Nick Adams

“Humpty-Dumpty is the familiar example of the clown unsuccessfully imitating the acrobat. Just because all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again, it doesn’t follow that electromagnetic automation couldn’t have put Humpty-Dumpty back together. The integral and unified egg had no business sitting on a wall anyway. Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like eggs. Humpty-Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The trees were budding, bright clouds sailing through a too-blue sky, and though he knew it wasn’t true, he had a sense of the world turning, and him along with it. He saw it as a promise.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Henry, Himself

“Why? The answer is central to any understanding of media. Why does a child like to chatter about the events of its day, however jerkily? Why do we prefer novels and movies about familiar scenes and characters? Because for rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. The press repeats the excitement we have in using our wits, and by using our wits we can translate the outer world into the fabric of our own beings.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,
Stay as you are.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects