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Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

Robert Bringhurst

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Robert Bringhurst
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: October 16
Linguist
Poet
Translator
LA
California
Bringhurst
Robert
Language
Represents
Social
Purposes
Sense
Triumph
Littles
Control
Little
Economic
Nothing
Written
Writing
Literature
Purpose
Subversion

More quotes by Robert Bringhurst

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I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.
Robert Bringhurst
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Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
Robert Bringhurst
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It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.
Robert Bringhurst
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How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that's probably true.
Robert Bringhurst
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Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
Robert Bringhurst
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With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.
Robert Bringhurst
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Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
Robert Bringhurst
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Stories are the reproductive organs of language.
Robert Bringhurst
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Popularity isn't just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that's the dangerous part of the process.
Robert Bringhurst
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We're into the era of desktop bureaucracy, where people sit at computers building websites and analyzing data rather than listening or reading.
Robert Bringhurst
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Anxiety projection can and does occur - in myth, in music, in fiction, and in the doctor's office too. That doesn't make it the basis of everything.
Robert Bringhurst
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Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.
Robert Bringhurst
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Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.
Robert Bringhurst
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When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.
Robert Bringhurst
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Every Native North American text I've ever grappled with has taught me something important about how to live on the continent where I was born.
Robert Bringhurst
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Many intellectual heroes in the European tradition seem to find the great outdoors a chilling prospect - and its literary analogue, the mythworld, equally chilling. As if a world in which humans have no leverage, and might not be present at all, couldn't be interesting to humans.
Robert Bringhurst
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By all means break the rules.
Robert Bringhurst
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Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.
Robert Bringhurst
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Nature, or the world, or reality, is what mythology is all about.
Robert Bringhurst