Quotes & Sayings About The Invention Of Writing

The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged. — David Elkind

There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry. — Henry Miller

This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself behind my leaks.

"I know," I said.

"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.

"I know," I said.

There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention ... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts ... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done. — Ian McEwan

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world ... enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space. — Abraham Lincoln

Prehistory isn't like a 'veil' or a 'curtain' that 'lifts' to reveal the pre-set 'stage' of history. Rather, prehistory is an absence of something: an absence of writing. So a better image of the 'dawn of history' might be an AM radio in the pre-dawn hours: you recognize wisps of words or music across the dial, inter blending, and noise obscures even the few clear-channel stations. The first ones we find, when we switch on the radio of history about 3200B.C.E., come from Mesopotamia, and those from Egypt soon emerge. Eventually the neighbouring lands produce records, with the effect that the ancient Near East is probably the best documented civilization before the invention of printing." (Daniels and Bright, page 19) — Peter T. Daniels

Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri's real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others. — Jorge Luis Borges

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers. — Wendell Phillips

He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce. — Samuel Johnson

Decade's reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only-but it is something- that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample. — Annie Dillard

The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together. — Bill Gates

Does writing exist for the typewriter, or the typewriter for writing? . . . the invention of the computer would one day make [the] argument obsolete . . . technologies exist for humans, and not vice versa. — Minae Mizumura

Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgement of his own works. On that which has cost him much labour he sets a high value, because he is unwilling to think that he has been diligent in vain: what has been produced without toilsome efforts is considered with delight as a proof of vigorous faculties and fertile invention; and the last work, whatever it be, has necessarily most of the grace of novelty. — Samuel Johnson

I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters. — Barbara Kingsolver

One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. — James Gleick

Writing is the great invention of the world. — Abraham Lincoln

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882) — Ralph Waldo Emerson

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are. — W. Somerset Maugham

The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention — Barbara Kingsolver

In writing The Invention of Wings, I was inspired by the words of Professor Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: "History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own." ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest thanks to . . . — Sue Monk Kidd

Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival. — Harold Innis

We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are. — Henry David Thoreau

What I saw quite clearly in the '80s, before the internet, was that the whole world was shifting toward digital formats, and that didn't matter whether it's movies or writing or whatever. It was something that was coming. And with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early '90s, when we were teaching our first courses, or the arrival of the internet by way of the browser, which opened up the internet to everybody - soon it was just revolutionary. — Robert Coover

You know this has really affected my ability to trust myself. No matter what happened in my life, I was always able to trust myself. My instincts. Two men in a row carrying on indiscretions makes me feel like I made up some story. Almost like a fiction, I
wrote in my mind that had a beginning, middle and end. It feels like I manufactured some ideal life that was a made-up invention that I needed to believe was the truth. — Jacqueline Simon Gunn

In years past, a person died, and eventually all those with memories of him or her also died, bringing about the complete erasure of that person's existence. Just as the human body returned to dust, mingling with atoms of the natural world, a person's existence would return to nothingness.

How very clean.

Now, as if in belated punishment for the invention of writing, any message once posted on the Internet was immortal. Words as numerous as the dust of the earth would linger forever in their millions and trillions and quadrillions and beyond. — Minae Mizumura

The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention. — Henri Matisse

Memory is the friend of wit, but the treacherous ally of invention; there are many books that owe their success to two things; good memory of those who write them, and the bad memory of those who read them — Charles Caleb Colton

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention. — Peter Carey

Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish). — Sandra Scarr

I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this usefull invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our Doctors very particularly about it, if I knew anyone of 'em that I thought had Virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of Revenue for the good of Mankind, but that Distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their Resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it. — Mary Wortley Montagu

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing ...
For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That's what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing. — John Banville

The Bible must be the invention of either good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God. It could not be the invention of good men or angels, for they neither would or could make a book, and tell lies all the time they were writing it, saying, 'Thus saith the Lord,' when it was their own invention. It could not be the invention of bad men or devils, for they would not make a book which commands all duty, forbids all sin, and condemns their souls to hell for all eternity. Therefore, I draw this conclusion, that the Bible must be given by divine inspiration. — John Wesley

If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing. This method of translating speech into graphic record not merely made it possible to transmit impulses and messages throughout the system, but to fix accountability when written orders were not carried out. Accountability and the written word both went along historically with the control of large numbers; and it is no accident that the earliest uses of writing were not to convey ideas, religious or otherwise, but to keep temple records of grain, cattle, pottery, fabricated goods, stored and disbursed. This happened early, for a pre-dynastic Narmer mace in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford records the taking of 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The arithmetical reckoning was an even greater feat than the capture. — Lewis Mumford

You don't realize what a strain it is on the nerves to write or think-of-writing all day long, and to sleep full of nervous dreams, and to wake up not knowing who one is: this all stems from anxiety about finishing the book, about time 'growing short', etc., and the perpetual strain of invention. — Jack Kerouac

When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising
computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence. — Carl Sagan

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing. — Douglas Engelbart

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances. — Andre Breton

To Lincoln, words always mattered most. Newspaper stories lived but a single day, caricatures flamed into view and just as quickly faded, and even the most flattering photographs inevitably receded behind the thick covers of family albums. But words lived forever. Writing, Lincoln believed, was "the great invention of the world. — Harold Holzer

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it's very healthy, because it's the only place where we never lie. At night we don't lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life. — Helene Cixous

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. — Marge Piercy

Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The beautiful unruliness of literature is what makes it so much fun to wander through: you read Jane Austen and you say, oh, that is IT. And then you turn around and read Sterne, and you say, Man, that is IT. And then you wander across a century or so, and you run into Kafka, or Calvino, or Cortazar, and you say, well that is IT. And then you stroll through what Updike called the grottos of Ulysses, and after that you consort with Baldwin or Welty or Spencer, or Morrison, or Bellow or Fitzgerald and then back to W. Shakespeare, Esq; the champ, and all the time you feel the excitement of being in the presence of IT. And when you yourself spend the good time writing, you are not different in kind than any of these people, you are part of that miracle of human invention. So get to work. Get on with IT, no matter how difficult IT is. Every single gesture, every single stumble, every single uninspired-feeling hour, is worth IT. Richard Bausch — Kathy Fish

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. — Jacob Bronowski

Think for a moment about the process that humans have used to record events throughout history. The first evidence we know of is paintings on cave walls. A little further along in time, after many intermediate steps, we see the development of writing. In the more recent past, we see the invention of the camera, audio recording devices, and ultimately video. The manner in which humans have recorded history (and to a lesser extent our own lives) has evolved. We've come a long way. Consider the implications of time. Much of the technology we take for granted today was pure science fiction 50-100 years ago, a dream 200 years ago, and inconceivable 500 years ago. Using these groupings of viewpoints, we can project into the future and categorize the possibilities. In — Todd William

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review. — Susan Larson

Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper. — John Dos Passos

But I hate things all fiction ... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar. — Lord Byron

Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist — Robert Charles Wilson