Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

“The people who think I'm famous are knitters. Most of my life, I'm wildly unrecognized.”

“When confronted with a birthday in a week I will remember that a book can be a really good present, too.”

“The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.”

“If you have time to knit, if you've taken up knitting, it means you're not worried about the essential stuff.”

“Achieving the state of SABLE is not, as many people who live with these knitters believe, a reason to stop buying yarn, but for the knitter it is an indication to write a will, bequeathing the stash to an appropriate heir.”

“All Newfoundlander men can knit.”

“It turns out that knitting isn't about the yarn or the softness or needing a hat (although we really can't argue with these secondary motivators). It's really about this: Knitting is a magic trick. In this day and age, in a world where science and technology take more and more wonder and work out of our lives , and our planet is quickly becoming a place running out of magic, a knitter takes silly, useless string, mundane sticks, waves her hands around (many, many times...nobody said this was fast magic), and turns one thing into another: string into a hat, string into a sweater, string into a blanket for a baby. It really is a very reliable magic.”

“I will always buy extra yarn. I will not try to tempt fate.”

“Once in a while, I bump into a knitter, and we have a lovely conversation. But if you figure out the number of people who know me and the people who don't, it's really a small number.”

“I explain at the parties that I believe knitting is a transformative and intriguing act that can change the life and brain of the person doing it, and that knitting is a perfect metaphor for life and insight into some better ways through it.”

“The rules of Canadian engagement say that if we encounter a celebrity, we have to pretend we're not encountering a celebrity.”

“The only difference between an experienced knitter and new knitter is that the experienced knitter makes bigger mistakes faster. Be bold; there are no terrible consequences in knitting.”

“Sweaters need to be imagined, dreamed over.”

“Hat head is a sad affliction wherein the chosen hat and the selected hairstyle are grossly incompatible. The unfortunate combination results in a condition that can be hidden only with the application of another hat.”

“Since I became a knitting humor writer, I seem to be understood a little better - at least for the purposes of social discourse.”

“It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 stitches. Never mind that you need two of them. (That's 34,000 stitches, for anybody keeping track.) Socks are only physically small. By stitch count, they are immense.”

“I will continue to freak out my children by knitting in public. It's good for them.”

“When people see me knitting, I tell them I'm a knitter. Not the sort of knitter they may have run into before, but a passionate, constant, deliberate knitter. I knit everyday, all the time, everywhere I go.”

“I do know that there isn't ever going to be a time when there aren't any knitters.”

“There are twice as many knitters as golfers in North America. Still, if you walk into any airport in North America, you can find a golf magazine but not a knitting magazine, even though you can't golf on a plane.”