Quotes from Richard Polt

What makes my life my own is ultimately the sheer fact that it is mine to live, mine to make something of, in the face of my possible non-existence. Every other possibility is something that I may be free not to do, and that someone else may be able to do just as well as I can. But my death is a possibility that necessarily faces me alone: no one can face it for me.

Why do we do inefficient things? Because sometimes we don't want life to be seamless—we want to feel resistance, we want to take our time, we want to savor the experience. When what you're doing isn't just a means to an end, you're in no hurry to get it done.

We process information so efficiently that we don't dwell on thoughts and words anymore—we flit incoherently from one set of distractions to the next.

Paul Lippman's American Typewriters: A Collector's Encyclopedia.

But the difficulty of changing a typescript can also have what seems to be the opposite effect: You let go. You stop caring about certainty; you stop editing yourself, stop second-guessing yourself, and simply write—mistakes and all.

It assumes that better means faster. By those standards, a typewriter is nothing but a very bad computer.

Who is the ingenious inventor of the type-writing machine that opens such a wide field of hope for the cautious caligraphist while it takes from the feeble spellist his only safeguard, illegibility?

When what you're doing isn't just a means to an end, you're in no hurry to get it done.

The rebellion against the logic of efficiency is also evident in the slow movement, an idea that has been building {slowly, of course} since a protest against the opening of a McDonald's in Rome in 1986 started the slow food movement.

But whatever we create on our typewriters, whenever we turn to them, we're choosing something that violates the digital Paradigm—something durable, intimate, focused, and self-sufficient.

To Save Time is to Lengthen Life," proclaimed the Remington Typewriter Company.

We make things so efficiently that they're all disposable; none of them endure, none can belong to us for long before they end up on the scrap heap.

Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

There are people who will choose quality communication over quantity, who want to express themselves in a message to another individual in a way that slow writing can encourage, and e-mailing and texting often discourage.