Eric Ellis & Tumblr
I'm a Chicago designer who graduated from Columbia College May 2010. I believe inspiration comes from unexpected places, and therefore it is necessary to look beyond the familiar to bring new ideas to light. This Tumblr allows me to record my discoveries in hopes of providing some nugget of truth or inspiration to the next fellow.
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It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
Ernest Hemingway
Posted Feb. 10 – 2012 / 1 Notes / Tagged: words inspiration
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“The sun has a dark power. The colorful clarity on the shore full of promise.”
Paul Klee, Tunisia 1920
Posted Nov. 3 – 2011 / 1 Notes / Tagged: drawing words
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Posted Nov. 2 – 2011 / 0 Notes / Tagged: words
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…when we know and feel that Nature is our friend, not our implacable enemy that an afternoon in the country, an hour by the sea, a full open view of one single day, through dawn, high noon, and twilight, will suggest to us so much that is rhythmical, deep, and eternal in the vast art of architecture, something so deep, so true, that all the narrow formalities, hand and fast rules, and strangling bonds of the schools cannot stifle it in us then it may be proclaimed that we are on the high road to a natural and satisfying art, an architecture that will live because it will be of the people, for the people, and by the people.
The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, Louis H. Sulliver, March 1896
(Source: academics.triton.edu)
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Autumn, with two zeros above her nose arguing over the sun being dark or Bach is as famous as its commotion & that she herself—not Orpheus—is the logical poet “I am the logical poet” she screams “Spring? Spring is only the beginning!” she attempts to make Cream Judge jealous by telling him of down-to-earth people & while the universe is erupting, she points to the slow train & prays for rain and for time to interfere—she is not extremely fat but rather progressively unhappy…
Highway 61 Revisited, Liner Notes, Bob Dylan 1965
Posted Oct. 17 – 2011 / 2 Notes / Tagged: streamofconciousness bobdylan words inspiration
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Louis Sullivan • March, 1896
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Bob Dylan’s Dream
While riding on a train going west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream and it made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had
With half damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many afternoon
Where we together we weathered many a storm
Laughing and singing, ‘till the early hours of the morn
By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words was told our songs were sung
We longed for nothing and we were satisfied
Joking and talking about the world outside
With hungry hearts through the heat and cold
We never much thought we could get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
And our chances were really, was a million to one
As easy as it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices they was few so thought never hit
That the one road we traveled, would ever shattered or split
Ah many a year has passed and gone
Many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a first friend
And each one I’ve never seen again
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly, if our lives could be like that
1963
(Source: )
Posted Sep. 16 – 2011 / 0 Notes / Tagged: inspiration words
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If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.
Posted Aug. 23 – 2011 / 1 Notes / Tagged: words
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Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.
Milan Kundera
Posted Aug. 10 – 2011 / 1 Notes / Tagged: words
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People seem unable to admit this principle of chance. Our spirits are not strong enough to stand the idea of life being a mere succession of chances—the idea, that is, of infinity. Each of us in his individual existence, which is contained between the chance of his birth and the chance of his death, identifies those few incidents that have arisen through what he styles his “will”, and the thing that emerges consistently from this he calls his “character” or again his “life”. Thus we contrive to comfort ourselves, there is, in fact, no other way for us to think.
Fires On the Plain, Ooka Shohei, 1951, Penguin Publishing, p233
Posted Aug. 5 – 2011 / 3 Notes / Tagged: words inspiration
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All drawings & graphics featured on this Tumblr were created by me, unless tagged: link or inspiration
