176 pages
Rating: (634 votes)
“Every man-made thing, be it a chair, a text, or a school, is thought made substance. It is the expression of someone's, or some groups, ideas and beliefs. The two-hundred year old double hung, six light sash window in the wall opposite my desk, out of which I am looking at this moment embodies ideas about houses and how we should live in them, tools, technologies, standards of craftsmanship, nature and much else. It is a material manifestation of the collective consciousness of its time and place channeled through the individuals who commissioned and made it".”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
“When I look at a piece of furniture from across a room, I see form, style, scale, context, and intended use. As I approach it, I distinguish material, joinery, and proportions. When I get close enough to touch it, I take in details such as hardware, textures, finish, edge treatments, wood grain, quality, and comfort.”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
“I was becoming aware that a good life was not some Shangri-La waiting to be stumbled upon. One constructed it from the materials at hand.”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
“Only as I approached adulthood did I realize that life is a process of continual becoming.”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
“there are three different contexts in which one can participate in a creative field. For shorthand, I call them the first-person, second-person, and third-person voices. You”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
“skilled manual work offered spiritual rewards to which academic institutions and my parent’s social milieu were oblivious.”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
“If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn’t there a kind of terrible beauty in it?”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The End of Everything
“Much worse. We couldn’t get any of those to come at all. Some of them are visibly fused. Some idiot must have welded them.” “Welded, yes. But not by some idiot. By the sun.” “Leo, it doesn’t get that hot—” “Not directly. What you’re seeing is spontaneous vacuum diffusion welding. Metal molecules are evaporating off the surfaces of the pieces in the vacuum. Slowly, to be sure, but it’s a measurable phenomenon. On the clamped areas they migrate into their neighboring surfaces and eventually achieve quite a nice bond. A little faster for the hot pieces on the sun side, a little slower for the cold pieces in the shade—but I’ll bet some of those clamps have been in place for twenty years.” “Oh. But what do we do about them?” “They’ll have to be cut.” Pramod’s lips pursed in worry. “That will slow things down.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Falling Free
“She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada
“No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.”
― Robert Aickman, quote from The Wine-Dark Sea
“It matters very little whether your judgments of people are true or untrue, and very much whether they are kind or unkind,”
― Winston S. Churchill, quote from Churchill: The Power of Words
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