A stack of books and inspiration

Curled up by the fire with a stack of art books from the library and Little Feat on the stereo - bliss.
I found these quotes from a book called "Drawing from the Modern" (Maurice Merleau Ponty) which I think are cool for their eloquence and their fluency - the post renaissance view still rings true in many ways.

On the subject of line :
'Akin to handwriting, line is a graphic declaration of the presence of a particular persona," (it is) "...the residue of the activities of a particular hand"
- which I think is a nice way of expressing the personal quality that we each bring to our drawing, the past experience and the hand-memory.
Another phrase, even more poetic, describes line as 'a seismograph of the soul' (yeah ?)- lovely but uncredited I'm afraid so I can't assign the quote here.

And this from a woman artist called May Stephens from the book called "Lines of Vision" whose author I omitted to note,I'm sorry.
She says ..."Between a line and a smudge lies a bridgeable gap, a shift of the eye. A line is a trajectory; too close or too far, too slow or too fast, it's a smudge and a blur. A smudge is a trace of what was or is to come. But a line is here."
- I like that - a line is here.