a cut-glass age
“There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly moustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterwards and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and cases—for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cut-Glass Bowl, from Flappers and Philosophers, 1920.
singing the Colombian national anthem
“You never know how many kinds of music there are in the world until you move to New York and start taking cabs. It’s like, from your apartment to Trader Vic’s you get Cuban music, and then from Trader Vic’s to Canal Bar you’ve got Zorba the Greek music and then Indian ragas from Canal Bar to Nell’s, Scandinavian heavy metal on the way from Nell’s up to Emile’s apartment. After that you start singing the Colombian national anthem.”
—Jay McInerney, Story of My Life, 1988.
Seadragon and Photosynth
digital publishing
“Five hundred years ago, when books were first introduced, they were greeted with the same level of skepticism that digital reading is facing today. Gutenberg’s bibles, as much as we revere them now, were not welcomed with open arms or eager hands.
‘Medieval clerics greeted printed books as imposters of illuminated manuscripts—aesthetically inferior, textually unreliable and likely to breed a dangerous diversity of opinion,’ wrote Jacob Weisberg in The New York Times in 2000. ‘The echo of such views is heard today in an equally misguided elite’s hostility toward digital publishing.’”
—Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead; Books in Our Digital Age, 2008.
words
“In the end, we may be in love with books, but it’s words that have truly won our hearts. It’s words that whisper into our ear and transform us, that make us believe in other worlds or new emotions we didn’t know existed; it’s words that keep us company in . . . planes, on subway trains, or our comfy couches. It is words, not books, paper, papyrus of vellum pages that transform our lives.”
—Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead; Books in Our Digital Age, 2008.
in a digital setting
“When William Faulkner finished As I Lay Dying in 1929, he wanted each of the characters to be represented by a different color ink. But the publisher balked, declaring it too expensive. Today, what Faulkner wanted could be easily accomplished in a digital setting.”
—Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead; Books in Our Digital Age, 2008.
‘How like Monet!’
“When music reminded me of something which was not music, I supposed it was getting me somewhere. ‘How like Monet!’ I thought when listening to Debussy, and ‘How like Debussy!’ when looking at Monet. I translated sounds into colours, saw the piccolo as apple-green, and the trumpets as scarlet.”
—E.M. Forster, Not Listening to Music, from Two Cheers for Democracy, 1939.
the conventional colouring of life
“The clock ticked, the coals blazed higher, and contended with the white radiance that poured in through the windows. Unnoticed, the sun occupied his sky, and the shadows of the tree stems, extraordinarily solid, fell like trenches of purple across the frosted lawn. It was a glorious winter morning. Evie’s fox terrier, who had passed for white, was only a dirty grey dog now, so intense was the purity that surrounded him. He was discredited, but the blackbirds that he was chasing glowed with Arabian darkness, for all the conventional colouring of life had been altered. Inside, the clock struck ten with a rich and confident note.”
—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.
a tract of quivering grey
“Certainly London fascinates. One visualizes it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity.”
—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.
but London was not afraid
“London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract.”
—E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910.