Robert Bringhurst Professions : Poet Born : October 16, 1946 Browse All Authors Top 40 quotes by Robert Bringhurst When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre. Robert Bringhurst given enough culture If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior. Robert Bringhurst writing civilization thinking In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. Robert Bringhurst space dark men Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly. Robert Bringhurst constraints wings In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time. Robert Bringhurst fashion goal order By all means break the rules. Robert Bringhurst typography break mean How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that's probably true. Robert Bringhurst income poet people To design things means to interfere with things: to think of how they might be and to alter how they are. Design is to making as writing is to speech: it is an ordinary physical activity pushed to a conscious edge. That interference with the given world can still be founded on admiration. Where it is not, what is the point of designing at all? Robert Bringhurst writing mean thinking Anxiety projection can and does occur - in myth, in music, in fiction, and in the doctor's office too. That doesn't make it the basis of everything. Robert Bringhurst myth anxiety office Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing. Robert Bringhurst style technology writing With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine. Robert Bringhurst routine littles philosophy A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well . Robert Bringhurst sheep add men Many intellectual heroes in the European tradition seem to find the great outdoors a chilling prospect - and its literary analogue, the mythworld, equally chilling. As if a world in which humans have no leverage, and might not be present at all, couldn't be interesting to humans. Robert Bringhurst intellectual hero interesting Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry. Robert Bringhurst made way thinking Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control. Robert Bringhurst triumph purpose writing Popularity isn't just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that's the dangerous part of the process. Robert Bringhurst popularity process giving In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action. Robert Bringhurst literature character world A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority. Robert Bringhurst emotion perception world It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader. Robert Bringhurst mind house world Every Native North American text I've ever grappled with has taught me something important about how to live on the continent where I was born. Robert Bringhurst native important Similar Authors Abdellatif Laabi poet Ihara Saikaku poet Abram Joseph Ryan poet Ingeborg Bachmann poet Izumi Shikibu poet Bion of Smyrna poet All Authors
