Tony Hiss famous quotes

Whenever we make changes in our surroundings, we can too easily shortchange ourselves, by cutting ourselves off from some of the sights and sounds, the shapes or textures, or other information from a place that have helped mold our understanding and are now necessary for us to thrive. Overdevelopment and urban sprawl can damage our own lives as much as they damage our cities and countryside.
-- Tony Hiss

#Cutting #Sight #Cities

People need immediate places to refresh, reinvent themselves. Our surroundings built and natural alike, have an immediate and a continuing effect on the way we feel and act, and on our health and intelligence. These places have an impact on our sense of self, our sense of safety, the kind of work we get done, the ways we interact with other people, even our ability to function as citizens in a democracy. In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become.
-- Tony Hiss

#Self #Impact #People

Our relationship with places is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think.
-- Tony Hiss

#Thinking #Abstract #Our Relationship

Here is a book to savor?flavorful and nutritious, it sticks to the mind's ribs. The 'New Agrarianism' is about Americans re-learning how to care for the land, and Eric Freyfogle has thoughtfully assembled a banquet of eloquent voices.
-- Tony Hiss

#Book #Land #Voice

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

It will be thought that I am acting strangely in concerning myself at this day with what appears at first sight and simply a well-known method of fortune-telling.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.

Considered as a mere question of physics, (and keeping all moral considerations entirely out of sight,) the appearance of man is a geological phenomenon of vast importance, indirectly modifying the whole surface of the earth, breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature.

We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places, it is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present.

I prefer the countryside to cities. This is also true of my films: I have made more films in rural societies, and villages, than in towns.

I've never had a treehouse because I live in New York City. It would be a little bit hard to fit a treehouse in a New York City apartment.

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.

Defend Paris to the last, destroy all bridges over the Seine and devastate the city.