Detritus Quotes

“Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs.”
― Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture

“Essex was just a shadow in the room, the shadow of a thing I wanted, which was itself a shadow of wanting. But it was unspeakably sweet to feel even that, and terrifying to know how quickly it would pass. A moment inscribed on water, a memory that would fade to grey. I was nothing but a ghost hunter, chasing the wraith of the man I used to be. A beachcomber of my own detritus.”
― Alexis Hall, Glitterland

“All over the apartment, there are lists that Myriam has written—on a paper napkin, on a Post-it, on the last page of a book. She spends her time looking for them. She is afraid to throw them away as if this might make her lose track of all the tasks she has to accomplish. She has kept some really old ones and, rereading them, she feels a nostalgia that is only intensified when she can no longer remember to what those obscure notes refer.

Pharmacy
Tell Mila Nil’s story
Reservations for Greece
Call M.
Reread all my notes
Go back to that shop. Buy the dress?
Reread Maupassant
Get him a surprise?”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Hence that state of mind at once gloomy and euphoric which one associates with carrying out the rubbish; and the way we see the men who go by emptying the bins into their pulping truck not just as emissaries for the chthonic world, gravediggers of the inanimate, Charons of a beyond of greasy paper and rusty tin, but as angels too, as indispensable mediators between ourselves and the heaven of ideas in which we undeservedly soar (or imagine we soar) and which can exist only in so far as we are not overwhelmed by the waste which every act of living incessantly produces (even the act of thinking: these thoughts of mine that you are reading being all that been salvaged from the scores of sheets of paper now crumpled up in the bin), heralds of a possible salvation beyond the destruction inherent in all production and consumption, liberators from the weight of time’s detritus, ponderous dark angels of lightness and clarity.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“Actually, no. I won't ever go digital. I work with thirty-five or large format. I like the hand-jobs, you know. And I still do most of my own printing. I've developed such a profound distaste for touch-up and modern artifice—comes from snapping too many derelicts and detritus, perhaps, but I love it. Photo bloody Shop can go stuff it. A picture should be honest, even if the subject is contrived on the ground, you know; not dolled-up for advertising punch or sex appeal.”
― Pansy Schneider-Horst

“Snakes shed their skin, cats their fur, manta rays their teeth. Man sheds used-up objects: he leaves an open Nesquik tin and a dirty glass on the kitchen counter, an open toothpaste tube, unmade beds, their sheets stained with urine; he leaves grandfather clocks, cigarette burns in the ashtrays, comics that have been scrawled on and books borrowed from the school library; he leaves clothes in the wardrobes and food in the fridge.”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka

“Russian Dolls: I imagine a hurricane lamp: our holy beings struggling to see out through the soot and detritus of life.”
― Helen S. Rosenau, The Messy Joys of Being Human: A Guide to Risking Change and Becoming Happier