Robert Bringhurst Quotes

25 quotes in 546 categories

• Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.
• Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
• 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…
• Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
• 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…
• 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…
• Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.
• When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.
• Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the…
• Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• Typography exists to honor content.
• Stories are the reproductive organs of language.
• 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.
• 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,…
• 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…
• If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain -…

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