Dan Kieran quotes

“The word hammockable (describing two trees that are the perfect distance apart between which a hammock can be hung) is not in the dictionary, but it should be. [Of lying in hammocks]”
-- Dan Kieran

Source : Dan Kieran, Tom Hodgkinson (2012). “The Book of Idle Pleasures”, p.194, Random House

#Distance Quotes #Lying Quotes #Two Quotes

“What is it about maps and globes that seems to require our undivided attention? I've spent hours looking at maps of places I will never see and maps so old that they are a record of nothing but the faintest glow of the past. Perhaps they turn us into gods, letting us look down at the insignificant drones that occupy the earth. Or maybe they simply feed off our hunger to go off into the unknown. Venturing off to places where people don't chain themselves to tedious jobs and financial debts but places of imagination, mystery and freedom Perhaps they're just trying to tell us something.”
-- Dan Kieran

Source : Tom Hodgkinson, Dan Kieran (2010). “The Book of Idle Pleasures”, p.48, Andrews McMeel Publishing

#Jobs Quotes #Past Quotes #Imagination Quotes

“Sarah took a deep breath and set off along the passageway again. A clump of lichen on the gatepost opened its eyes and watched her go. The eyes, on tendrils, had an anxious look, and when she had gone some distance away the clump, swiveling its eyes toward each other, commenced to gossip among itself. Most of it disapproved of the direction she had taken. You could tell that from the way the eyes looked meaningfully into each other. Lichen knows about directions.”

Source : Jim Henson, A.C.H. Smith (2014). “Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Novelization”, p.49, Simon and Schuster

“Typography must be as beautiful as a forest, not like the concrete jungle of the tenements It gives distance between the trees, the room to breathe and allow for life.”

“Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.”

“Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.”

“Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.”

“It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.”

“On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.”

“I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they'd taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.”

“What's so great about television. You're able to tell a long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.”

“I think there are two ways to depict a family. One is what it's really like, and one is what the audience would like it to be. Between you and me, I think the second one is what I would prefer.”