Robert Bringhurst Quotes

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

Nature, or the world, or reality, is what mythology is all about.

The claim that myth is always a narrative spin-off of ritual; the claim that myth is the projection of human anxieties onto a cosmological scrim; the claim that myths are invented to give sanction to human predilections and institutions... These are ways of trivializing a mode of thought that has served humanity well for a very long time.

We're into the era of desktop bureaucracy, where people sit at computers building websites and analyzing data rather than listening or reading.

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.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.

When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

Stories are the reproductive organs of language.

My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as I can tell - because it's part of life itself. In the world of the hamburger stand and the supermarket, or the vegan café and the ashram, you might try to tell yourself it's possible to be nonviolent. In a hunting and gathering society, violence is more difficult to hide.

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.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.

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.

If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the 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.

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.

Typography exists to honor content.

Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

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.

Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

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?

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.

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.

Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.

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.

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.

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.

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 .

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the 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.

Essay on Adam" There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell. Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four: he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him. Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam. The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth, fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth, nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between: he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these is only an issue of whether the demons work from the inside out or from the outside in: the one theological question.

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.

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.

By all means break the rules.