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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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Paul Laffoley
Age: 80 †
Born: 1935
Born: August 14
Died: 2015
Died: November 16
Architect
Artist
Diarist
Inventor
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Paul George
Jr. Laffoley
Book
First
Gave
Heard
Books
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More quotes by 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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I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer? I said, Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me.
Paul Laffoley
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When [my father] reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there.
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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[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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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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I like Colin Wilson, mainly because he never went to school. When you don't go to school you can say anything you want like that and not have to worry.
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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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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[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.
Paul Laffoley
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My father said he did have the mathematics of mind physics, or the physics of consciousness.
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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[My father] was always upset that my mother didn't want to live in New York. Because he said he wanted to live in a hotel and not have to mow the lawn and all that. In other words, he never liked sports clothes, he always liked to be dressed up formally, 24/7. And he drove big cars and, you know, just loved to act the banker.
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
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[Buckminster Fuller] would pretend to be deaf at the right times.
Paul Laffoley
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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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Now, we know this is what [H.P.] Lovecraft was into. Because he kept talking about how he wasn't interested in religion. In a heaven state there is no religion, meaning that you're seeing the whole thing ... I mean, to worship something means that it's something beyond you, right? In other words, it's not being revealed to you.
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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[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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Stephen Hawking won [Babson Institute competition ] one year with his black hole stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists or not. I think my father believed this because ... when the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something he couldn't control.
Paul Laffoley