June 2011
8 posts
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees— just as things grow in fast movies— I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
—Steve Jobs speaking at Stanford in 2005, one of 5 timeless commencement addresses (via curiositycounts)
“Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, – a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.”
—Mark Twain on the telephone – proof that new media are always met with dismay and discomfort, which isn’t necessarily an accurate value judgement of their eventual social value (via curiositycounts)
