Pottery Quotes - Page 2

• In the 19th century China dominated the manufacture of porcelain. Then European factories discovered a cheaper method of making pottery of equal quality, demolishing the Chinese industry the exact reverse of what is happening now. World economics have turned full circle.

  Martin Sorrell

  Business, Circles, Chinese

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• The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues; he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Issues, Interesting, Political

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• The more I have learned about wine ... the more I have realized that it weaves in with human history from its very beginning as few, if any, other products do. Textiles, pottery, bread ... there are other objects of daily use that we can also trace back to the Stone Age. Yet wine alone is charged with sacramental meaning, with healing powers; indeed with a life of its own.

  Hugh S. Johnson

  Healing, Wine, Age

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• We asked a lot of questions and we watched everyone who was working in the studio. And we had an opportunity to sit in on discussions, aesthetic discussions at the pottery, which took place generally over tea breaks in the morning and afternoon. So we learned a lot just from being around there [with Bernard Leach ].

  Warren MacKenzie

  Morning, Opportunity, Tea

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• You never hear Jesus say in Pilate's judgement hall one word that would let you imagine that He was sorry that He had undertaken so costly a sacrifice for us. When His hands are pierced, when He is parched with fever, His tongue dried up like a shard of pottery, when His whole body is dissolved into the dust of death, you never hear a groan or a shriek that looks like Jesus is going back on His commitment.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Jesus, Sorry, Commitment

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• And as far as I know about Alix's [MacKenzie] work, I don't believe she ever did any sculptural work at all. It was always pottery.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Believe, Don't Believe, Knows

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.

  William S. Burroughs

  Wall, Sadness, Cat

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• I have no policy for my collection. For example, there's a bunch of meteorite [on the windowsill in my studio]. I touch it and I feel the energy from the universe. I have a 1/1,000th of a fragment of stone-age tools and pottery and debris. I can learn many things from my collection. Actually, the 1,000 Buddha, I wanted to buy it, but it's a National Treasure, so I couldn't. If you cannot buy it, just photograph it!

  Hiroshi Sugimoto

  Age, Energy, Example

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.

  John Ruskin

  Men, Cities, Steel

  John Ruskin (2012). “Selections From the Works of John Ruskin”, p.215, tredition

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• In the Leach Pottery we did most of our work on the wheel. [Bernard] Leach did a little work in the studio, which was press-molded forms, plastic clay pressed into plaster forms to make small rectangular boxes and some vase forms, which he liked to make. These were molds which had been made to an original that he had modeled in solid clay, and during our work there, sometimes I would be pressing these forms as a means of production.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Mean, Littles, Vases

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• When I was 16 I got a school holiday job at Minton's pottery factory in Staffordshire, packing plates. For a month's work, I was paid £44. Everything I now know about the birds and the bees, I learnt there.

  Anthea Turner

  Jobs, School, Holiday

  Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

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• Some crafts have been practiced for centuries. These crafts were created using skills passed from generation to generation, and were motivated by necessity such as baskets and pottery, or artistic expression, such as more baskets and more pottery. Today, there is a much more leisurely attitude toward crafting, and virtually anyone without a job and access to pipe cleaners can join the elite society of crafters.

  Amy Sedaris

  Jobs, Attitude, Skills

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• I think back to some of the pots we made when we first started our pottery, and they were pretty awful pots. We thought at the time they were good; they were the best we could make, but our thinking was so elemental that the pots had that quality also, and so they don't have a richness about them which I look for in my work today. Whether I achieve it all the time, that's another question, because I don't think a person can produce at top level 100 percent of the time.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Quality, Looks

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• I celebrated [my 50th birthday] by throwing a big bowl on the pottery wheel, then going for a water ski at the lake on our property in the Catskills, and that night, skinny-dipping under the stars. Just being free and joyful. And that's how I [felt] about turning 50.

  Marcia Gay Harden

  Stars, Night, Lakes

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• Do you think Patrick Swayze now goes up behind people in pottery classes and hugs them just to crack up other ghosts?

  Chris Hardwick

  Thinking, Class, People

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• I want to learn how to pick locks, swordfight, throw pottery - it's all research. It's like the curious person's version of James Bond's license to kill. I've got a license to learn.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Locks, Research, Want

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• American archaeology has always attracted lots of amateurs ... They were digging up Indian pottery all over the place.

  Anthony F. C. Wallace

  Science, America, Digging

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• I thought I was going to be able to use my painting ideas as decoration on pottery, but my painting did not translate into decoration on pottery. I thought it was going to, and in fact I made, while still in school, a plate with one of my paintings on it, and that's exactly what it was, it was a plate with a painting on it. It was not a decorated plate; it was just a painting superimposed over a three-dimensional ceramic form.

  Warren MacKenzie

  School, Ideas, Ceramics

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• We thought [with Alix MacKenzie], if those are the kinds of pots from every culture that interest us, why would we think that it should be any different in mid-North America 20th century? And we decided then that our work would center around that sort of utilitarian pottery, and that's what I've done ever since.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, America, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out!

  Chelsea Handler

  Country, Weekend, Thoughtful

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• I do remember that when we left [Bernard Leach] after two and a half years, we went home on a boat again - this was before air travel became really easy - and Alix [MacKenzie] turned to me and she said, "You know, that was a great two years of training, but that's not the way we're going to run our pottery."

  Warren MacKenzie

  Running, Home, Air

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• I'm trolling through the recesses of my mind for the things I did with my kids when they used to like to do things with me. They don't want to be around me now. I look back on these times - all those little funny pottery dishes that you'd pay for, and they'd paint, and they were ugly, and you glazed them, and you'd go back, pick them up, and it's like, "Oh, now I've got to put this on my desk." There's all that kind of stuff.

  Michelle Obama

  Kids, Mind, Looks

  Source: www.popsugar.com

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• We moved up here [to St.Paul with my wife] and started to teach, we very quickly found out we were not equipped either to teach or to run our own pottery, and so we decided that we had to have further training.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Running, Wife, Training

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Looking back on it now, I understand why that was not possible [to express ourselves], because the pottery employed a dozen people, not all of whom are making pots. And these people had families, children, and they had to have a wage that would allow them to raise their family and they had to get a paycheck every Friday afternoon. So if we had not made pots that would sell it, would not have been possible for these people to be employed.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Friday, Children, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land. We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sculpted, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth. We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite. We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education.

  Richard Wright

  Iron, Ivory, Medicine

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