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I was born rather late in [my father's] life, in his mid - 40s. And so what he did up until the time he was 15, I think probably from age 12 to 15, my grandfather made him demonstrate mediumistic powers at the Exeter Street Theater, the first Spiritualist church in the United States.

Paul Laffoley

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Paul Laffoley
Age: 80 †
Born: 1935
Born: August 14
Died: 2015
Died: November 16
Architect
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Cambridge
Massachusetts
Paul George
Jr. Laffoley
Life
Father
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Late
Exeter
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Probably
Spiritualist
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Demonstrate
Made
Church
Grandfather
Time
Rather
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Think
United
Street
Thinking
Born
Theater

More quotes by Paul Laffoley

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I first heard of [Orfeo Angelucci] from Giuseppe Conti who gave me some books by him.
Paul Laffoley
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[My father] was also a lawyer in his bank and specialized in tax law. He would have to do the tax returns for all the Harvard profs because they were buffaloed by that kind of reasoning. Professors in the economics department, even they knew nothing about it.
Paul Laffoley
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[My father] was a banker. He was the president of the Cambridge Trust Company, the head of the trust department, and he taught classes at the Harvard Business School. And he was a member of the Harvard Faculty Club, which I am, too, because what I did is... I have the same name as my father, only Jr.
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I think [H.P. Lovecraft] recognized what he was dealing with, he was dealing with demons. And he was dealing with creatures that're suffering. There's no way out of this suffering.
Paul Laffoley
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[Nikola Tesla and Leon Theremin] were European gentlemen, very well-mannered, all of the stuff you associate with living in Europe.
Paul Laffoley
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Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way.
Paul Laffoley
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I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that.
Paul Laffoley
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The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles.
Paul Laffoley
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You know, people who can draw get upset when people who can't start telling them what to do!
Paul Laffoley
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Both [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff.
Paul Laffoley
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Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.
Paul Laffoley
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In other words, you've got a journey as the plot, but it has to be in a lively environment, being able to create the mood. If you read Pickman's Model, in other words, they're winding their way through the Boston Streets and [H.P.] Lovecraft researched what was there.
Paul Laffoley
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I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University. They do things like follow in Lovecraft's footsteps, just like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the actual footfalls, you know, like they're going out looking for sasquatch, this kind of stuff.
Paul Laffoley
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[Buckminster Fuller] always liked to say that he got kicked out of Harvard three times. Mostly you only got kicked out once, but he kept coming back.
Paul Laffoley
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[Buckminster Fuller] would pretend to be deaf at the right times.
Paul Laffoley
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To have that radical a mind in that bourgeois-looking body was really hard for a lot of people to take, because, when my mother would want to have people over she'd tell [my father], Don't start with the gravity stuff. And then he would invariably do this and the guests would look at each other and say, Well, I think it's time to go now.
Paul Laffoley
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We would go on retreats to Florence. The people in the planning team got to be good friends and so we did things like, we'd all go over to the Fort Belvedere in Florence and take that thing over. Because it's up for grabs, you can rent it. And then have New Age meetings and all that kind of stuff. [Buckminster] Fuller loved to go there.
Paul Laffoley
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You know, in the suburbs, most people believe in gravity, but they don't have much of a sense of humor.
Paul Laffoley
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I mean, even New York isn't in any great shape anymore in relation to the rest of the world.
Paul Laffoley
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At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff.
Paul Laffoley