greg > greg's Quotes

“The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“To trim, I decided, is human, which probably explains the modernists’ contempt for it. Because if we’re not using trim to hide our poor craftsmanship, we’re using it to proclaim our fine craftsmanship—either way, sloth or pride, trim embodies the most human of failings and thereby spoils the supreme objectivity that modernists strove for.”
― Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

“The reason I didn’t have a normal, dad-built tree house is that, as I’ve indicated, I didn’t have anything even approaching that kind of dad. He was, and remains, one of the world’s great indoorsmen, a delegator of all conceivable outdoor tasks—lawn mowing, car washing, gutter cleaning, and tree-house building. By the time I was ten, which was when I’d kicked off my campaign for a tree house in the woods behind our ranch, he didn’t even own the tools needed to build one, having “accidentally” nailed his tool chest behind the walls of a cedar closet he’d tried to build for my mother in the basement. Whether consciously or not, my father had clearly wanted to make sure the cedar closet would be his last do-it-yourself project, and it was.”
― Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams