tool
As soon as you move to New York, you kiss your tools goodbye.
“Peter Buchanan-Smith and the Urban Ax,” by Penelope Green, The New York Times, June 30, 2010.
Nothing is more incisive than extreme cold. As we now cut iron with an acetylene torch, some day when we shall have completely harnessed the cold, tools will be unnecessary and we’ll saw wood with a blade of cold.
Sens-Plastique (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2008), 123.
One well-documented use of tools on a grand scale by crows around the world is the dropping of nuts on the road to be shelled by passing cars. The crows will swoop in, drop their nuts, and wait on a wire for a vehicle to pass. They will then swoop down again to see whether their nuts have been crushed open.
Crow Planet (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 72.
Thanks again for the knife, which is a little gem. My husband, I regret to say, has snitched it for his own use—cutting the lemon peel the proper thinness for the six o’clock Martini—but it will be mine while he is in California.
April 3, 1952 letter to Julia Child in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 9–10.
When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.
Written in a letter to Philip Roth, letting him know his stories are the “real thing,” dated December 12, 1969, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 290.
I knew from the very first that some day there would be a cow here. One of the first things that turned up when we bought the place was a milking stool, an old one, handmade, smooth with the wax finish which only the seat of an honest man’s breeches can give to wood.
“Getting Ready for a Cow,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 315.
The most powerful tool of all is the word no.
“What I’ve Learned: Andy Grove,” by Mike Sager, Esquire, May 1, 2000.