Today was spent reading from "The Timeless Way of Building".

• "So long as I build for myself, the patterns I use will be simple, and human, and full of feeling, because I understand my situation. But as soon as a few people begin to build for 'the many', their patterns about what is needed become abstract; no matter how well meaning they are, their ideas gradually get out of touch with reality, becuase they are not faced daily with the living examples of what the patterns say." (p. 235)
• "First, to be living as a language, it must be the shared vision of a group of people, very specific to their culture, able to capture their hopes and dreams, containing many childhood memories, and special local ways of doing things." (p. 336)
• "Even the ordinary language in a person's mind (English, French, whatever) is created by him - it is not learned. When a baby 'learns' language from his parents, or from people around him, he does not learn the rules which they have in their languages - because he cannot see or hear the rules. He only hears sentences which they produce. What he does then, is to invent systems of rules, for himself, rules which are entirely invented, for the first time, by him. He keeps changing these rules, until with them, he can produce a language similar to the language he hears. And at that stage, we say that he has 'learned' the language." (p. 338)
• "An organism, which seems at first sight like a stataic thing, is in fact a constant flux of processes. ... A town or building also is a constant flux of processes." (p. 356)