Pile Quotes - page 5
The "Second System Effect":
An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint.
As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used "next time.” Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system.
This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable.
The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."
Fred Brooks
My talents are not those of Kan Pao, elegant explorer of the records of the Gods; I am rather animated by the spirit of Su Tung-P'o, who loved to hear men speak of the supernatural. I get people to commit what they tell me to writing, and subsequently I dress it up in the form of a story; thus in the lapse of time my friends from all quarters have supplied me with quantities of material, which, from my habit of collecting, has grown into a vast pile.
Pu Songling
I am a big believer that orderliness begets wealth. A pile of bills and statements - whether paid or not - is a sign that someone is clueless about what's coming in and going out. When you consciously open, read, and file away your bills and statements, you are connecting with your money and taking control of your life.
Suze Orman
In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the 1950s and '60s, consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in vast towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away - but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980, the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them: billions of dollars of worth, week after week.
Philip K. Dick
Mammonism is the unlimited hypertrophy of the - in itself healthy - human drive for acquisition. Mammonism is the lust for money grown into a madness, which knows no higher goal than to pile money on top of money, which seeks with unequaled brutality to coerce all forces of the world into its service, and must lead to the economic enslavement, to the exploitation of the work-potential of all peoples of the world.
Gottfried Feder
Bill [=Willem de Kooning ] was working on a huge canvas. It was black and white. And I said to him, 'It's very curious.' You know, I came into the studio. I had my separate studio and I walked in and I said, 'It's very curious. There are no treelike shapes in that painting. The forms are all like animals more or less and organic shapes that don't resemble the forest at all, but I get the feeling of Faulkner forest from that painting.' Bill said, 'That's extraordinary.' And he went over and lifted up a pile of papers and underneath was a book by Faulkner and later he named a painting 'Light in August.
Elaine de Kooning
That's something that I regret – that I allowed them to browbeat me into doing an album every year. Because when I took time out to have children I got behind in my albums. One year I had to do three in a row. The same year! Just to keep up with my contract with them. What a pile of bullshit that is.
Anne Murray
