Art & Creativity Quote by Joseph Bologna

Bologna is staging a small domestic tug-of-war that still feels painfully current: the friction between convenience and contact. The sentence structure is the tell. He opens with a rhythm of repetition - "e-mail... e-mails" - mimicking the numbing loop of digital life. It sounds less like a boast than an admission of captivity, the way a smoker might rattle off how many cigarettes they have without thinking. Then he pivots to Amazon with the casual fluency of someone who already knows the interface by muscle memory.

The key word is "but". This isn’t anti-technology nostalgia; it’s a confession that the modern consumer gets lured into frictionless habits and then wakes up craving friction again, because friction is where other people live. "I don't want to buy all of them" is a surprisingly moral line in a mundane context. He’s not debating capitalism in the abstract; he’s drawing a boundary in his own routine, as if self-respect now requires conscious limits on convenience.

"Duttons" grounds the sentiment in a real, vanishing ecosystem: the local bookstore as social infrastructure, not just retail. The punch lands on "another human being". He could have said "a clerk" or "a bookseller". He chooses the broadest, loneliest phrasing possible, implying that the internet doesn't just change where we shop; it changes what we expect from daily life. Buying a book becomes a proxy for insisting that your day contain at least one unscripted, analog encounter.