Category Archives: Quotes

One bus driver’s salary

In the city [$3.40 an hour] bought you a house. We did, we went out and bought houses. In 1977 when I bought my house in Dunbar, it took one bus driver’s salary to buy a house in the city, even on the west side. And now it takes eight bus driver’s salaries to buy the same house. And that’s a huge change, in the city and the job and everything, the affordability of housing has massively changed.

—Angus McIntyre

I just did a quick search of Dunbar on MLS. Zero single-family houses under $1 million. Fourteen under $1.5 million.

The lowest priced house, at $1.195 million, was built in 1925 and has 7 bedrooms and 3 baths. The fact that there are no interior photos and the blurb includes the word “redevelop” means that it’s being sold for land value. The house may be perfectly fine to live in, but inevitably it’ll be torn down to the studs and re-built as a two- or three-unit “craftsman-style” condominium (never a proper duplex or triplex, always a condo).  In a year or so, each of those units will be sold for about $1 million each.

I try to be Zen about real estate in Vancouver, but sometimes it really grates.

A very small story

I had a lot to say and no one to talk to. So I wrote a story, a very small story, to send to friends and family.
…
Writing a novel is long and lonely. … I’ve been either off somewhere doing research or at home peering into art gallery catalogues for five years. So I fell out of touch with many people. If I saw anyone they’d ask what was going on with the novel. A hard question to answer, that.
…
New vocabulary was a bonus. From a friend living in Japan: “It’s great to hear about your progress, even if it’s a kolekutibu iimeeru.” (collective e-mail)

—Katherine Govier

Like they were notepads

Before I worked in publishing, and learned about things like first editions and galleys, I treated books like they were notepads, scribbling lists and phone numbers into them, stuffing articles between pages to read later. It’s these lists I flip back to now to remind me of who I was years before—a journal of sorts. … What will eventually become of these books with their treasure trove of notes and inscriptions? Electronic books are just pixels on a screen. These personal connections to the past make physical books so much more than that.

—Megan Alix Fishmann

I like finding ephemera that others have left behind in books. I love the idea of using a printed book like a notepad, a journal. I think that’s why I liked The English Patient so much.

And yet, I don’t underline or scribble in the margins of my own books. I don’t tuck things inside them to be found years later. I think this is mostly habit.

I didn’t actually own a lot of books as a child, so the ones that I did have I read over and over. Keeping those books note-free made each reading its own, uninfluenced by past readings. Most books came from the library, and of course, writing in library books was not allowed (never mind that lots of people do it anyway!). Later, when I’d run out of library books to read, I’d buy books from the used bookstore, read them, trade them back for store credit, buy a new set of books, and so on. Obviously, the better condition the books were in, the more credit you got. And things that were tucked inside would be lost (or become someone else’s).

By the time I started buying books and keeping them I was stuck in my not-writing-in-books ways (I also don’t turn down corners or anything like that).

Wooden tables with green lamps

[T]he fact of not going to the library [as a kid] never bothered me much until as an adult I found myself in one. It was a bit like a religious experience. Tall ceilings, imposing windows, rows of books, wooden tables with green lamps that loomed like ancient scholars bent over their ancient work. And silence, silence, everywhere silence. It was then that I realized that libraries are not just about the books. Yes, they are about the books, about voices from around the world that invite you into to slip between their covers, voices from the places one has not heard about, from people one could not have imagined. But it was the silence – being away from voices of one’s family, friends, inner voices of home-bound concerns, things to do, being away from voices that fills one’s mind so persistently and steadily that one mistakes them for one’s own – it was the silence that shocked me into listening, very hard, for faint whispers of a voice of my own.

—Maja Djikic

The rest of this quote is nice, but the sentence that got me was: “Tall ceilings, imposing windows, rows of books, wooden tables with green lamps that loomed like ancient scholars bent over their ancient work.” You mean there are actually libraries like that in the real world?!

Chalk this one up as one of the Great Disappointments of my youth. Every time I walked into a new library, I imagined it would be The One with the “[t]all ceilings, imposing windows, rows of books, [and] wooden tables with green lamps.” I spent the whole summer before junior high dreaming about the library, imagining it would be like this.

Why did I expect libraries to look like this? Because this is how libraries were depicted in books. And movies. But especially books.

When the junior high library turned out to be the usual—drop ceilings, metal shelving, Formica tables and plastic chairs, uncomfortably bright fluorescent lighting)—I was crushed. It was then gave up my dreams of wooden tables with green lamps. I still held my breath a little when going into a new library, but never in quite the same way, all wide-eyed anticipation unmitigated by cynicism.

Just get the words down

[M]y motto for writing (which is a big part of my daily existence and own happiness), one that I think applies to life as well: “Write drunk, edit sober.” Not that you should actually be drunk (the inebriated writer is a silly, antiquated idea, among other things), but that you should just get the words down whether you’re writing a letter, a report for work, or the story of your life, in six words or 60,000. Put the words down, don’t obsess over them, just effusively spill them down onto the page. Then step away—for an hour, a day, a week, whatever you need. And then edit. Edit like crazy. Be hard on words and yourself and make it better. And when you think you’re finished, edit it one more time.

—Larry Smith

Good Enough for a PhD

Einstein’s Ph.D. dissertation was printed in Bern 30 April 1905. In 24 pages of calculations and text Einstein’s estimate of Avogadro’s number came out wrong by a factor of nearly 3, but good enough for a PhD degree in Mathematical Physics from Zurich University.

…

Realizing that the answer in his dissertation was wrong, Einstein made a correction for a magazine article the following year, after receiving help from Paul Drude the editor of Annalen der Physik. … After 18 pages of mathematics Einstein produced an estimate of Avogadro’s number wrong by a factor of nearly 1.5 on the second attempt. … A few years later Einstein’s estimate was found to be wrong in experimental work with chemical reactions, so a friend helped Einstein make another correction. … [N]ot bad for a third attempt.

—Jerry Decker

Look! Even Einstein’s dissertation wasn’t perfect. Einstein, people.

So awesome.

Some of the Glow

[W]hen I finished my MFA, it never occurred to me order invitations or to ask anyone to come to the ceremony. After all, it wasn’t a big deal. I never even picked up the forms to order a cap and gown. It just wasn’t a big deal. What I didn’t admit even to myself that it wasn’t just the ceremony I was blowing off, it was my entire experience and accomplishment. I had my degree in basketball. Whatever.

…

Then, I started thinking about my students and how proud I was of them and how hard they worked. It occurred to me that I had worked just as hard. Finally, I was able to let some of the glow I saw in their faces, reflect back on me.

—Tayari Jones

An Artist’s Work

[I]n the arts, there’s no guarantee for success. Even if you’re working at Wal-Mart, if you show up, you get paid. In the studio, you don’t. It’s very risky business. You have to create your own life and have a very strong understanding about what your have to offer. There will be a lot of people telling you that you’re just fooling around. Society just doesn’t consider an artist’s work as “work” — just like motherhood isn’t often acknowledged as being real work. One learns an awful lot about being human when they put themselves out there in song or in story, but we just relegate it to “entertainment.”

—Pamela T. Boll

Little Pleasures

It’s definitely one of [Law and Order‘s] little pleasures to discover in just about every episode one of those people you know wasn’t a big deal at the time, but is at least a moderately big deal now. As a matter of fact, you can get to the point where, if you see an important role being played by someone you haven’t ever seen in anything else, you find yourself saying, “Huh. Wonder what ever happened to that guy.”

—Linda Holmes

Methinks there needs to be a snappy name for the “recognizing people who weren’t recognizable when the movie/episode was made but are now” game. It’s right up there with “Hey, it’s that guy!” for good times whilst watching retro movies/TV shows.

Open and Connected

[T]he online world outside of Facebook is already a very open and connected place, thank you very much. Densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets are all visible to anyone and everyone. Instead of contributing to this interconnected, open Web world, the growing popularity of Facebook is draining it of attention, energy and posts that are in public view.

Every link found on the open Web, inviting a user to click and go somewhere else, is in essence a recommendation from the person who authored the page, posted it or broadcast it in a Tweet. It says, “I’ve taken the trouble to insert this link because I believe it will be worth your while to take a look.”

—Randall Stross