When you hold a book in your hand, nothing will happen unless you work to make it happen. When you hold a book, the power and the responsibility are entirely yours.
Jonathan Franzen, from Perchance to Dream, his 1996 essay for Harper’s, which I mentioned last week.
Interesting to find this quote in the afterglow of Facebook’s announcement of its “friction-less sharing.” Any physicist knows that it’s impossible to exist in a frictionless universe, and that friction hasn’t been diminished with Facebook’s sharing model so much as transferred the work of making sense of things from the one sharing to the audience.
(via viafrank)