Graffiti Painted Quotes

I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.

I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what’s on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.

For a while, for as long as you're looking at it, that painting is the world and you get to be in it.

Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

Kept dreaming of this spot she had on her neck, this tiny country. I wanted to visit, to paint a picture of what I found there, a wall with a road map of her skin.

Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron. It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist.

Open skies painted above painted doorways and painted birds skimming across bricks trying to fly away. Little bird, what are you thinking? You come from a can.

Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?

I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don't want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.

And I look at him because he needs to be looked at. He needs to be seen. I hate that he has been on his own for so long painting graffiti moons in the dark keeping quiet about who he really is.

We spent a few minutes painting light graffiti. Grover wrote Pan 4ever. I wrote AC+PJ.

I escaped onto the wall, a painted ghost trapped in a jar. I stood back to look at it and I knew the sad thing wasn't that the ghost was running out of air. the sad thing was that he had enough air in that small space to last him a lifetime. What were you thinking, little ghost? Letting yourself get trapped like that?

Some spray-painted graffiti on the wall asks, Is it nothing to you all who pass by? Lamentations 1:12 and I think, No, Lord, whoever the hell You are, this is not nothing to me. This counts.

Most times I look at Shadow and Poet's work, I see something different from what the words are telling me. I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.

The police have no leads as yet on the person or persons who painted obscene suggestions on the buildings. One store owner said he was going to leave a dictionary on a public bench so the vandals could at least spell the obscenities correctly.

Let me meet Poet, too, but mainly Shadow. The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growing from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers. A guy who paints things like that is a guy I could fall for. Really fall for

I hear everything he's ever painted in his voice. I hear that person on the beach, looking at the waves. I hear hearts rocked by earthquakes and disappointed seas. I make myself look at him because he needs to be looked at. He needs to be seen. I hate that he's been on his own so long, painting graffiti moons and bricked-in birds and keeping quiet about who he really is.

the usual graffiti on the wall. JRH WAS HERE. NICK LOVES CASS. Visitors leaving the worst parts of themselves behind in fluorescent paint.

I took the money and passed the box across the counter and said politely, ‘Your choice of colour really lacks style.’ I smiled and Beth laughed and the guy asked to see my manager. I got Bert and he leant over the box and looked at the paint and said, ‘Ed was being polite. Your choice of colour is shit.

It isn't the smallness of this place that bothers me. It's the grey that's worked its way into the walls. It's the stains on the carpet from some other life that came and left before ours. Bert always said he'd give me a good deal on paint but some places take burning down and rebuilding to make them shiny." -Ed, page 10

[The graffiti] had a sort of Christmassy look to it. The green paint tended to be short top to bottom but long front site to side. The red paint was fat and closed up. It sort of looked like garlands with red balls hanging down. There was even "Ho, ho, ho" if you skipped around a little and deleted an "e" on the last "ho". Our green painter had a limited vocabulary and occasionally mixed up a professional working woman with a garden implement.

[Graffiti] gets erased and painted over, and maybe it's even more beautiful because we know it won't last.

She loved that boy with her whole heart, but my God, there were days when she couldn’t fully breathe until she’d left him at the schoolyard gate. That’s all over now; she would staple him to her, sew him into her skin, affix her body permanently to his now, if she could. She’d grow her hair into his scalp, would become his conjoined twin-mother. She would forgo a private thought in her head for the rest of her life, if she could keep him safe. Luca waits at the corner, and Lydia looks beyond him, across the street, where the side of a building is painted with graffiti. A giant question mark. No. No, it’s not a question mark. Lydia stops cold. She puts her hand out for Luca.

I hear people talking about the feeling they get when they pain stuff in illegal places. Leo says he gets this fast-moving fear swinging through him, running from his heart to everyplace under his skin. I pain to get the thoughts in me out. I paint so it gets quiet under my skin.

My students tag tables, walls, and chairs because their greatest fear is that no one will ever remember them. They do not believe they can give impassioned speeches, rally people in protest, paint masterpieces. They think they will die, small and forgotten, and it dictates their every action.

There is a bus station in Henry, but it isn't on Main Street. It's one block north - the town fathers hadn't wanted all the additional traffic. The station lost one-third of its roof to a tornado fifteen years ago. In the same summer, a bottle rocket brought the gift of fire to its restrooms. The damage has never been repaired, but the town council makes sure that the building is painted fresh every other year, and always the color of a swimming pool. There is never graffiti. Vandals would have to drive more than twenty miles to buy the spray paint. Every once in a long while, a bus creeps into town and eases to a stop beside the mostly roofed, bright aqua station with the charred bathrooms. Henry is always glad to see a bus. Such treats are rare.

Though Kurt would later claim that his graffiti messages were political, in fact, most of what he wrote was nonsensical. He enraged a neighbor with a boat by painting “Boat Ack” in red letters on the ship’s hull; on the other side he lettered, “Boat people go home.

I like that the skies go nowhere. In the painting. I like that the birds want to get away but they can't. I like the reflection of paint in the dark.

as had the graffiti spray-painted in red on one of the corridor walls: THE CAKE IS A LIE.

Art like that doesn’t need words. That painting tells you something by pulling you into it and pushing you out and you know what it’s saying without words being spoken.

Whom one is speaking to - or which aspect of their character - fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. 'Indulge Your Desires' comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than it does spray-painted across the broken windows of an SUV dealer. It follows that what you say is not nearly as important as how and when you say it.

THE FAIR HAD A POWERFUL and lasting impact on the nation’s psyche, in ways both large and small. Walt Disney’s father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt’s Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby became Roy. Walt came next, on December 5, 1901. The writer L. Frank Baum and his artist-partner William Wallace Denslow visited the fair; its grandeur informed their creation of Oz. The Japanese temple on the Wooded Island charmed Frank Lloyd Wright, and may have influenced the evolution of his “Prairie” residential designs. The fair prompted President Harrison to designate October 12 a national holiday, Columbus Day, which today serves to anchor a few thousand parades and a three-day weekend. Every carnival since 1893 has included a Midway and a Ferris Wheel, and every grocery store contains products born at the exposition. Shredded Wheat did survive. Every house has scores of incandescent bulbs powered by alternating current, both of which first proved themselves worthy of large-scale use at the fair; and nearly every town of any size has its little bit of ancient Rome, some beloved and be-columned bank, library or post office. Covered with graffiti, perhaps, or even an ill-conceived coat of paint, but underneath it all the glow of the White City persists. Even the Lincoln Memorial in Washington can trace its heritage to the fair.

When Ascyltes, loaded down with all these woes, was falling asleep, the maid he had rejected and insulted rubbed the whole of his face with a generous quantity of ash. He felt nothing, and she went on to paint graffiti-style penises on his shoulders and sides.

Urban renewal projects were accomplished so frantically it seemed like time-lapse photography. Stadiums built, hotels refurbished, decrepit buildings detonated, flora planted, less appealing native flora removed, roads paved, bus routes added, uniforms created, musicians recruited, dancers hired, corporate sponsors slapped on any surface that would receive a logo, graffiti painted over, homeless discreetly relocated, coyotes euthanized, bribes paid; deeper schisms around race and class momentarily tabled because company was coming!

I love London. I love everything about it. I love its palaces and its museums and its galleries, sure. But also, I love its filth, and damp, and stink. Okay, well, I don’t mean love, exactly. But I don’t mind it. Not any more. Not now I’m used to it. You don’t mind anything once you’re used to it. Not the graffiti you find on your door the week after you painted over it, or the chicken bones and cider cans you have to move before you can sit down for your damp and muddy picnic. Not the everchanging fast food joints – AbraKebabra to Pizza the Action to Really Fried Chicken – and all on a high street that despite its three new names a week never seems to look any different. Its tawdriness can be comforting, its wilfulness inspiring. It’s the London I see every day. I mean, tourists: they see the Dorchester. They see Harrods, and they see men in bearskins and Carnaby Street. They very rarely see the Happy Shopper on the Mile End Road, or a drab Peckham disco. They head for Buckingham Palace, and see waving above it the red, white and blue, while the rest of us order dansak from the Tandoori Palace, and see Simply Red, White Lightning, and Duncan from Blue. But we should be proud of that, too. Or, at least, get used to it.

We did not get along at first," Dr. Mitchell said. "She pushed me harder than anyone ever had. She gave me extra homework and made me stay after school and read aloud to her. At one point, I was so tired of the special treatment, I threatened to graffiti her house if it didn't stop. The next day she handed me a can of spray paint and a card with her address and said, "Whatever you write, just make sure it's spelled correctly.

True to a unique tradition of Rome, all the nearby walls had been slathered with that unique institution of the Latin race: graffiti. Daubed in paint of every color were slogans such as Death to the aristocrats! and The shade of Tribune Ateius calls out for blood! and May the curse of Ateius fall on Crassus and all his friends! All of this was scrawled wretchedly and spelled worse. Rome has an extremely high rate of literacy, mostly so that the citizens can practice this particular art form.

Marina Orlova was hooked on my quote about women not owing men. I scrolled through her posted paintings and recalled a Slovak friend once commenting on a guy wanna-be a great painter, something like this: "Aaano, on bol profesionalnym maljiarom na Slovensku, maloval tam pice a hakove krize po stenach". He meant graffiti, but I hesitate to translate it in detail for it may sound too rough. Another thought is about surreal, sometimes spurious aesthetics mixed with hinted or daring sexuality, which Marina Orlova endorses, deliberately or not, in line of her claimed profession. The posts call to mind The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover or even Titus Andronicus. No wonder, thousands of bozos are attracted to her internet activity because ..., well, the woman is hot.

My intention all along had been to get my wakeboarding legs back this first day. Maybe I'd do tricks when we went out the next day. I didn't want to get too cocky and bust ass in front of Sean. But as I got more comfortable and forgot to care, I tried a few standbys-a front flip, a scarecrow. There was no busting of ass. So I tried a backroll. And landed it solidly. Now I got cocky. I did a heelside backroll with a nosegrab. This meant that in the middle of the flip, I let go of the rope handle with one hand, reached down, and grabbed the front of the board. It served no purpose in the trick except to look impressive, like, This only appears to be a difficult trick. I have all the time in the world. I will grab the board. Yawn. And I landed it. This was getting too good to be true. My brother swung the boat around just before we reached the graffiti-covered highway bridge that spanned the lake. Cameron had spray-painted his name and his girlfriend’s name on the bridge, alongside all the other couples’ names and over the faded ones. My genius brother had tried to paint his own name but ran out of room on that section of bridge. McGULLICUDD Y Sean wisely never painted his girlfriends’ names. He would have had to change them too often. For my part, I was very thankful that when most of this spray-painting action was going on last summer, I was still too short to reach over from the pile and haul myself up on the main part of the bridge. I probably had the height and the upper body strength now, and I prayed none of the boys pointed this out. Then I’d have to spray-paint LORI LOVES SEAN on the bridge. And move to Canada.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans became a danger to that cave’s beauty, we agreed to stop going. We might have graffitied over the paintings, or kept on visiting them until the black mold ate them away entirely. But we didn’t. We let them live on by sealing them off. The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents.

If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The

The biggest canvas is wider than my arm span. It’s bursting with so much color it looks like a graffiti artist got too excited with a spray can. But it’s my story, told in brushstrokes and acrylic paint. There's Jamie and me as children, hiding in trees and searching for ladybugs. There's me alone, searching for stars in the dark. There's my mom, the queen of the starfish, existing in a tornado of glitter that poisons anything else it touches. There are my brothers and me, living on opposite sides of a triangle, experiencing the same things but never together. There's my dad, never knowing or doing as much as he should but trying to fix the poison all the same. There's Hiroshi, painting my hands so I can paint my voice. There's me split in half—Japanese and white—stitching myself together again because I am whole only when I’ve embraced the true beauty of my heritage. And there's Jamie and me in June, the sun on our faces and the sand at our feet, finding each other again after all those years. Our lives trail around us, sometimes broken and sometimes beautiful, but all puzzled and tangled up into the lump that is us. We fit together not because we need each other, but because we choose each other. Our friendship was always our choice. Love was a natural progression. Jamie stares at the painting for so long that I think the room actually starts to get darker. When he turns to face me, he looks relieved. Calm. Jamie turns back to the painting. We don’t need words. We just know. Our fingers find each other’s.

When the attendant at Britz Rentals of Australia whipped around in our prepaid-in-full honeymoon car, my eyes grew wide and I knew we were in trouble. It was an SUV, yes, and a Toyota Land Cruiser at that--just as Marlboro Man had ordered. It was white and clean and very shiny. And painted in huge bright orange and royal blue lettering across the hood, the roof, all four doors, and the tailgate of the vehicle, were scrawled the enormous words: BRITZ RENTALS OF AUSTRALIA. I could see Marlboro Man’s jaw muscles flex as he beheld his worst nightmare playing out in front of his eyes. He could hardly even bear to gaze upon such an attention-grabbing abomination, let alone conceive of driving it all over an entire continent. Unfortunately, our last-minute attempts to trade to another vehicle proved to be futile; even if Britz hadn’t been completely booked that week, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Every single car in their fleet was smeared with the exact same orange and blue promotional graffiti. Having no other transportational alternative, we set off on our drive, a black cloud of conspicuousness and, in Marlboro Man’s case, dread following us everywhere we went. Being an attention-seeking middle child, I didn’t really mind it much. But for Marlboro Man, this was more than his makeup was programmed to handle. As far as he was concerned, we were the Griswolds, and the Land Cruiser was our Family Truckster. It was a pox on what might have been the perfect honeymoon. Except for my inner ear disturbance. And the vomiting. And the slightly marsupial undertone to the hamburgers.

He refuses to sell his paintings and writes "NOT FOR SALE" on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a "graffiti artist" and "primitive." "They don't invent a childhood for white artists," he says.

Megan Meade’s Guide to the McGowan Boys Entry Ten Observation #1: Boys have immature ways of making their points. Like leaving you without a ride to school. Or flattening your tires. Or spray-painting really obvious graffiti involving pictures of pee. Observation #2: Boys can chill you out with just the sound of their voices. At least Finn can.

They have no idea if the paintings have faded away, or have been spray-painted with graffiti, or if the bunker still exists – or, for that matter, if it ever existed at all – but they are young and the trail is wide and Easily traveled. And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?

They caravanned over to 51st Avenue in northwestern Nashville, a small section of town aptly named the Nations. It was across Interstate 40 from Sylvan Park, the mirror image of the state street routes Taylor and Sam used to trace with their parents on pilgrimages to Bobby’s Dairy Dip. The Nations was an upstanding industrial area which quickly gave way to squalor. It was another one of those bizarre Nashville disunions, a forgotten zone in the midst of splendor and plenty. A five-block area dedicated to crime. The police presence was heavy, trying to quell the rampant drug and sex trade. They were losing the battle. Here in this little molecular oasis of misery, the residents operated in the land time forgot. Pay phones outnumbered cell phones and were still prevalent on every street corner, graffiti-painted and piss-filled. Teenagers wandered in baggy pants and cornrows, holding forty-ounce beer cans wrapped in brown paper bags. Crime, negligence, fear, all the horrors of life seeped in under the cracks of their doors in the middle of the night, carrying away their faith in humanity. These people didn’t just distrust the police, they didn’t acknowledge their existence. Justice was meted out behind gas stations and in dirty alleyways, business conducted under broken street lamps and in fetid, unair-conditioned living rooms.

Back then in Flux’s time artists thrived, but Trinai is just a member of a meager, scattered handful of street artists, struggling on their own, ill-equipped and ill-prepared. She paints graffiti in a time when graffiti is already dead, and she must protect herself in any way she can.

SOLOMON’S LAWS 1. Try not to piss off a cop unless you have a damn good reason . . . or a damn good lawyer. 2. The best way to hustle a case is to pretend you don’t want the work. 3. When arguing with a woman who is strong, intelligent, and forthright, consider using trickery, artifice, and deceit. 4. A prosecutor’s job is to build a brick wall around her case. A defense lawyer’s job is to tear down the wall, or at least to paint graffiti on the damn thing. 5. Listen to bus drivers, bailiffs, and twelve-year-old boys. Some days, they all know more than you do. 6. When the testimony is too damn good, when there are no contradictions and all the potholes are filled with smooth asphalt, chances are the witness is lying. 7. A shark who can’t bite is nothing but a mermaid. 8. When the woman you love is angry, it’s best to give her space, time, and copious quantities of wine. 9. Be confident, but not cocky. Smile, but don’t snicker. And no matter how desperate your case, never let the jurors see your fear. 10. Never sleep with a medical examiner, unless you’re dead. 11. If you can’t keep a promise to a loved one, you probably aren’t going to keep the loved one, either. 12. Life may be a marathon, but sometimes you have to sprint to save a life.

I admired Bolden’s abilities. I’ve long thought that a good prosecutor is a well-trained union carpenter building a sturdy house with shiny tools and freshly hewn wood. She follows blueprints to the letter, makes sure the framing is in plumb, lines up the two-by-fours, and hammers the nails straight. The best courtroom carpenters are Renaissance men and women. They double as bricklayers, installers, tapers, finishers, electricians, and even plumbers. They can build the whole damn house, and it’s a thing of beauty that will pass the toughest inspection by city inspectors . . . or juries. Until the defense lawyers come along. We’re the stealthy vandals wielding crowbars and spray paint. We tear down door frames, break windows, and spray graffiti on the walls. Our job is to destroy what the carpenters have built and feed it into the woodchipper.

We drove by several abandoned houses that were surrounded by overgrown grass and had windows boarded over with plywood. The chipped and peeling paint was covered with graffiti.

glorified graffiti. But there were no murals. Each room had been painted a different color—the kitchen a sunny yellow, the living room a deep cantaloupe, the bedrooms a warm peach—and the overall effect was of stepping into a box of sunlight, even on a cloudy day.

As we have seen, there is nothing like a good experiment to settle the question, and researchers in the Netherlands obliged by experimentally manipulating the existence of public signs of lawlessness and observing whether this influenced people’s criminal behavior. In one study, for example, they put a five-euro bill in an envelope that had a cellophane window and placed the envelope halfway out of a mailbox, so that the bill was clearly visible to passersby. Then, from a hidden location, they observed how many passersby stole the envelope. When there were no visible signs of lawlessness, only 13 percent of the passersby gave into temptation and pocketed the envelope. But when the researchers added signs of lawlessness—graffiti painted on the mailbox or litter scattered on the ground below—this percentage doubled. This study shows that signs of disorder, such as graffiti and litter, can cause people to reinterpret a situation as one in which other kinds of disorder are permissible, such as stealing money. People are highly sensitive to social norms (information about what other people are doing and what they approve of), and subtle indicators of these norms can have dramatic effects on people’s behavior (we will encounter this lesson again in the next chapter). When there are signs that lawlessness is the norm, people are more likely to act lawlessly.

The rents are scandalous: they only want rich people to live in this city, no one else. It’s for tourists. They’re cleaning the graffiti! There were some that were really beautiful, no other city in the world had graffiti like Barcelona’s. But just try to explain to those brutes what art is. The fuck. They ruin everything.” “A friend of ours was arrested because he painted a slogan that said, ‘Tourists, you’re the terrorists.’ They gave him like four months. Poor guy,” said Julieta.

Art like that doesn’t need words. That painting tells you something by pulling you into it and pushing you out and you know what it’s saying without words being spoken. ~Ed

He sees dilapidated three- and four-story concrete blocks, their walls painted in peeling pastel colors and streaked with graffiti, and because of the corrugated tin roofs, he again thinks of the reserve, which he also doesn’t know. Sunlight. Black people staring at him. Tropical greenery. Tough dusty roots and grasses, leaves and vines. Gutted buildings. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. Cement walls give onto gapingly empty ideas of rooms.

Athens somehow manages to be bright white and grubby at the same time. The most beautiful freshly painted neoclassical homes are defaced with new graffiti. Ancient ruins are everywhere, of course, but seem to have little to do with anything else. It’s Los Angeles with a past.

Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from gray-colored chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-size chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti.

There were two-foot-tall coils of barbed wire over the bridge wall that caught shopping bags in their spikes and shredded them. I watched those plastic ribbons fight in the wind, and far below saw concrete irrigation ditches that once contained the Rio Grande. The water dissipated, the only thing to see was the concrete spray painted with graffiti. The city, like the river, had dried up and left little in its place.

into the bar area and through the kitchen, letting herself out of the back door. She knew the shops would be shut at this time but she had a faint hope that she might stumble across some kind-hearted baker who would open his door just for her. She could almost taste the thick warm dough, sniffed the air for a telltale whiff of it. There didn’t appear to be a bakery in the village at all. Or a café. In fact, as she moved down the high street she was shocked to see so many ‘For Sale’ signs, shops with nothing in the windows but a few chairs or rolls of carpet. Other windows were boarded up, even the graffiti half-hearted, illegible squiggles in spray paint, dull colours. There was faded writing drawn into the dust on one window, a notice promising an end-of-stock clearance

The graffiti artist who painted Facebook’s office walls in 2005 got stock that turned out to be worth $200 million, while a talented engineer who joined in 2010 might have made only $2 million

The graffiti artist who painted Facebook’s office walls in 2005 got stock that turned out to be worth $200 million, while a talented engineer who joined in 2010 might have made only $2 million.

Whether you consider yourself an economic veteran or novice, now is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or, better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times. The rest of this book proposes seven ways to think like a twenty-first-century economist, revealing for each of those seven ways the spurious image that has occupied our minds, how it came to be so powerful, and the damaging influence it has had. But the time for mere critique is past, which is why the focus here is on creating new images that capture the essential principles to guide us now. The diagrams in this book aim to summarise that leap from old to new economic thinking. Taken together they set out – quite literally – a new big picture for the twenty-first-century economist. So here is a whirlwind tour of the ideas and images at the heart of Doughnut Economics. First, change the goal. For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet. And that goal is encapsulated in the concept of the Doughnut. The challenge now is to create economies – local to global – that help to bring all of humanity into the Doughnut’s safe and just space. Instead of pursuing ever-increasing GDP, it is time to discover how to thrive in balance.

It was graffiti tagging for rich people, except they used plaques instead of spray paint.

barbouiller /baʀbuje/ I. vtr 1. (salir) to smear (de "with") • ~ son visage/un meuble de qch | to get sth all over one's face/a piece of furniture, to smear one's face/a piece of furniture with sth • il est tout barbouillé | his face is all dirty • il est tout barbouillé de confiture | his face is all smeared with jam 2. (couvrir) to daub [surface, support] (de "with") • ~ un plafond/une porte de peinture verte | to slap green paint on a ceiling/a door, to daub a ceiling/a door with green paint • ~ un pont d'inscriptions | to daub graffiti all over a bridge 3. (peindre) • (pej) ~ des natures mortes/des paysages | to do daubs of still lives/landscapes (péj) • ~ du papier | to write drivel (péj) 4. (rendre malade) • cela barbouille l'estomac | it makes you feel queasy • être or se sentir barbouillé | to feel queasy II. vpr • (se salir) se ~ le visage/le corps de qch | to get one's face/body all covered in sth, to smear one's face/body with sth

Any other girl at La Brea High would have been flattered to have him pursue her. They found his laid-back scruffy look irresistible, even with his bad reputation as a heartbreaker. Serena had caught him staring at her in English class and had wondered what he wanted with her. She wasn't the glam type of girl he normally dated, not with her combat boots, black fishnet hose, and graffiti-painted nails. But it didn't take much to realize he had a huge crush on her. He always seemed to show up where she was. At first Serena had been impressed that he wasn't the kind of guy who judged a girl by the way she dressed. She might have even dated him if she hadn't discovered the truth. He lied about the girls he had gone out with. It wasn't as if Serena didn't know guys did that. She knew they exaggerated sometimes, but Jerome did more. She couldn't confront him or even tell others what she knew, though, because no one would believe her.

The glare of the green landscape and the air, the air that was everywhere, in us and making way for us, and we rode and were aware only of each other and ourselves for those couple of miles, and for those couple of miles I was myself, back in the neighborhood of Chacarita, where I moved with my mom after we realized my dad was never going to move out first, that we would have to leave him, and I saw on either side of me the big ugly high-rises and squat goldenrod houses and fuchsia and blue and inscrutable notes scrawled on the walls, graffiti intermingling with the shimmering, shadowing little leaves of the tipas, and as I rode I slowed at the oleander at Facultad de Medicina, those delicate pink flowers that rose over the fence in utter opulence and the lush stiff leaves that reached out through the bars that were freshly painted bright green. Then there it was: the Great Mamamushi. I slowed, and Freddie slowed. We parked our bikes. I was out of breath and all the air on Earth was in my blood, and we kissed again, and I turned around, and he put his arms around my waist, and I leaned into him, and we beheld it: a tree that was almost too much to be true, that truly was incredible, with its trunk that was almost eight meters around, a staggering circumference, glittered over by dragonflies, heavy, petite, iridescent incarnations of Irena's genius, when suddenly a flock of impossible parrots exploded out of the alders, and we looked up to see them shattering the sky. "All the oaks on this trail have their own names," I explained to Freddie. "This one is my favorite. Can you believe it's still growing?" He put his face against mine. He didn't say anything. For a while we just stood like that, together, watching the Great Mamamushi grow.

Across the street from the van was a board fence. Someone had spray-painted incomprehensible graffiti on it—could have been an ambigram for all she knew, legible upside-down as well as right-side-up.

I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cards and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.