Dan Hill > Dan's Quotes

“To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?”
― Angela Carter

“[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“The theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualising an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. It is the inbetween space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture, and by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.”
― Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture

“It was when I realised I had a new nationality: I was in exile. I am an adulterous resident: when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.”
― Suketu Mehta

“He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.”
― Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz

“We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
― Ken Robinson

“When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“I asked a professor of nanotechnology what they use to measure the unthinkable small distances of nanospace? He said it was the nanometre. This didn't help me very much. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre. I understood the idea but couldn't visualise what it meant. I said, "What is it roughly?" He thought for a moment and said, "A nanometre is roughly the distance that a man's beard grows in one second". I had never thought about what beards do in a second but they must do something. It takes them all day to grow about a milllimetre. They don't leap out of your face at eight o'clock in the morning. Beards are slow, languid things and our language reflects this. We do not say "as quick as a beard" or "as fast as a bristle". We now have a way of grasping of how slow they are - about a nanometre a second.”
― Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative

“...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.”
― Susan Sontag

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time. ”
― Paul Rand

“Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
― H.G. Wells

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
― H.G. Wells