A collection of my favorite quotes, sourced from my Twitter account, Instapaper and Kindle highlights, and things I’ve saved from various sources in my Notes app.
RSS
Thirty-four isn’t old for anyone. It’s just not young for a baseball player.
This world is intricately stitched together, boys. Every thread we pull, we know not how it affects the design of things. We’re but children on this earth, pulling bolts out of the Ferris wheel, thinking ourselves to be gods.
Each client we work with, each platform we support – they aren’t isolated transactions. They’re votes cast in an ongoing election about what kind of world we’re building.
The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly.
Lots of “Why did they do that dumb thing?” comes down to “We didn’t know”. Conversely, a lot of “Wow, they were brilliant!” also is not real planning: it just happened to turn out well.
In a world where it’s easy to feel like you're losing your grip, it’s a good reminder: your grip is fine. You’re just being handed a lot of slippery things.
There is no more profound human bias than the expectation that tomorrow will be like today. It is a powerful heuristic tool because it is almost always correct.
For a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.
The kind of things that you learn in this experience are more like what you learn by running a marathon or moving to a new city: you can talk about them, but it doesn’t really impart the knowledge.
We set up the clichés and reversed the audience’s expectation of the outcome. That’s all it is. … That worked 30 years ago, it’ll work today and it’ll work 30 years from now.
If you had a magically weighted coin that came up heads 60% of the time, it would take quite a while for your friends to realize your relatively unambitious chicanery.
When you hire someone to run your hot-dog stand and he starts telling the customers that hot dogs are bad for them, that relationship won’t endure. Even if he’s right about the hot dogs.
The universe is divided into two types of people: “I had to go through it, so you should too” and “I had to go through it, so I will work and change it to make sure you don’t.” You choose.
Millie Tran
Twitter
January 22, 2021
Ignoring near misses is how people and societies get in real trouble the next time.
We’re driving faster and faster into the future, trying to steer by using only the rear-view mirror.
Marshall McLuhan
September 28, 2020
Whether our graves are the cold and shadowy depths of the ocean or a potter’s field stacked with plague victims, the grave awaits us all, and always has. Your efforts matter as much as they always did, which is to say not one little tiny bit, except that they are the most precious of things — they are your heart.
I sort of swore off deadlines because they seemed so hazardous to health. But in many ways, they’re helpful to mental health because you can be done with something.
It's one thing to buy a ticket, plop down in a box seat and take out your frustrations on some bum who hacks weakly at a curveball, but it's a wholly different thing to repeatedly kick a man when he's down.
They didn’t have a guinea pig mirror at the pet shop. I suggested maybe they have one for dogs or cats that would work, and Madi says “dogs don’t need mirrors — they already know they’re all that”
Josh Fallon
March 4, 2019
At dinner, Madi keeps finding little bones in her salmon, and is getting frustrated/concerned. Charli chimes in: “You know what they say… ‘Fish got bones!’”
Josh Fallon
January 15, 2019
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.
Case went to John, the bartender, and said, “I don’t understand. There are only two ingredients in a martini. What’s special about yours?” John said, “Oh. You have to make it with love.”
Is there a way to celebrate a place without the possibility of destroying it? Or is this just what we are now -- a horde with a checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?
Talking at the dinner table about chow mein noodles which were labeled as “improved taste”. Ashley: they don’t really have a taste, they’re just crunchy. Charli: Yes, they do have taste. Oh my god, do they have taste.
Josh Fallon
November 7, 2018
Your words carry a lot of weight. But your testimony speaks so much louder when you struggle.
I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art.
Scene: Sunday night, Fallon family car. Been out all day, everyone is hungry, still need to make a trip to the grocery store. Madi: “What’s a good dinner cereal?”
Josh Fallon
August 27, 2018
“I told him I was in a storage room, and it was loud because there was a band downstairs,” he says. “He said, ‘They’re playing a Pearl Jam song.’ I told him, ‘That IS Pearl Jam.’ ”
In fact, as I wrote this article I realized just how far the iMac’s design legacy has gone. My family owns a bright blue first-generation Nissan Leaf. I realize now that for the last year I’ve been driving around an iMac G3.
Nowadays, companies hang flat screen TVs hanging on the walls, all them running 24/7 to display a variety of charts. Most everyone ignores them. The spirit is right, to be transparent all the time, but the understanding of human nature is not. We ignore things that are shown to us all the time.
We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay.
Our culture might be a corpse, and everything you see in it and confuse for life might just be the nails and hair of the corpse still expanding after death.
There wasn’t really time to kick your feet back on the desk and say, ‘This is going to be really fucking awesome one day.’ It was like, ‘Holy fuck, we’re fucked.’
Now, I’m no fan of death. I don't like the time commitment, or the permanence. A number of people I love are dead and it has strained our relationship.
Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven't been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate
I said, “Harry, pretty soon I’m not going to have a job. I’m retiring. But everything will be the same.” And he said, “Will I still get to watch the Cartoon Network?” That was his concern about my retirement.
Grandma Melinda: “Whoa Charli, you’re really into those oranges.” Charli: “Somebody’s not gettin’ scurvy!”
Josh Fallon
March 5, 2017
A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
Of course his shirt’s top couple buttons were undone and his tie was askew and his whole just general appearance made it look like he’d been rolled down a hill, because Stan Van Gundy always looks like he’s just been rolled down a hill
On a scale of 1 to 10, the attention to detail on an average job is about an 8. For Apple it was 100, just off-the-charts, unprecedented attention to detail. Should the sleeves be rolled up twice or three times? Should the jeans come in at the bottom just a half-an-inch? Are those shoelaces off-putting?
The same brutal, merciless ingenuity that we bring to ruining the world is the exact same ingenuity applied by the scientists working at the Frozen Zoo and elsewhere, poised at the horizon of existence, willfully pulling our animal brethren back from the edge
So the very things that appeal to people about him are the opposite of most sports TV does. It's like we can't get enough of this, and we can't stop doing the exact opposite.
But just as modern street lighting has slowly blotted the stars from the visible skies, so too have cars and planes and factories and flickering digital screens combined to rob us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.
Yes, online and automated life is more efficient, it makes more economic sense, it ends monotony and “wasted” time in the achievement of practical goals. But it denies us the deep satisfaction and pride of workmanship that comes with accomplishing daily tasks well, a denial perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom such tasks are also a livelihood — and an identity.
You can get better, no matter how good you are, if you do the work — tirelessly, relentlessly and with a profound and abiding belief that what you are doing matters.
Is it possible that parkour, with its emphasis on agility and creativity instead of bulk and brute force, is really the tightest link we have in sports to our evolutionary past?
From way out here, it hits you that we’re living in a phase—a sad little window that an intelligent species inevitably passes through, when they’re advanced enough to understand their own mortality, but still too primitive to save themselves from it
Do you think we’re headed toward a future where we’re only going to be talking about weird, very hard to forecast events, precisely because we get good at avoiding a lot of problems and mistakes?
When everything works, the reader flashes green and emits a pleasing tone; if something goes wrong, it glows blue—never red. Red lights are forbidden at Disney, as they imply something bad happened. Nothing bad can happen at Disney World.
Me: “Free Birds got an 18% on rotten tomatoes”. Madi: “I knew it was gonna be bad… too many fart jokes in the trailer”.
Josh Fallon
March 15, 2014
Sometimes it’s no good to be too humble. Sometimes it’s no good to be too egocentric. So what has happened is, I took him down, he pulled me up, and we met in the middle. That is Siegfried & Roy.
Madi: why can't I see the lint on your shirt now? Me: a black light made it show up before Madi: what? that would just be a light turned off
Josh Fallon
January 2, 2012
Madi: “Why don't restaurants have clocks in them? That's my biggest issue.”
Josh Fallon
December 10, 2011
Madi: “Dogs make you happy. Cats make you... Eh.”
Josh Fallon
November 11, 2011
I think that you can wait forever for the muse to sit on your shoulder, but most of the time you know what has to be done and inspiration is not going to help you.
Stop. Pull everything together into a single stack, take a breath, and enjoy the work. We’re not tarring roofs in 100° heat. We get to build for the web, and life is wonderful.
The DirecTV screensaver just bounced off the corner of the screen PERFECTLY. No better way to punctuate a great vacation.
Josh Fallon
August 15, 2011
Me: “I wonder what cell phones will be like when you're a teenager.” Madi: “I bet they'll be awesome, like 'Phineas & Ferb' awesome.”
Josh Fallon
July 2, 2011
We make in the hope that what we produce can carry us somewhere better, to a place more satisfactory. If we can do this for ourselves, we are lucky. When we are able to do so for others, we are tending towards glory.
Frank Chimero
June 20, 2011
Charli: “Dad, did you know that work is fun?”
Josh Fallon
May 29, 2011
My 5 year old daughter informed me the male seahorse carries the eggs, and I had to pretend I didn't already learn that from @JimGaffigan
Josh Fallon
May 18, 2011
Madi: “Dad, did Mom make dinner or did you make dinner?” Me: “Mom.” Madi: “Good.”
Josh Fallon
May 9, 2011
In every kind of creative endeavor – and great technology is indeed a form of creative expression – there’s a difference between real art and mere technical competence. It’s impossible to quantify but which everybody can intuit it almost instantly.