Quotes from Robert Bringhurst

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

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.

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

Typography exists to honor content.

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.

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.

if the poet becomes what-is, then what-is (and no one else) becomes the author of the poem.

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

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

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.

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.

Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.

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?

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 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 .

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

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

I hold the very simpleminded view that everything is related to everything else-and that every one is related to everyone else, and that every species is related to every other. The only way out of this tissue of interrelations, it seems to me, is to stop paying attention, and to substitute something else-hallucination, greed, pride, or hatred, for example-for sensuous connection to the facts. I think it is not the world's task to entertain us, but ours to take an interest in the world.

What shall I do with the night and the day, with this life and this death?

A myth is a hypothesis about the personality of reality itself and not the personalities of individual persons, character types, or nations.

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.

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

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.

An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.