Quotes About Structure

Architecture has the power to create order out of unholy confusion.

Congress is a middle-aged, middle-class, white male power structure ... no wonder it's been so totally unresponsive to the needs of this country.

The more centralized the power, the less compromises need to be made in architecture.

The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power.

fascinating book on story structure Into the Woods

But the frontier in this meaning was a process of becoming, not of being, and hence substituted motion for structure as its end. Motion as a substitute for structure is possible only so long as there is unlimited room to move in. When confined without the discipline provided by an ideal, such social motion produces aimlessness or chaos—or perhaps the final ordering of some utopia.

Plans are immensely reassuring to most people, not just because they contain information but because they exist.

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

I find it easier to believe in God than to believe Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.

Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow?

We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.

the market prices of quasi-commodities are not related to the costs in their own manufacturing area, but to the cost structure of the lower-cost competitors and their willingness to operate at certain margin levels.

Although you should not let your emotional responses dictate your allocation, you do need to sleep at night, and your personal preferences are an important part of your asset class structure.

It seems to me that when you look back at a life, yours or another's, what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. Our histories, like my father's current body, are structures built of toothpicks.

Our histories, like my father's current body, are structures built of toothpicks.

Nothing is more beautiful than an organized width, and nothing is worse than an unorganized lapidary.

Almost simultaneously their eyes alighted on a small opening in the twisted branches of the trees, affording them a direct line of sight to the majestic Verrazzano Bridge. Together the women gazed at the slate-gray metal towers soaring skyward, the steel cables delicately draped from one tower to the other, ascending and descending, the small squares and larger rectangles moving back and forth over the curved roadway.

All effort to bring order into disorder is disorder.

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

Then, from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

The visible structure of Jane Austen's stories may be flimsy enough; but their foundations drive deep down into the basic principles of human conduct. On her bit of ivory she has engraved a criticism of life as serious and as considers as Hardy's.

Paradoxically, the flows of energy that sustain complex things (including you and me) are helping entropy with its bleak task of slowly breaking down all forms of order and structure.