Objects Quotes

“Memory dilutes, but the object remains unaltered.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“History is a madman's museum.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“What really lies beneath our feet at each moment is not a usefulness, but an inaccessible netherworld that we can use because it is there. It is the Empire of the Capital X.”
― Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures

“Objects are what we aren't, what we can't extend ourselves to be. Do people make things to define the boundaries of the self? Objects are the limits we desperately need. They show us where we end. They dispel our sadness, temporarily.”
― Don DeLillo, The Names

“However completely people might fulfil themselves in other spheres, if they don’t possess this understanding between their hands and material objects, they can never have more than an incomplete understanding of the world.”
― Madeleine Bourdouxhe, À la recherche de Marie

“I don't think hoarders prefer squalor. Rather, I'd theorize that when yucky things happen, for some the attachment to objects is so strong that they must exist in denial rather than confront the cause: the clutter. The hoard. An overabundance of objects with no proper place to go.”
― Eve O. Schaub, Year of No Clutter

“When strange objects shapes the landscape, we get fiction”
― Umair Siddiqui

“... each of us describes our existence by means of objects which are indifferent to us, which survive us, and which are then thrown back into the common stock from which they are soon gathered again and ascribed other roles in other circumstances.”
― Andrew Motion

“I thought of that lost book and all the memories it held and how it was just one of millions of objects in the world loaded with secret history which pass hands until eventually they excite nothing more than mild curiosity or, often, complete apathy. It was like all the sadness and loneliness of life resided in these objects. I realised the moment anything loses its context it becomes a husk.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“All these objects... how can I explain? They inconvenienced me; I would have liked the to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Objects, too, have trickled through the doors between worlds, blown by strange winds, drifting on white-frosted waves, carried and discarded by careless travelers- even stolen, sometimes. Some of them have been lost or ignored or forgotten- books written in foreign tongues, clothes in strange fashions, devices with no use beyond their home worlds- but some of them have left stories in their wakes. Stories of magic lamps and enchanted mirrors, golden fleeces and fountains of youth, dragon-scale armor and moon-streaked broomsticks.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. . . We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Embodied in objects was a partial sense of sharing. They didn't lift their eyes from their respective sets. But noises bound them, a cyclist kick-starting, the plane that came winding down the five miles from its transatlantic apex, rippling the pictures on their screens. Objects were memory inert. Desk, the bed, et cetera. Objects would survive the one who died first and remind the other of how easily halved a life can become. Death, perhaps, was not the point so much as separation. Chairs, tables, dressers, envelopes. Everything was a common experience, binding them despite their indirections, the slanted apparatus of their agreeing. That they did agree was not in doubt. Faithlessness and desire. It wasn't necessary to tell them apart. His body, hers. Sex, love, monotony, contempt. The spell that had to be entered was out there among the unmemorized faces and uniform cubes of being. This, their sweet and mercenary space, was self-enchantment, the near common dream they'd countenanced for years. Only absences were fully shared.”
― Don DeLillo, Players

“It' is for objects, not people.”
― Christina Engela, Black Sunrise

“A child learns to be guilty when he is punished and scolded for damaging material objects”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Facts produce structures, objects are lyrical realities.”
― Lepota L. Cosmo

“We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Hoarding is holding onto what I can’t keep and all the while convincing myself that I can. And in the end, what I’m really hoarding is my need to believe something at the expense of my existence.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“There are certain readers for whom books exist in the moment of reading them, and later as memories of the read pages, but who feel that the physical incarnations of books are dispensable. Borges, for instance, was one of these. Those who never visited Borges’s modest flat imagined his library to be as vast as that of Babel. In fact, Borges kept only a few hundred books, and even these he used to give away as gifts to visitors. Occasionally, a certain volume had sentimental or superstitious value for him, but by and large what mattered to him were a few recalled lines, not the material object in which he had found them. For me, it has always been otherwise.”
― Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions

“Empirical objects become signs (or they are looked at as signs) only from the point of view of a philosophical decision.”
― Umberto Eco

“Designer turns daily common objects to sexy and interesting stuff but not necessarily functional.”
― Baris Gencel

“To treat an object primarily as part of a network is to assume it can be reduced to that set of qualities and relations that it manifests in this particular network.”
― Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures

“Thus I am in Holland, the kingdom of things, great principality of objects. In Dutch, schoen means beautiful and at the same time clean, as if neatness was raised to the dignity of a virtue.”
― Zbigniew Herbert, Still Life with a Bridle

“It’ is for objects, not people”
― Christina Engela, Pearls Before Swine

“Every object is a piece of information that always comes with an embedded pair of instructions.”
― Joey Lawsin, Originemology

“Abstracted into signs, objects can be understood as a self-referential
system with no relationship to either the natural materials or colours, or
traditional societal structures. A substratum of meanings, objects become a
lowest common denominator to which the connotative meanings imposed by
advertising are attached.”
― Francesco Proto, Baudrillard for Architects

“Alice of course used the camera to document anything the remotest bit mysterious. She spent her days on what she called "photo walks": looking for objects and people that hinted at a hidden, fey, or wild side, which she would try to coax out with her camera. Once she found a potential subject she worked long and hard composing the shot, sometimes with additional mirrors or a lantern if it was in a dimly lit alley. She developed these images in her aunt's darkroom and then laid them out around her own room, studying them and trying to conjure a world out of what she saw there. Sparkling dew on spiderwebs, gloomy attics, a pile of bright refuse that might have hidden a monster or poem. The elfin qualities of a child, her eyes innocent and old at the same time.”
― Liz Braswell, Unbirthday

“Money is not the success of life; it is only the power of buying the objects”
― Ehsan Sehgal