Quotes from Peter Behrens

Design is not about decorating functional forms - it is about creating forms that accord with the character of the object and that show new technologies to advantage.

Don't think that even an engineer, when he buys a motor, takes it to bits to scrutinize it. Even he as a specialist buys from the external appearance. A motor ought to look like a birthday present.

Marriage is a mystery.

Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and what they have done.

What you lost weakened you, could kill you. What you wanted kept you going. What you wanted gave you strength.

Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?

Stories always started this way, suddenly, and set within a strange world. Patience is required, to let the stories unroll. This is how people explan their lives.

Perhaps if I had been able to put things in plain language, it might have been plain that things between us were so damnably unequal, that I loved her as I would never love anyone else and that she loved me as a young woman might love a devoted brother, a trusted bodyguard, or a horse that never stumbles, never shies, but takes all fences willingly, and carries her safely across.

When we were apart and I thought of her, I left words out of it. What came to mind instead were flashes of bold color in sunlight. And always an impression of wide-open country and the pair of us traveling, alone together, great distance at great speed.

Burning aviators, clots of fire. The reeking night jar in our bedroom in Muswell Hill. Children skipping round me in a school yard, shouting taunts. My ship Lilith. London's winter cold and dark. The smell of ground sliced open in Regent's Park, my father's pale prisoner's face, his white hands on a table in the visiting hall. There it is. That was my war.

I don't want to lose you over tedious genealogy and history that must be very dim to you. This is a story of real people who lived and died, about their times and what went wrong. I shall try to be honest even when it's apparent that I am making things up, delivering scenes I couldn't have witnessed. I know the truth in my bones. And that's what I shall give you.

This will become the story of a young woman, Karin Weinbrenner. Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me.

Where do they come from, thoughts? Like wrens, out of the sky. They arrive. Noisy, hungry, perfectly themselves.

You throw yourself on the world like turf on a fire.

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored

autumn leaves and earth. She wondered if Margo might be willing to drive down to Maine with her for one last holiday. October light was gorgeous at the beach and they could have a

Is courage just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives have intrinsic shape, and must, one way or another, be completed?