Handwriting Quotations

"Handwriting is civilization's casual
encephalogram."

-- Lance Morrow

"You may not be able to read a doctor's
handwriting and
prescription, but you'll notice his bills are neatly typewritten."

-- Earl
Wilson

" ... behold, the false pen of the scribes
hath written falsely."

The
Bible
, Jeremiah 8:8

"I have terrible handwriting. I now say it
is a learning disability
... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingerswith
a ruler because my handwriting was so bad."

-- attributed variously to Andrew Greeley
and Akhmed Zakayev

"Somehow I started
introducing handwriting
into my drawings, and after
a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with
the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting."

-- Patti
Smith

"I once did hold it, as our statists do,

A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much

How to forget that learning, but, sir, now

It did me yeoman's service."

 --William
Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act 5, Scene 2

"Here is a golden Rule. ... Write legibly.
The average temper of the
human race would be perceptibly sweetened, if everybody obeyed this
Rule!"

-- Lewis
Carroll
(Charles
Lutwidge
Dodgson) in “Eight or Nine Wise
Words About Letter-Writing” reprinted in The
Letters
of
Lewis
Carroll:
,
vol. II, ed. Morton N. Cohen, Oxford University Press (1979).

"I do not know whence I got the notion
that good handwriting was not
a necessary part of education, but I retained it until I went to
England. When later, especially in South Africa, I saw the beautifu
handwriting of lawyers and young men born and educated in South Africa,
I was ashamed of myself and repented of my neglect. I saw that bad
handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education." --
Mahatma
Gandhi, Gandhi
An
Autobiography:
The
Story
of
My
Experiments
With
Truth

" ...But the effort that cost her [Eliza
Dolittle] the deepest
humiliation was a request to
Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton's verse, was
caligraphy[sic], and who
himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that
he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally
incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton's
words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the
task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity,
concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting
disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and
destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely
uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal
beauty ... "

-- George Bernard
Shaw in his Afterword to PYGMALION ("Sequel: What
Happened Afterwards")

"When Fred went to the office the next
morning, there was a test
to be
gone through which he was not prepared for.

Now Fred," said Caleb,
"you will have some desk-work. ... . How are you at writing and
arithmetic?"

Fred felt an awkward movement of the heart; he had not
thought of desk-work; but he was in a resolute mood, and not going to
shrink. "I'm not afraid of arithmetic, Mr. Garth: it always came easily
to me. I think you know my writing."

"Let us see," said Caleb, taking
up a pen, examining it carefully and handing it, well dipped, to Fred
with a sheet of ruled paper. "Copy me a line or two of that valuation,
with the figures at the end."

At that time the opinion existed that it
was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least
suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as
gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels
were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or
down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to
keep the line-- in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind
easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means.

As
Caleb looked on, his visage showed a growing depression, but when Fred
handed him the paper he gave something like a snarl, and rapped the
paper passionately with the back of his hand. Bad work like this
dispelled all Caleb's mildness.

"The deuce!" he exclaimed, snarlingly.
"To think that this is a country where a man's education may cost
hundreds and hundreds, and it turns you out this!" Then in a more
pathetic tone, pushing up his spectacles and looking at the unfortunate
scribe, "The Lord have mercy on us, Fred, I can't put up with this!"

"What can I do, Mr. Garth?" said Fred, whose spirits had sunk very low,
not only at the estimate of his handwriting, but at the vision of
himself as liable to be ranked with office clerks.

 "Do? Why, you must
learn to form your letters and keep the line. What's the use of writing
at all if nobody can understand it?" asked Caleb, energetically, quite
preoccupied with the bad quality of the work. "Is there so little
business in the world that you must be sending puzzles over the
country? But that's the way people are brought up. I should lose no end
of time with the letters some people send me, if Susan did not make
them out for me. It's disgusting." Here Caleb tossed the paper from
him.

... "I am very sorry," were all the words that [Fred] could
muster. But Mr. Garth was already relenting. "We must make the best of
it, Fred," he began, with a return to his usual quiet tone. "Every man
can learn to write. I taught myself. Go at it with a will, and sit up
at night if the day-time isn't enough. ... "

 -- George
Eliot, MIDDLEMARCH