“He chuckled, shaking his head. "Man, you hunters. I break a pencil and there's hell to pay.""I can see how that's deeply unfair, Chip. Especially if that pencil should try to kill you with it teeth and claws, or launch its brood of a thousand deadly paper clips against you.”

“life is like a pencil,whenever it breaks you sharpen it again,that's how life is.”

“Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”

“He can't hear you." Alex sighs. "You aren't the sharpest sheep in the barn, are you?""That's not even the right metaphor," I snap, my attention still focused on Richie. "It's the sharpest pencil in the box.""Right." Alex nods. "Except you are a sheep. I'm not stupid, I just adjusted the metaphor to fit your persona-""Oh, shut up. Richie!" I scream again. Alex shakes his head.”

“He loved the scratching of pencil against paper when he was focused: it meant something was happening.”

“I like 'pencil-necked weasel'. It has 'pencil' in it. Pencils are good things. You can draw or write things with pencils. I think it's what you call someone when you're worried that using a long word like 'intellectual' may have too many syllables. It's not something that people who have serious, important things to say call other people.”