Latest Robert Bringhurst Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• We're into the era of desktop bureaucracy, where people sit at computers building websites and analyzing data rather than listening or reading.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Reading, People, Listening

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• My own view is that violence is a part of classical Haida literature - and of every mythology everywhere, so far as I can tell - because it's part of life itself. In the world of the hamburger stand and the supermarket, or the vegan café and the ashram, you might try to tell yourself it's possible to be nonviolent. In a hunting and gathering society, violence is more difficult to hide.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Hunting, Trying, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the world.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Native American, Violence, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Anxiety projection can and does occur - in myth, in music, in fiction, and in the doctor's office too. That doesn't make it the basis of everything.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Office, Anxiety, Myth

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Nature, or the world, or reality, is what mythology is all about.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Reality, World, Mythology

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The claim that myth is always a narrative spin-off of ritual; the claim that myth is the projection of human anxieties onto a cosmological scrim; the claim that myths are invented to give sanction to human predilections and institutions... These are ways of trivializing a mode of thought that has served humanity well for a very long time.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Long, Giving, Anxiety

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Many intellectual heroes in the European tradition seem to find the great outdoors a chilling prospect - and its literary analogue, the mythworld, equally chilling. As if a world in which humans have no leverage, and might not be present at all, couldn't be interesting to humans.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Hero, Interesting, Intellectual

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Perception, World, Emotion

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Character, Literature, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.

  Robert Bringhurst

  House, Mind, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Every Native North American text I've ever grappled with has taught me something important about how to live on the continent where I was born.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Important, Native

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Literature, Russian Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com