As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.

— Marginalia by monks working on illuminated manuscripts (source)

The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

— From “Pearls Before Breakfast,” by Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post (source)

Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing…

— Molly Wood on Facebook news apps and “frictionless” sharing (source)

And then in the afternoon I get to say things like, “The robot lost its claw!” That is just something you never get to say when you’re talking about the Garfield administration.

— Sarah Vowell, on recording for 'The Incredibles' and writing about history (source)

In Rwanda, I was under shell fire for hours. I was shot at. Once, I had a machete held to my neck. I was a goner, I thought. But a French photographer in the car talked them out of it.

— Jackie Northam, NPR foreign affairs correspondent, on covering war (source)

…we cannot assume that the campaign visible to the mass audience is the same campaign that’s being pitched to individuals and groups around the nation…

— NYT's Derek Willis, on covering increasingly sophisticated political campaigns (source)

Did I notice you dropping three cubes of sugar in my tea in a scandalous manner?

— McSweeney's: Masterpiece Theatre's Missed Connections (source)

If you’ve ever known a misfit or a dork, you know that they’re not stupid. They’re just odd, and odd is measured on a different axis than dumb.

— Linda Holmes of NPR, critiquing a new Fox TV show (source)

I do not know how American Gods looks from the outside. I’ve never read it, not to find out what happened next, anyway. I wrote it to find out what happened next, and that’s a very different thing.

— Neil Gaiman, on writing the novel 'American Gods' (source)

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.

— Steve Jobs, on interdisciplinarity (source)

Words have meaning. Type has spirit. And the combination is spectacular.

— Paula Scher, on typography (source)

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.

— Steve Jobs, in a 1996 interview with Wired (source)

I got a report card in first grade that said, “Jack excels in his studies and really enjoys math and English, but he starts fights on the playground that he brings back into the classroom.” I’ve tried to make that my operating premise: Let’s start some fights and see who wins.

— Jack Shafer, columnist for Slate (source)

Warren Buffett is the wealthy industrialist. “Warren Buffet” is the all-you-can-eat restaurant run by superintelligent rabbits.

— Fake AP Stylebook wins the afternoon (source)

I haven’t died on schedule, and I’ve been learning not to live life on one either.

— Mark Trautwein, on living with AIDS for almost 30 years (source)

I don’t trust children. They’re here to replace us. Nice try, kids.

— Stephen Colbert, on children (source)

If you ever need a crash course in color theory, ride ‘It’s a Small World’ repeatedly.

— Designer Sean Adams, on color palettes (source)

He spells it as it sounds. It’s not a bad strategy. The alternative is to guess where the errant letters are hidden, and in that way lies madness.

— From “American Bee” by James Maguire (source)

But in an age when everyone is a picture-maker, and every situation a photo-op, there is the danger that we tend to become, one and all, producers.

— Alva Noë, on photography and detachment (source)

Do nothing I cannot defend.

— From Jim Lehrer’s MacNeil / Lehrer Editorial Guidelines (source)

An infographic is, by definition, a visual display of facts and data. Therefore, no infographic can be produced in the absence of reliable information.

— Juan Antonio Giner and Alberto Cairo, on ethics in infographics (source)