These yarn quotes will inspire you. Yarn spun thread is used for knitting, weaving, or sewing; or a long or rambling story, especially one that is implausible.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging yarn quotes, yarn sayings, and yarn proverbs.
Best Yarn Quotes
- “My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.” ~ David Brin
- “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “I believe that the yarn we spin is capable of mending the broken warp and woof of our life!” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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“It is a little known fact that much like birds, who can always find north, knitters can always find yarn.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
- “I’ve always done things the hard way. I was born like a piece of tangled yarn. The job is trying to untangle it, and I’ll probably go on doing it for the rest of my life.” ~ Karen Allen
- “I’m a yarnaholic. That means I have more yarn stashed away than any one person could possibly use in three or four lifetimes. There’s something inspiring about yarn that makes me feel I could never have enough.” ~ Debbie Macomber
- “There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, ‘No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'” ~ Joss Whedon
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“I still have a problem with nuns. I follow them around like a kitten with a ball of yarn.” ~ Meg Tilly
- “If each person in this world will simply take a small piece of this huge thing, this amazing quilt, and work it regardless of the color of the yarn, we will have harmony on this planet.” ~ Cicely Tyson , Colorful yarn quotes
- “When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.” ~ Julia Glass
- “Spin’ is a polite word for deception. Spinners mislead by means that range from subtle omissions to outright lies. Spin paints a false picture of reality by bending facts, mischaracterizing the words of others, ignoring or denying crucial evidence, or just ‘spinning a yarn’ – by making things up.” ~ Kathleen Hall Jamieson
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“God, the Master Weaver. He stretches the yarn and intertwines the colors, the ragged twine with the velvet strings, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes his reach.” ~ Max Lucado
- “The chances of running out of yarn on a project are directly related to the difficulty that you will have getting more.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
- “I will always buy extra yarn. I will not try to tempt fate.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
- “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.” ~ William Shakespeare
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“It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.” ~ Daniel Dennett
- “And telling a story, I suppose, is like winding a skein of spun yarn- you sometimes lose track of the beginning.” ~ Edith Pattou
- “I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.” ~ John Masefield
- “If upon this earth we ever have a glimpse of heaven,it is when we pass a home in winter, at night,and through the windows, the curtains drawn aside,we see the family about the pleasant hearth; the old lady knitting; the cat playing with the yarn;the children wishing they had as many dolls or dollars or knivesor somethings, as there are sparks going out to join the roaring blast;the father reading and smoking, and the clouds rising like incense from the altar of domestic joy.I never passed such a house without feeling thatI had received a benediction.” ~ Robert Green Ingersoll
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“I’ve got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.” ~ O. Henry
- “The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.” ~ Ben Hecht
- “Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I’d have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash…in fact, they’d assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful.” ~ Elizabeth Moon
- “It is some kind of miracle that all knitting is constructed of only two stitches: knit and purl. Sure, you throw in some yarn overs, and sometimes you knit the stitches out of order, but when it really comes down to it, knitting is simplicity. The most incredible gossamer lace shawl … the trickiest aran … a humble sock … each just made with knit and purl.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
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“Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.” ~ Graham Moore
- “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.” ~ Wallace Stegner
- “The needle rocked awkwardly and at the end of her beginning rows, Isabel held up her work to show Esperanza. “Mine is all crooked!” Esperanza smiled and reached over and gently pulled the yarn, unraveling the uneven stitches. Then she looked into Isabel’s trusting eyes and said, “Do not ever be afraid to start over.” ~ Pam Muñoz Ryan
- “There I was out in the barn playing midwife to a pregnant mare. I remember sitting there, spinning yarn in the light of a little oil lamp, a city girl who knew nothing about farming, sitting on the deel beside that mother in pain, already beginning the birthing process. All around me there was darkness and perfect silence, except for the mother’s pain. It was as if the war didn’t exist in those hours.” ~ Diet Eman
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“A lot of fancier yarns come from people trying to tell the truth. It’s not easy once you’re out of the habit.” ~ Dashiell Hammett
- “I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can’t reuse or repair.” ~ Tayari Jones
- “Kittens play with yarn, they bat it around. What they’re really doing is saying, “I can’t knit, get this away from me!”” ~ Mitch Hedberg
- “In your arms I forget what the yarn knows of sweaters. I forget how to hold myself together. So if I unfold now like a love letter tell me you’ll write back soon. Tell me you’ll still come untethered.” ~ Andrea Gibson , Yarn quotes love
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“Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.” ~ Eric Temple Bell
- “I don’t just use yarn from a store. I buy old sweaters from consignment shops. The older the better, and unravel them. There are countries of women in this scarf/shawl/blanket. Soon it will be big enough to keep me warm.” ~ Laurie Halse Anderson
- “Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air. Should a clerk come out with the remark that All Young Mothers In This Day and Age (why can’t they save their breath and say “now”?) insist on a yarn which can be machine-washed and machine-dried, come back at her with the reply that one day, you suppose, they will develop a baby that can be machine-washed and -dried.” ~ Elizabeth Zimmermann
- “I’m afraid of coaching, of writer’s classes, of writer’s magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble – you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
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“… everyone has to knit when they’re here. … But not every person has to use yarn.” ~ Kate Jacobs
- “Paul’s One Way Out is a fresh, intelligently arranged, and satisfyingly complete telling of the lengthy (and unlikely) history of the group that almost singlehandedly brought rock up to a level of jazz-like sophistication and virtuosity, introducing it as a medium worthy of the soloist’s art. Oral histories can be tricky things: either penetrating, delivering information, and backstories that get to the heart of how timeless music was made. Or too often, they lie flat on the page, a random retelling of repeated facts and reheated yarns. I’m happy to say that Paul’s is in that first category.” ~ Ashley Kahn
- “Chyerti—that’s us, demons and devils, small and big—are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change—a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.” ~ Catherynne M. Valente
- “Some knitters say that they buy yarn with no project in mind and wait patiently for the yarn to “speak” to them. This reminds me of Michelangelo, who believed that every block of stone he carved had the statue waiting inside and that all he did was reveal it. I think I’ve had yarn speak to me during the knitting process, and I’ve definitely spoken to it. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong, or maybe my yarn and I aren’t on such good terms, but it really seems to me that all I say is “please” and all it ever says is “no”.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
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“Tangle me up like Grandma’s yarn.” ~ Luke Bryan
- “I’ve learned a lot about doing accessories and making shoes and handbags. I don’t think my perspective has really changed. The subtlety of understanding yarns, what makes a fabric what it is – I’ve learned technical skills and more about the craft.” ~ Marc Jacobs
- “I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues. I am not festive, though contented. When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, – to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “William Kowalski is the kind of storyteller you don’t see quite enough these days. The yarn spinner with a generous soul. The Hundred Hearts is a moving, humane adventure about the price of personal connections and the costs of sacrifice. I tore through this bad boy in two short nights.” ~ Victor LaValle
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“As usual, the sock yarns have no idea what is going on.” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
- “Jack Campbell’s dazzling new series is military science fiction at its best. Not only does he tell a yarn of great adventure and action, but he also develops the characters with satisfying depth. I thoroughly enjoyed this rip-roaring read, and I can hardly wait for the next book.” ~ Catherine Asaro
- “I mean to say, whether a yarn is tall or small I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man that can take in hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he’s at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.” ~ Flann O’Brien
- “Our job as actors, especially in front of a camera, is almost like textile artists. We spend so much time getting the right texture of yarn, and working out the color scheme, and binding off the weave, and making it just right.” ~ Anthony Heald
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“Spinning yarns is a protection against the nuttiness… the greed, the hate all around us.” ~ John D. Voelker
- “With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel-Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss-and you have urban fantasy at its best.” ~ Hal Duncan
- “What Rob Brezsny does with words is grammarye, the Old English term for magic. With his strange brew of macho feminism and poetic rationalism, Brezsny weaves a yarn crazy enough to be true and real enough to subvert the literalist virus of cynicism now immobilizing the collective mindscape.” ~ Antero Alli
- “I have not much faith in women in fiction…. Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.” ~ Willa Cather
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“I told personal stories the way [Bill] Cosby would spin a yarn for ten minutes. I think in hindsight it works better as a long story than as a condensed monologue.” ~ Ed Helms
- “It will be easy for us the first time we receive that ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many there are who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “I Need a Good Book I need a good story. I need a good book. The kind that explodes Off the shelf. I need some good writing, Alive and exciting, To contemplate all by myself. I need a good novel, I need a good read. I probably need two or three. I need a good tale Of love and betrayal Or perhaps an adventure at sea. I need a good saga. I need a good yarn. A momentous and mightily Or slight one. But with thousands and thousands And thousands of books, I need someone to tell me The right one. -John Lithgow” ~ John Lithgow
- “Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story – and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books – is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.” ~ Ashwin Sanghi
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“His [Sam Fuller] self-discipline was amazing. No matter what happened, he’d always go out to his Royal Upright typewriter and just keep working on his stories, his “yarns” as he called them.” ~ Curtis Hanson
- “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that history doesn’t repeat. For 70 years, liberals have been spinning the yarn that FDR’s New Deal, despite all the evidence that it exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression, quickened our economic recovery. Indeed, I remember scratching my head when one of my college history professors in the 1970s tried to convince us of that theory and its corollary – an even better howler – that FDR was actually a conservative because if he hadn’t implemented his socialist programs, the republic would have died right there.” ~ David Limbaugh
- “My parents … are more like cats. They accidentally had a litter of kittens, and then emotionally moved on to whatever ball of yarn rolled past their line of sight.” ~ Jenny Mollen
- “If I gave up writing, I’d have to find an equally obsessive way to fill my time. Yarn-bombing skyscrapers or making houses out of empty soda bottles.” ~ Eden Robinson
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“As project chief, you are creating a narrative, a story, a good yarn. If you look at the process-journey that way, you and your gang will … dramatically up the odds of a WOW outcome!” ~ Tom Peters
- “A plain sock by itself is terribly boring, but it could score points by having a clever stitch pattern, or maybe by being made out of a very beautiful yarn that’s an enchantment to work with. (Sadly, it is still infuriatingly true that being beautiful without being clever is almost worth more points than being clever without being beautiful, but such are the rules of life and knitting-they are cruel, but there anyway).” ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
- “Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.” ~ Glen Duncan
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“Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn.” ~ Ilana Mercer
- “The progress of science is tremendously disorderly, and the motivations that lead to this progress are tremendously varied, and the reasons why scientists go into science, the personal motivations, are tremendously varied. I have said … that science is a haven for freaks, that people go into science because they are misfits, and that it is a sheltered place where they can spin their own yarn and have recognition, be tolerated and happy, and have approval for it.” ~ Max Delbruck
- “The first thing that attracts me to any script is the writing. If I find myself becoming lost in a good yarn, then I feel certain that others will, too.” ~ Anne-Marie Duff
Yarn thread is made of natural or synthetic fibers and is used for knitting and weaving.