar. The conjurer then took half a crown from my chum's ear, and my chum took a ten-bob note from the conjurer's wallet, three shillings from his trousers pocket, and a fountain-pen from his waistcoat. The headmaster interfered, and took a pound note from his son's coat pocket. The son at once got his father's watch. In a touching speech, the conjurer complained that he was four pounds down, and had lost his overcoat, a dozen stamps, his hat and his set of trick-cards.

From the dairy a wall extended which formed the right-hand boundary of the octangle, joining the bull’s shed and the pig-pens at the extreme end of the right point of the triangle. A staircase, put in to make it more difficult, ran parallel with the octangle, half-way round the yard, against the wall which led down to the garden gate. The spurt and regular ping! of milk against metal came from the reeking interior of the sheds. The bucket was pressed between Adam Lambsbreath’s knees, and his head was pressed deep into the flank of Feckless, the big Jersey. His gnarled hands mechanically stroked the teat, while a low crooning, mindless as the Down wind itself, came from his lips. He was asleep. He had been awake all night, wandering in thought over the indifferent bare shoulders of the Downs after his wild bird, his little flower... Elfine. The name, unspoken but sharply musical as a glittering bead shaken from a fountain’s tossing necklace, hovered audibly in the rancid air of the shed. The beasts stood with heads lowered dejectedly against the wooden hoot-pieces of their stalls. Graceless, Pointless, Feckless, and Aimless awaited their turn to be milked. Sometimes Aimless ran her dry tongue, with a rasping sound sharp as a file through silk, awkwardly across the bony flank of Feckless, which was still moist with the rain that had fallen upon it through the roof during the night, or Pointless turned her large dull eyes sideways as she swung her head upwards to tear down a mouthful of cobwebs from the wooden runnet above her head. A lowering, moist, steamy light, almost like that which gleams below the eyelids of a man in fever, filled the cowshed. Suddenly a tortured bellow, a blaring welter of sound that shattered the quiescence of the morning, tore its way across the yard and died away in a croak that was almost a sob. It was Big Business, the bull, wakening to another day, in the clammy darkness of his cell.

I said, "You will have to find your answers without me," which made him tap his fountain pen so hard in frustration that it left a large blot of ink on his compulsive little page of notes. If I had not felt so sorry for him, I would have laughed out loud at his desire to pin everything down, at his naïveté, at his childish desire to know.

He picked up the fountain pen and clicked the top on and off a few times while he listened.

A man can never have too many books. Neither can he have too many fountain pens, hats, fishing rods, waistcoats, tea caddies, paintings or whatever helps him to feel at home in his surroundings and communicate his personality to the world.

For example, a telegram is a "lightning-letter"; a wireless telegram is a "not-have-wire-lightning-communication"; a fountain-pen is a "self-flow-ink-water-brush"; a typewriter is a "strike-letter-machine". Most of these neologisms are similar in the modern languages of China and Japan.

My Father knew no Romanian and by that time I had become the mover and shaker in our family. I took along a Waterman fountain pen, covered with silver filigree, which Uncle Morris had left us on one of his visits to Europe. That was intended as a "thank you" for an officer, if needed. All the way from home to City Hall Father was mumbling, talking to himself. When I asked what he was saying, he said: "Nishmas" (Hear, oh God ... an appeal to God to hear his prayer in this hour of need.) We came into a big hall. About 20 officers were seated along a table. The officer at the letter S looked through the identification papers of all three of us. As I was showing him what he was asking for, I tried to talk lightheartedly, to cover up my fear. Without asking many questions, he signed the certificate, stamped it and wished me good luck and added: "You'll need it.

What good were fountain pens and an empty wallet?

try to hypnotize Chris here,” Bear says, “and then we’ll teach him the Greek alphabet. Right, Sam?” “If Chris is a good subject, and I believe he very well might be, it should work,” Hutto says in a surprisingly deep voice. “But don’t fuck around with him,” the Bear warns. “Any funny stuff and I’ll break your goddamn neck.” Hutto’s look of fright is a visual contract that he won’t try any funny stuff. “You wanna’ try it, Chris?” I ask. He nods uncertainly. “OK, Sam. Let’s give it a whirl.” Hutto directs a study lamp and pulls a chair up close to the Martian’s, leaning forward against its back. At his nod, Dense turns out the overhead light. He removes a shiny fountain pen and holds it vertically in front of the Martian. The steady pen sparkles in the lamplight. “Now Chris,” he says softly, “I want you to relax

Even a best fountain-pen cannot make a writer be a fount of eloquence, but fountains teach to sob with ecstasy.

Many people are plagued by misplacing treasured items. You usually put the item in a particularly good hiding place—and then never see it again. (If you do, it’s likely to be when you move, and empty all your drawers and closets.) This problem, too, can be solved by making an instant association. Say you have an expensive fountain pen that you want to keep for a child or grandchild. You place it in a drawer beneath your good sweaters for safekeeping. As you place it there, see a picture of the pen leaking ink all over those sweaters, ruining them. Be assured that the next time you think of that pen, no matter how long after you’ve put it away, you’ll know that it’s under your sweaters.

The Fountain Pen inks my spot in the line of silver Stars.

root of my literary ambitions, apart from the marvelous simplicity with which one sees things at the age of five, lay in a prodigious piece of craftsmanship and precision that was exhibited in a fountain-pen shop on Calle Anselmo Clavé,

News of the verdicts brought a marked change in Rogers. He became almost obsessive in his desire to discuss the fire on the Morro Castle. Increasingly, he dwelt on how the blaze had been set. Doyle began to keep a record of his assistant’s statements. Finally, he noted: “George knows that I know he set fire to the Morro Castle.” Doyle decided to wait. He knew that what Rogers had told him was not strong enough to obtain a conviction. If questioned, Rogers could always escape by pleading idle boasting, something his police colleagues knew he was capable of. Vincent Doyle told no one of his suspicions. But he continued to question Rogers on every aspect of the Morro Castle disaster, and began to form a picture of Rogers which was remarkably in tune with later psychiatric reports. The strange cat-and-mouse questioning went on until early March 1938. Then, on March 3, a quiet Thursday afternoon, Doyle and Rogers sat down for yet another discussion on the peculiar fate of the Morro Castle. At the end of it Doyle knew “exactly how Rogers set the fire. He told me how to construct an incendiary fountain pen; how it had been placed in the writing-room locker’.” Doyle wondered how best to present his sensational evidence to his superiors. He was still worrying over it next afternoon when he met Rogers outside the police radio department. Rogers seemed pensive and withdrawn. “There’s a package for you,” said Rogers. Doyle nodded and went into the department. Rogers remained just outside the doorway. On the workbench was a package. Doyle unwrapped it and found a heater for a fish tank. There was nothing unusual in that; from time to time Doyle used the department’s facilities to repair electrical equipment for his colleagues. Attached to the fish tank was a typed label: This is a fish-tank heater. Please install the switch in the line cord and see if the unit will work. It should get slightly warm.

There was also a series of top contributor lists, for the previous forty-eight hours as well as for all time, to motivate both short-term and long-term participation. And to celebrate successful participation, as well as sheer volume of participation, there was also a “best individual discoveries” page that identified key findings from individual players. Some of these discoveries were over-the-top luxuries offensive to one’s sense of propriety: a £240 giraffe print or a £225 fountain pen, for example. Others were mathematical errors or inconsistencies suggesting individuals were reimbursed more than they were owed. As one player noted, “Bad math on page 29 of an invoice from MP Denis MacShane, who claimed £1,730 worth of reimbursement, when the sum of those items listed was only £1,480.

When words were carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments. When we had to make our own ink and chase a goose around the yard to get a quill (and before the Infite Monkey Theorem was developed), we got William Shakespeare . When the fountain pen was invented, we got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, we got Jack Kerouac. And with the Internet we get - the President of the United States on Twitter

Anyway,’ he said, snapping the cap decisively onto his fountain pen, ‘let's go and see what's for tea’. He noticed, surprised, that he had been needing to talk to somebody about what he was doing, and Jessica felt the sleepy gratification of a child who has been told a story.

On a blazing, dusty street corner in the broken city, he took the chapbook out of his coat pocket, and slid off the strap. He found his pen – an antique plunger-action fountain, for his traditionalist tastes applied as much to the means of marking as what should be marked – and began to write.

Are you ready, Tiana? One last deal." His willingness to sacrifice some innocent person's soul alleviated the last prickle of conscience she felt over what she was about to do. This snake in the grass deserved everything that was coming to him. "Okay," Tiana said. "I'll sign it." She followed him to a wooden desk that held a lamp, and grabbed hold of the fountain pen he held out to her. Tiana bent over the contract, turning her back slightly as she scribbled across the bottom of the scroll. "Okay, it's done," she said. She turned and held the vial out to him. "Now, you drink half, and I'll drink half." His eyes were bright with triumph as he snatched the vial from her free hand, wrenched the cork out of it, and gulped down the entire contents. He threw his head back and let out a peal of laughter. But his laughter quickly died as he clutched at his throat and staggered several steps back. Tiana held out the contract to him, the words Goodbye, Shadow Man scrawled on the signature line.

Because I wasn't in love with Yuichi, I understood that very well. The quality & importance of a fountain pen meant to him something completely different from what it meant to her. Perhaps there are people who love their fountain pens with every fiber of their being - and that's very sad. If you're not in love with him, you can understand him.

Now that I had become a man (with a leaky fountain pen to prove it), I was ready to take on the world.

They craned their heads like schoolboys to gaze at the malachite green fountain pen from London. It was an object well worth the attention of these five adult businessmen for three minutes.

dresses, her hair long and wispy, and she waved her hands around when she described a story, as if casting a spell. Come back, Aunt Maude, Astrid thinks in desperation. I need you. You still have life left in you. Her head throbs—her stomach hurts. She hasn’t eaten since breakfast. But she can’t leave Maude’s side, not yet. “I’m sorry I didn’t visit you before,” Astrid says softly. “It was too hard to come back here.” Aunt Maude never pushed—until recently. She called, wrote letters with her fountain pen—often smudging the words—and sent gifts. She even visited Astrid in California now and then. But she never lamented the fact that her family no longer visited Heron Bay. I should’ve been here for her, Astrid thinks. “Miss Johansen?” a soft voice says behind her. Astrid turns, and Dr. Sawari summons her to the door. Compact and quick on her feet, the doctor sports a shiny black ponytail, her eyes a startling, intense green. She seems too young to take charge of Aunt Maude’s care.

He sat in his father’s cracked brown leather swivel chair. The Judge used to sit here night after night, law books open before him, and his big fountain pen in his hand. He scribbled notes in yellow legal pads.

Who betrayed Kelsier three years ago?” Sazed paused, then set down his fountain pen. “The facts are unclear, Mistress. Most of the crew assumes it was Mare, I think.” “Mare?” Vin asked. “Kelsier’s wife?” Sazed nodded. “Apparently, she was one of the only people who could have done it. In addition, the Lord Ruler himself implicated her.

...The ever-blossoming additional clauses are most often the Narrator's idea of written language stapled awkwardly onto his knowledge of spoken language: 'Well, besides black hair, this doll has a complexion like I do not know what, and little feet and ankles, and a way of walking that is very pleasant to behold. Personally, I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her, because the way I look at it, the feet and ankles are the big tell in the matter of class, although I wish to state that I see some dolls in my time who have large feet and big ankles, but who are by no means bad. But this doll I am speaking of is 100 per cent in every respect, and as she passes, The Humming Bird looks at her, and she looks at The Humming Bird, and it is just the same as if they hold a two hours’ conversation on the telephone, for they are both young, and it is spring, and the way language can pass between young guys and young dolls in the spring without them saying a word is really most surprising, and, in fact, it is practically uncanny.' The naturally exuberant street language (“I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”) always gets topped off by self-conscious writerly gestures (“although I wish to state”; “by no means bad”; “is really most surprising”). The Narrator’s half-conscious knowledge that there are rules out there that you’ve got to respect leads him to overcompensate by respecting the wrong rules; that is, using formal diction where there ought to be vernacular idioms and vernacular idioms where there ought to be formal diction. So Runyon’s key insight into American slang is double: first, that street speech tends to be more, not less, complicated grammatically than “standard” speech; but, second, that slang speakers, when they’re cornered to write, write not just fancy but stiff. In prime Runyon, the two sounds—street ornate and fountain-pen formal—run together into a single argot and beautiful endless sentences: “This Meyer Marmalade is really a most superior character, who is called Meyer Marmalade because nobody can ever think of his last name, which is something like Marmalodowski, and he is known far and wide for the way he likes to make bets on any sporting proposition, such as baseball, or horse races, or ice hockey, or contests of skill and science, and especially contests of skill and science.” When Abe Burrows brilliantly recast Runyonese for Guys & Dolls, what he did instinctively was to scrub off the second, writerly patina and keep in the elaborate speech. This approach worked wonderfully onstage, where we easily accept a stylized dialogue, as we do with David Mamet now.

I just love the ritual of the booking book, and guests do, too—signing in with the fountain pen, flicking through the thin pages, the heft of that leather cover as it thuds closed on the desk . . . It’s all part of the hotel experience, like the gold bell they ding if they need us and we’re not there. We could have an intercom-type system for that, but we don’t, because dinging is fun.

She writes little observations and ideas for stories her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.

Delta Titanio Galassia fountain pen,

It was in black fountain pen, clear and careful writing.

Time to clarify a few things. Simon had a severe peanut allergy—so why not stick a Planters into his sandwich and be done with it? I’d been watching Simon Kelleher for months. Everything he ate was wrapped in an inch of cellophane. He carried that goddamn water bottle everywhere and it was all he drank. But he couldn’t go ten minutes without swigging from that bottle. I figured if it wasn’t there, he’d default to plain old tap water. So yeah, I took it. I spent a long time figuring out where I could slip peanut oil into one of Simon’s drinks. Someplace contained, without a water fountain. Mr. Avery’s detention seemed like the ideal spot. I did feel bad watching Simon die. I’m not a sociopath. In that moment, as he turned that horrible color and fought for air—if I could have stopped it, I would have. I couldn’t, though. Because, you see, I’d taken his EpiPen. And every last one in the nurse’s office.

In the eastern Atlantic forest of Bahia, Brazil, on the sandy, mossy ground beside the off-grid house of a single amateur botanist, grows an inch-tall plant with reddish stems ending in tiny dart-shaped flowers. The flowers are white with bright pink tips, like a fountain pen dipped in ink. The whole plant emerges only during the rainy season, springing up within weeks of the persistent wetness that begins in March and dying back entirely by its end in November. Within a month the little dart-flowers open, get pollinated, and disappear, having done their part. Capsules of fruit appear in their place, holding the seeds of the next generation. The usual course of events. But then something unusual happens: the fruit-tipped stems begin to bend toward the earth, genuflecting, craning like slender necks bent in deference. The fruits and the earth connect. The stems keep bending. They push down until the capsule is buried in the soft moss. The plant, Spigelia genuflexa, has planted its own seeds.

It’s amazing how beneficial it can be looking at your life through the lens of a seventy-year-old Englishman who talks like he’s got a fountain pen wedged up his jacksie.

To have visitors during a Day in Bed is a grave error. It means getting out to do your hair, make up your face, and have your bed made. A little talk on the telephone with some sympathetic friend who is really interested in your symptoms is the only social intercourse that should be allowed. A good deal of pleasure can be derived from asking for your fountain-pen and notepaper, and then not writing any letters.

it’s very clear to me that my ability to think and write at the same time depends on the flow of ink. The thing I enjoy most is the flow of my own ideas and getting them down on paper. I will not write with a ballpoint pen, because it doesn’t really flow. That’s why I use a fountain pen. And only a fountain pen that really works very well.

Margo stared at the tattered piece of brittle paper in disbelief. A gust of wind almost tore it from her hands, but the cold blast quickly died. Her eyes raced across the faded, amber-colored letter as she struggled to absorb its meaning. She stood transfixed and read the vehement warning written with a fountain pen

I was sent to school with bread an' drippin' and a stubby pencil. All the other lads had fountain pens in their top pockets, not me. That's why I never got invited to the parties. That an' the gum boots. I saw all the others going off, all the little girls with their silver shoes and the boys in their party slippers giving each other great smackers at Postman's Knock. I was outside - the face at the window.

Alice dug into her pocket and pulled out her notebook, hurrying to make a note of the sensation and the day and the people in it, chewing on the end of her fountain pen as her gaze tripped over the sunlit house, the willow trees, the shimmering lake, and the yellow roses climbing on the iron gate. It was like the garden from a storybook- it 'was' the garden from a storybook- and Alice loved it. She was never going to leave Loeanneth. Never.

He has given Caspar flowers, has given him soft toys (however ridiculous that might be as a gesture.) Has written real actual poems, with fountain pen ink on nice expensive paper. (Ridiculous also. But everyone deserves a few ridiculous romantic gestures in life, Caspar feels. Including him. Especially him. He hasn’t had an over-abundance of them up until this point.) He likes Mack. Mack likes him. It’s so simple, really, although they have perhaps enjoyed complicating it more than strictly necessary.

A tour was being planned so we could conquer America, just like The Beatles had. All we had to do was sign on that little piece of paper you see on Mr. B.S.'s desk. We signed it in blue ink from a fountain pen—but had we known whom we were dealing with we would have pricked ourselves and used blood.

Inui’s insane laughter filled the sanctuary. The ceiling peeled off and shards of stained glass danced through the air. They turned into dead rats, German dictionaries, wineglasses, fountain pens, scorpions, cats’ heads, syringes, and a motley jumble of other objects that filled the space, flying around madly, swirling like a whirlwind, surging like a raging sea.

Conklin Nozac; the Eversharp Doric and Skyline; the Parker Duofold, Vacumatic, and “51”; Sheaffer’s Flat-Top, Balance, and “TRIUMPH”; and Waterman’s Nº 7

Also, please charge my fountain pen and bring it with you.

I imagined, who gave me such beautiful eyes.

A child is given a new light, the Light was given by a child.

Fountain pens let you write with flair.