Quotes About Relevance

Via our FWP leaders, we have been instructed to deliver "no ivory tower writing" but to bring "the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature." This admonishment bids us to accurately record our informants and to make them feel that they are critical to our mission.

The church always arrives on the scene a little breathless and a little late.

Faith ... is a conscious apprehension of something inevident, something which unlike this desk and this chair is not seen to be there, even if it enters into the fabric of our personal relations to reality with at least as much force, relevance, and moment as things which are seen to be there.

What makes sense in the ivy-covered ivory tower may be shrill extremism in America's neighborhoods and workplaces.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

Nourish your audience with authentic content that highlights your authority instead of feeding them cheap click bait.

The most effective brand messaging strategy is not to create the messaging that makes the most sense to you. It is creating the brand messaging that makes you, your brand and your products make the most sense to others.

She's understanding now what women mean when they say females her age seem to disappear.

Don't call me a dinosaur. It isn't fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?

I ask people impertinent questions. Hopefully turning up pertinent answers.

Significance is cumulative—but not always obvious.

I snorted. "They still make you read Dickens in school? Great Expectations?" "Yeah." "You can stay at home and hide if you want—and wind up like Miss Havisham," I said. "Watching life through a window and obsessed with how things might have been." "Dear God," she said. "You've just made Dickens relevant to my life." "Weird, right?" I asked her, nodding.

And besides, she was curious. She had questions. And answering questions was very nearly always more important than caution.

Whether they represent us as clowns or criminals, the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again.

Tell me what matters, BZ said. Nothing, Maria said.

I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.

The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.

I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure.

I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.

Industry structure is dynamic, not static, a point that Porter has to repeat often because there has been a remarkably persistent misconception that industry structure and positioning are static, and therefore irrelevant in a fast-changing world.

Slowed time is -- or should be -- a way of pointing to what's important.

Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.

Then Henry speaks again. Did he do it? I turn to him slowly. Does it matter?

A model's opinion seldom matters. The only time that he is required to open his mouth is when he is required to smile at the camera.