Robert Bringhurst Quotes

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Since human memory is short and does not suffice for a crowd of things, the authority of those who preceded our age, the divine emperors and kings, has decreed that those things were to be written down which the progress of fleeting time generally removes from the knowledge of men.

It's an amazingly consistent thing with Irish people. We will talk to strangers at parties for hours. It's what we were bred to do I think. And the Jewish people were bred to write the stuff that we say.

There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.

"For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulations in words and the handling on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and continuing consciousness of itself."

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

There's a tremendous amount of language loss. Most of the attention is given to indigenous languages, which makes sense, but some of the most dramatic language loss is in Europe.

Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that's it. That's all we need to do." And I was thinking, "Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?" I think that's kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together.

They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.

But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.

I have a great deal of hope. I think that change is here, it's happening. But I know that if we think it's just going to happen on its own, that's not the way it works. We need people to keep talking about women of color writing comics and living the charge. Not just talking but doing. Making art, putting it out there.

Librarians are not just gatekeepers to knowledge, they are what the American Indians used to call their special sages who preserved the oral legends of a tribe: dream keepers.

To my way of thinking, the American family started to decline when parents began to communicate with their children.

Most of the scientists I know think civilization is teetering on the brink of a global disaster. They just don't know when it's going to hit. I don't have the answer to that either. I'm scared as hell.

We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.

There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything out, and it's more important how it sounds. And applying that to more formal aspects of writing.