Robert Bringhurst

“Essay on Adam"There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between theseis only an issue of whether the demonswork from the inside out or from the outsidein: the onetheological question.”

“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.”

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.”

“If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.”

“If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.”

“When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.”

“Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.”

“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.”

“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.”