Howard Mansfield > Quotes

“I was trying to discover examples of a living restoration, trying to go beyond discussions about correct historic colors, materials, and techniques.

I looked to the past for guidance, to find the graces we need to save. I want to be an importer. This is not nostalgia; I am not nostalgic. I am not looking for a way back. "From where will a renewal come to us, to us who have devastated the whole earthly globe?" asked Simone Weil. "Only from the past if we love it."

What I am looking for is the trick of having the same ax twice, for a restoration that renews the spirit, for work that transforms the worker. We may talk of saving antique linens, species, or languages; but whatever we are intent on saving, when a restoration succeeds, we rescue ourselves.

-- Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age”
― Howard Mansfield

“Good preservation is a life preserver thrown to us in a shipwreck. Good preservation keeps us in touch with the graces of this life. It's bricks and mortar, yes. It's arguments about true colors and authenticity and representation. But true preservation is like the hand that shelters a fire from the wind. It protects the spark of life."
-- Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax, Twice”
― Howard Mansfield

“We have everywhere an absence of memory. Architects sometimes talk of building with context and continuity in mind, religious leaders call it tradition, social workers say it’s a sense of community, but it is memory we have banished from our cities. We have speed and power, but no place. Travel, but no destination. Convenience, but no ease.”
― Howard Mansfield, In the Memory House

“The [commercial] strip is marketed with the come-on of comfort (the Comfort Inn) and with the promise of a home on the road, a home where nobody knows your name and they're glad to see you as long as you can pay. The strip lives in the contradiction of the name Home Depot—domesticity on a gargantuan scale. Home—"a person's native place," "at ease," "deep; to the heart," says the dictionary, and Depot, "a storehouse or a 'warehouse.'" (Warehouse of the Heart?)”
― Howard Mansfield, The Bones of the Earth

“Four hundred years is but a moment in 10,000 years. Time is curved, time is braided. Throw out your clocks.”
― Howard Mansfield, Turn and Jump: How Time & Place Fell Apart

“Compelling…. he delivers a gripping biography.... A father’s war experiences, unvarnished and illuminating.
-- Kirkus Reviews”
― Howard Mansfield, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II

“World War II defined a generation. Howard Mansfield’s book I Will Tell No War Stories tells a moving personal and family story, and, in doing so, tells the story of that generation and of America itself. This is a wonderful book.
— Robert Rodat, screenwriter, Saving Private Ryan”
― Howard Mansfield, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II

“In this moving and absorbing book, Howard Mansfield tries to understand his father’s steadfast, lifelong refusal to discuss his service as a 19-year-old B-24 machine gunner during World War 2. There was guilt, of both the survivor and the killer … but mostly there was the shadow of a terror so intense and sustained that not even a long life was enough to escape. To speak of it was to re-enter it. It was … an experience so overwhelming that words diminished it, as if trying to draw a frame around the infinite.”

— Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War”
― Howard Mansfield, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid about World War II

“The Pocumtucks helped the stranger. It’s what we need now: someone to come down the river with a feast, with food and forgiveness. Someone to say, open your heart, take a holiday from your hate, let the hate-making machine—the broadcasts and tweets, the bloody fights in the street—let the hate-making machine rest. Accept today this gift. Love your enemy. Reload the canoes with gifts. Paddle back upriver with humility and thanks.”
― Howard Mansfield, Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers